[ad_1]
DETROIT / READING, Pennsylvania – A record 90 million Americans have voted early in the U.S. presidential election, Saturday’s data showed, as President Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden campaigned across the country to try to influence the few remaining undecided voters.
The high number of early voters, about 65 percent of the total turnout in 2016, reflects intense interest in the contest, with three days of the campaign to play.
Concerns about exposure to the coronavirus at busy Election Day polling places on Tuesday have also increased the number of people voting by mail or at the first polling places in person.
The Republican president is spending the final days of his re-election campaign criticizing public officials and medical professionals who are trying to fight the pandemic even as it reappears in the United States.
Close contest
Opinion polls show that Trump is behind former Vice President Biden nationally, but with closer competition in the most competitive states that will decide the election. Voters say the coronavirus is their number one concern.
Trump has repeatedly asserted without evidence that vote-by-mail ballots are susceptible to fraud, and more recently has argued that only results available on election night should count. In a series of legal motions, his campaign has sought to restrict absentee voting.
“I don’t care how hard Donald Trump tries. There is nothing, let me say it again, there is nothing I can do to prevent the people of this nation from voting in overwhelming numbers and reclaiming this democracy, ”Biden said at a rally in Flint, Michigan, where he was joined by the former El President Barack Obama for their first campaign event of 2020 together.
Ballots by Mail
Trump held four rallies Saturday in the battlefield state of Pennsylvania, where campaigns seek to win over undecided voters in areas such as suburban Philadelphia and the western “Rust Belt” of the state.
“If we win Pennsylvania, it’s over,” Trump said at a large rally in Reading before moving on to another large rally in Butler.
Officials in several states, including Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, say it could take several days to count all mail-in ballots, possibly leading to days of uncertainty if the outcome depends on those states.
A federal judge in Texas scheduled an emergency hearing for Monday on whether Houston officials illegally allowed direct voting and should cast more than 100,000 votes in Democratic-leaning Harris County.
In Iowa, a new poll released Saturday shows that Trump has assumed leadership there just days before the election. A Des Moines Register / Mediacom Iowa poll shows Trump now leading Biden by seven percentage points, 48% versus 41%. The results, based on a poll of 814 Iowa voters, suggest that Biden has lost support among independent voters in the Midwest state.
In a small in-person rally in Newtown, Pennsylvania, Trump mocked his opponent for his criticism of the administration’s record in fighting COVID-19, which has killed more people in the United States than in any other country.
“I saw Joe Biden speak yesterday. All he talks about is COVID, COVID. He has nothing more to say. COVID, COVID, ”Trump told the crowd, some of whom were not wearing masks.
He said the United States was “just weeks away” from mass distribution of a safe COVID-19 vaccine, which is pushing hospitals to full capacity and killing up to 1,000 people in the United States every day. Trump did not provide details to back up his comments about an imminent vaccine.
Stanford University economists on Saturday released an estimate that Trump’s June-September rallies led to more than 30,000 additional COVID-19 infections and possibly as many as 700 deaths. The study was based on a statistical model and not on actual investigations of coronavirus cases.
The article, which did not cite disease experts among its authors, has not been peer reviewed.
Social distancing at rallies
Public health officials have repeatedly warned that events from Trump’s campaign could accelerate the spread of the virus, particularly those taking place in places where infection rates were already increasing.
The actual impact of these manifestations on infection rates has been difficult to determine due to the lack of robust contact tracing in many US states.
Amesh Adalja, an infectious disease expert at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Safety, described the report as “suggestive.”
“I would just say that it is suggestive but difficult to completely isolate the specific impact of an event without robust contact tracing data from the cases,” Adalja said.
Biden’s campaign, which has drastically limited crowd sizes at events or restricted fans to their cars, quickly took advantage of Stanford’s findings.
“Trump doesn’t even care about the lives of his staunchest supporters,” Biden’s campaign spokesman Andrew Bates said in a statement. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the report.
At a Biden rally in Detroit on Saturday, social distancing was broken when supporters crowded onto the stage to hear Obama speak.
Read next
Subscribe to INQUIRER PLUS to get access to The Philippine Daily Inquirer and more than 70 other titles, share up to 5 gadgets, listen to the news, download from 4am and share articles on social media. Call 896 6000.
[ad_2]
