Towards the End of the Campaign, Obama Joins Joe Biden for the First Time and Trump Focuses on Pennsylvania | 2020 U.S. elections

For the first time since the campaign began, Democrat Biden, 77, will join the platform with his most popular supporter, former President Obama. The two will participate in rallies in the cities of Flint and Detroit, Michigan, where Stevie Wonder is expected to be the musical guest of the night.

In the same state, Republican Trump, 74, won by a small margin of 0.2 points in 2016. This time, however, Biden leads the polls in Michigan by seven points.

This puts him in the lead in getting all 16 state votes in the electoral college, a considerable number of the 270 needed to win the White House.

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Obama last week put his popularity at the service of Biden. He organized several events in which he criticized Trump’s response to the coronavirus pandemic, especially in Florida and Pennsylvania.

See, in the video below, which are the main disputed states:

But Trump, who plays down Obama’s campaign actions by saying they are much smaller than his own, will visit Pennsylvania this Saturday for three rallies, as a sign of the importance of the state in the electoral college.

In 2016, the president narrowly won in Pennsylvania, where Biden was born, and took all 20 votes from the university.

Biden, in turn, owes his home state this Sunday (1st) and Monday (2nd).

Millions of early votes

Trump and Biden campaigned on Friday (30) in the Midwest, a region that fueled the Republican triumph in 2016.

The current occupant of the White House trails former Vice President Barack Obama by an average of eight points in national polls. But Tuesday’s victory will be defined in a handful of states where the margin is much smaller.

The two candidates visited several of them, all considered “red zones” by Covid-19 by the White House crisis cell, on the same day that the United States registered 94,000 new infections, a record for the second consecutive day.

Trump, seemingly oblivious to the spread of the virus, continues to downplay the risks of the disease.

“If you catch it, you will improve and then you will be immune,” he said in Detroit, during one of his packed rallies, in which many fans did not wear masks. “We just want to get back to normal.”

The country, with almost 230,000 deaths from coronavirus, is the most affected in the world by the pandemic and has exceeded 9 million cases.

American hospitals brace as infections rise in nearly every state; the approaching flu season is an additional complicator in this scenario.

The pandemic has devastated the economy, and despite some signs of recovery, millions of people remain unemployed.

Trump is trying to sell the economic successes of his presidency, including data on GDP growth, released on Thursday (29).

Wall Street, however, ended its worst week and its worst month since March fearing that the economic recovery will not be as fast as it was imagined.

And with voters concerned about the health risks of attending packed polls on November 3, more than 90 million Americans have already voted early by mail or in person.

Texas from red to blue?

The election dispute also reached the southwest of the country on Friday, with visits from Vice President Mike Pence to Arizona and Biden’s running mate, Kamala Harris, to Texas, two other key states.

Texas, a traditionally conservative stronghold and a disputed trophy that casts 38 of the 270 votes needed to win in the Electoral College, could surprise by swapping Republicans ‘red for Democrats’ blue, which hasn’t happened since the victory by Jimmy Carter in 1976.

Nine million voters have already voted in Texas, surpassing the total vote for the entire 2016 election in this state.

But Trump didn’t seem concerned. “In Texas we are doing very well,” he said.

According to the average of the RealClearPolitics polls, Trump wins by only 2.3 points in Texas, and the race is tied in Arizona.

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