Biden and Trump trade blows and prepare for post-election election battle

MONACA, Pennsylvania – President Donald Trump and Democratic rival Joe Biden traded criticism Monday, urging last-minute voters to get involved while stumped in battle states on the final day of a record-breaking polarizing campaign. early voting.

Yet even as the candidates presented their closing arguments, their campaigns were already laying the groundwork for post-election disputes.

Trump, who lags behind in national opinion polls, has continued to launch unfounded attacks on mail-in ballots, suggesting that he would deploy lawyers if states are still counting votes after Election Day. His deputy campaign manager, Justin Clark, said the campaign will combat any Democratic attempt to “subvert the state’s deadlines for receiving and counting ballots.”

In response, Biden’s campaign manager Jennifer O’Malley Dillon reminded reporters Monday that states typically needed time after election night to finish counting votes in the last US election.

“Under no circumstances will Donald Trump be declared the winner on election night,” he said.

The election has already sparked an unprecedented wave of litigation over whether voting rules should be adjusted in light of the COVID-19 pandemic. On Monday, a federal judge in Texas rejected a Republican offer to discard about 127,000 votes already cast at self-service voting sites in the Democratic-leaning Houston area.

At a rally in Scranton, eastern Pennsylvania, Trump recalled an enthusiastic crowd that he won the state in 2016 despite polls suggesting he would lose and warned that election officials’ plan to count the ballots up to three days later Election Day was a “ dangerous situation. ” “

“You have to have a date. The dates cannot be extended, ”he said.

In the western Pennsylvania town of Monaca, Biden told supporters that the future of the country was in his hands.

“What happens tomorrow will determine what this country will be like for generations,” he said.

Trump, 74, is trying to avoid becoming the first incumbent president to lose re-election since fellow Republican George HW Bush in 1992. Despite Biden’s leadership in national polls, the swing state race is seen as close enough that Trump can still rebuild the 270 votes are needed to prevail in the state-by-state electoral college system that determines the winner.

After visiting North Carolina and Pennsylvania, Trump headed to Wisconsin and Michigan, four states he narrowly won in 2016, but which polls show he could trade Biden this year. As he has for months, the president addressed large crowds, where many attendees avoided masks and social distancing despite the resurgent COVID-19 pandemic.

Biden, 77, who has made Trump’s handling of the pandemic a central theme of his campaign, spoke in Ohio and Pennsylvania in much smaller meetings. He was scheduled to hold a late-night drive-in in Pittsburgh alongside singer Lady Gaga.

The latest Reuters / Ipsos poll in Florida, an ever-changing state, showed Biden leading 50% to 46%, a week after the two were statistically tied.

Early voting has skyrocketed to levels never seen before in the US elections. A record 97.3 million early votes have been cast in person or by mail, according to the US Elections Project.

The number is equal to 70% of the total voter turnout for the 2016 election and represents approximately 40% of all Americans who are legally eligible to vote.

That unprecedented level of early voting includes 60 million mail-in ballots that could take days or weeks to count in some states, meaning a winner may not be declared in the hours after polls close on Tuesday. the night.

Some states, including critics Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, don’t begin processing mail-in ballots until Election Day, slowing down the process.

‘Illegal voter intimidation’

Twitter said Monday that it would attach a warning label to any tweets, including those of the candidates, claiming an election victory before state election officials or national media do.

In a sign of how volatile the election could be, buildings in several cities were bricked up, including around the White House in Washington and Macy’s flagship department stores in New York.

The FBI was investigating an incident in Texas when a convoy of pro-Trump vehicles surrounded a tour bus carrying Biden’s campaign personnel. The caravan, which Trump praised, prompted Biden’s campaign to cancel at least two of its events in Texas, as Democrats accused the president of encouraging supporters to engage in acts of intimidation.

Eight state attorneys general, representing Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, warned Monday that they would not tolerate voter intimidation.

“Voter intimidation is illegal in every state, whether in person or from a car,” North Carolina Attorney General Josh Stein said in a statement. “People who witness worrying behavior should immediately report it to law enforcement.”

Trump has repeatedly said, without evidence, that postal ballots are prone to fraud, although election experts say that is rare in American elections. Voting by mail is a long-standing feature of American elections, with roughly one in four ballots cast that way in 2016.

Democrats have pushed voting by mail as a safe way to cast a vote, while Trump and Republicans have a large turnout in person on Election Day.

Final push

Trump will conclude his campaign in Grand Rapids, Michigan, the same place where his 2016 presidential race ended.

Biden, his running mate Kamala Harris and their spouses spend most of Monday in Pennsylvania, separating to reach the four corners of a state that has become vital to the hopes of Democrats. Biden is spending Election Day in Pennsylvania, with stops in Scranton, his childhood home, and Philadelphia.

Former President Barack Obama, whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, will hold a voting rally in Atlanta on Monday before an evening rally in Miami.

Biden ended his campaign on the offensive, traveling almost exclusively to the states Trump won in 2016.

Biden accuses Trump of quitting fighting the pandemic, which has killed more than 230,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs. Polls show Americans trust Biden more than Trump to fight the virus.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, America’s leading infectious disease expert, has said that the first doses of an effective coronavirus vaccine will likely be available to some high-risk Americans in late December or early January.

Trump, who has often disagreed with Fauci publicly, suggested early Monday that he might fire him after the election.

“Choose me, and I’m going to hire Dr. Fauci, and we’re going to fire Donald Trump,” Biden said in Cleveland.

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