President Donald Trump appears to have returned to the 2016 playbook for the final nine days of the 2020 White House race, hoping to achieve a similar victory, without much help from polls or experts.
Democratic nominee Joe Biden, on the other hand, has kept the focus on the present and seeks to expand the battlefield states. He will address two rallies in Georgia, a solidly Republican state, his campaign announced Saturday. Hours earlier, Biden and his former boss, Barack Obama, criticized Trump in separate rallies for his inability to contain Covid-19.
“Something is happening. It happened this time four years ago. This time again, ”President Trump told supporters at a rally Saturday in Ohio, a battleground state that had easily won in 2016 but now leads Biden by a precariously thin 1.5 percentage point margin on average. weighted from FiveThirtyEight surveys.
Trump has started to portray himself, beginning with the last debate, as an outsider, and has gone to great lengths to paint Biden as a corrupt politician just as he did his 2016 rival, Hillary Clinton, and looked indulgently at his Supporters shout “Lock it up”, a 2020 version of “Lock her up.”
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told The Washington Post, which first reported on Trump’s back-to-2016 strategy: “There are striking similarities to the president’s 2016 campaign: a close race, an advantage of enthusiasm and a clear momentum down the stretch for Donald Trump. “
In fact, Trump had trailed Clinton in polls at this stage in 2016 by similar margins: by 6.1 percentage points (43.2-49.4) in the FiveThirtyEight average on October 24, 2016. Four years later, Trump follows Biden in 9.1 percentage points (32.8-51.9). Not exactly the same, but not very far apart either.
However, there are crucial differences between the 2016 and 2020 elections: Trump is the president, for example, with a record to defend or flaunt, and not just a candidate; He and Clinton both had unfavorable high marks in 2016, but this time, there is a big gap: Biden is viewed much more favorably than Trump and Clinton (compared to their ratings then).
Meanwhile, Biden is looking to expand his lead by taking the battle into Republican territory: Georgia, where he will address rallies on Tuesday, hoping to turn around a solidly conservative state that has not voted Democrats in presidential elections since 1992.
Citing the number of Covid-19 infections from the previous day, the former vice president said: “However, in the debate on Thursday night, Donald Trump kept saying, ‘We’re just around the corner … he’s leaving .. . we’re learning to live with it. ‘
He added, recounting his own comments from the debate: “But like I told you, we are not learning to live with it. We are learning to die with him, and a dark winter awaits us. “
Obama was scathing in his comments about his successor. “Eight months after this pandemic, the new cases are breaking records,” he said. “Donald Trump is not going to suddenly protect us all. You can’t even take the basic steps to protect yourself. “
That was a reference to Trump’s own fight with Covid-19. Since then, the president has recovered and resumed his campaign with energy, addressing multiple demonstrations every day. But White House staff have continued to test positive for the deadly virus, with new reports adding Vice President Mike Pence’s chief of staff and a political adviser to the growing list.
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