Uncertainty dominates the final stretch of the US presidential campaign

NEW YORK – Within US President Donald Trump’s campaign, some privately feared the worst in the face of national conventions.

They were concerned that a strong performance by Democrat Joe Biden, combined with a disappointing performance by Trump, would ensure the certainty of a major defeat that would essentially end the election in September.

But as the candidates move beyond the conventions smoothly and enter the final phase of the 2020 election season, both sides acknowledge that the contest is narrowing. And after months of running an almost entirely virtual campaign due to the pandemic, Biden has decided to launch a new phase of in-person events to help mitigate any Trump gains.

“This campaign has always known that it will be a close race, it will be a difficult race,” said Biden’s senior adviser, Anita Dunn, noting that no Democratic presidential candidate since 1964 has obtained more than 52.9% of the vote.

She added: “It is a polarized nation and we look forward to this kind of adjustment.”

That leaves Democrats and Republicans bracing for a 64-day sprint to the finish that is expected to be one of the most turbulent and chaotic periods in modern American history.

Each side viewed the other as an existential threat to America’s future, offering voters completely different versions of reality during the last two weeks of carefully written conventions.

Democrats attacked Trump as an incompetent racist with autocratic tendencies who is failing to protect the nation from the pandemic while actively undermining democracy. Republicans largely ignored the pandemic while attacking Joe Biden as a lifelong senile politician controlled by his party’s far-left wing and unable to protect suburban voters from crowds of protesters.

“America doesn’t feel like a country with all the chaos and division,” former Democratic presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg said in an interview.

“We should be prepared for literally anything in the coming months,” he said. “2020 has not finished offering blows and surprises.”

Rarely have such dire variables presented during the final weeks of an election.

A pandemic that has already killed 180,000 Americans shows little sign of slowing down. A struggling economy has pushed 28 million onto the jobless rolls and tens of thousands of businesses are feared to close permanently. Ongoing police violence against unarmed blacks has sparked widespread civil rights protests and new incidents of violence related to street protests.

There are the natural disasters: A hurricane hit the Gulf Coast last week, massive wildfires are burning California, and powerful winds of law hit Iowa’s agricultural industry.

And what worries government watchdogs most: Trump is openly undermining the integrity of the election by raising unfounded concerns about voting by mail to avoid long waits at polling places during the pandemic.

Amid the chaos, Miles Taylor, a longtime Republican who previously served as chief of staff within the Trump administration’s Department of Homeland Security, warned that there is nothing the Republican president will not do or say to defeat Biden. .

“Don’t put anything beyond Donald Trump,” Taylor told The Associated Press. “She will do anything to win. If that means climbing over other people, climbing over your own people, or bypassing American law, it will. People are right to be concerned. “

Among the many crises that shaped the fall campaign, racial tensions have emerged as a critical factor that could decide Trump’s fate.

The Trump campaign believes it is profiting from sometimes violent protests in Wisconsin that followed a white police officer who shot Jacob Black, a black man, seven times, leaving him paralyzed.

The president has repeatedly branded the protesters as angry mobs threatening America’s suburbs, an argument with racist overtones intended to strengthen Trump’s diminished position with older voters and suburban women.

As part of his “law and order” message, Trump has always sided with the police for his African-American victims. He plans to visit the site of the latest violent crash, Kenosha, Wisconsin, on Tuesday.

Civil rights leader Martin Luther King III compared Trump’s rhetoric on race, and his party’s efforts to make voting more difficult this fall, to the efforts of Republican leaders like Richard Nixon before the passage of the Rights Act. Civilians of 1968. It is not clear if in 2020 the United States will have as much tolerance for the message that resounded half a century ago.

“It’s just racism,” King said of Trump’s rhetoric and track record. “The hands of the clock are receding.”

Meanwhile, candidates are unleashing dramatically different campaigns on voters as they navigate the pandemic.

After almost completely avoiding campaign trips since early March, Biden will resume the campaign in person on Monday in Pennsylvania. It will make subsequent appearances in battlefield states “where it’s safe,” Dunn confirmed, noting that some states have strict limits on public gatherings. Biden himself has cited plans to campaign in at least four states: Arizona, Michigan, Minnesota and Pennsylvania, although the specific schedule remains a work in progress.

He is expected to rely on smaller events where attendees adhere to strict social distancing measures and wear masks.

“You saw all those people in the White House the other night without masks,” Dunn said. “You’re not going to see that at a Joe Biden event.”

Biden’s team does not currently plan to resume in-person probing efforts, usually the lifeblood of campaigns, in which armies of paid staff and volunteers speak face-to-face with potential supporters on their doorstep. Instead, the campaign has more than 2,000 paid employees and many more volunteers who make phone calls and send messages to voters.

On the other hand, the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, said that the Republican Party has been actively courting voters in person for weeks and will continue to do so, despite the rising death toll from the pandemic.

“Now we have increased to about 2 million volunteers who have been activated. We are knocking on a million doors a week, ”McDaniel told The Associated Press. “Biden has chosen to give that up. They are knocking on zero doors a week. “

Trump plans to begin a fast-paced campaign program with bigger events in the coming days and weeks. They have grown fond of rallies inside airport hangars, which are possibly safer from a health perspective given that they are partially outdoors; they also allow the president to energize his crowds by pulling Air Force One.

The president will continue to highlight civil unrest in response to police brutality in Wisconsin and elsewhere, according to Trump’s campaign manager Bill Stepien, who described the Republican message against his Democratic rival this way: “We will equalize leadership and President’s record against Joe Biden, who is a weak puppet of the far left, fearful of standing up to anti-police rioters and bowing to radicals to raise taxes and drag the country toward socialism. ”

Trump’s aides privately bragged about Biden’s decision to resume the campaign, believing it shows concern over an increasingly tight race that could lead to public stumbling blocks from the error-prone former vice president.

They also pointed to Biden’s plans to campaign in Minnesota, describing it as evidence of a narrow run even in a state Trump lost four years ago. The president’s position is improving across the Midwest, aides believe, although Minnesota and Michigan remain much steeper climbs than Wisconsin, Ohio or, further east, Pennsylvania.

Trump’s team believes it can afford to lose Michigan and Pennsylvania as long as it leads to Wisconsin and the rest of its 2016 states, including a Maine congressional district.
Meanwhile, Biden is betting that he can hold together the many disparate factions in his party behind his run for the White House.

Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who ran against Biden in the Democratic primary, hosted a series of online events over the weekend designed to refocus his party’s message from the past few weeks on health care and income inequality.

“That is a topic that I will talk about. I think other Democrats need to talk about that, too, ”Sanders said in an interview.

The Vermont senator’s weekend appearances mark the beginning of what he described as a more active role designed to highlight progressive priorities.

“This is not only the most important election of our lives, it is the most important election in modern American history,” Sanders said. “Our job at this time is to choose Biden. And the day after he takes office, we are going to unite the American people to make sure we implement the most progressive agenda in modern American history. “

JPV

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