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FLORIDA: US President Donald Trump promised his supporters in Florida on Friday (October 23) that the COVID-19 pandemic would end soon, and accused Democratic rival Joe Biden of exaggerating the health crisis to scare the public. Americans to vote for him.
The pandemic, which has killed more than 224,000 people in the United States and cost millions more their jobs, has become the dominant theme of the campaign, with Trump on the defensive over his administration’s handling of the crisis.
Biden said earlier that day that Trump had given up on containing the virus and vowed that if he won the November 3 election he would ask Congress to pass a comprehensive COVID-19 bill that he would sign within the first 10 days after taking office. The charge.
“He resigned from America. He just wants us to doze off,” Biden said during a speech in his hometown of Wilmington, Delaware. “I am not going to close the economy. I am not going to close the country. I am going to end the virus.”
READ: More than 50 million Americans vote early in the US presidential election.
During two rallies in the battlefield state of Florida, Trump mocked Biden for saying in the presidential debate Thursday night that the United States was entering a “dark winter.”
He said the former vice president and his Democratic allies were trying to scare people by exaggerating the threat of the virus.
“We are going to quickly end this pandemic,” said Trump, who has downplayed the threat since it began, at The Villages, a sprawling retirement community in central Florida.
Later, Trump told a large crowd in Pensacola that the election was a choice “between a boom and a lockdown.”
Researchers at the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation warned on Friday that the virus could kill more than half a million people in the United States by the end of February 2021. About 130,000 lives could be saved if all the world will wear masks, according to the study.
The campaign stops followed the second and final debate between the two contenders on Thursday night, when Biden and Trump discussed how to handle the pandemic.
The Trump campaign said Friday it had raised $ 26 million from the debate. The Biden campaign, which has beaten Trump in the race for money in recent months, did not release a fundraising figure for the debate, but sent out appeals saying they were outraged.
“Discussion days are often some of the best for fundraising, but we didn’t see the increase we expected,” the campaign said in a fundraising alert for supporters.
READ: See how Donald Trump and Joe Biden face off in the final US presidential debate.
With 11 days to go, more than 53 million Americans have already voted, a record pace, according to the University of Florida Election Project. Michael McDonald, who manages the project, has said the election could set a record for modern turnout, surpassing the 60 percent turnout rate in recent presidential elections.
INTENSE INTEREST
The rise in early voting points to both intense interest in the race and a population eager to avoid the risk of exposure in the Election Day crowds to COVID-19. The huge early voting total gives Trump less room to change his mind before the vote is over.
Opinion polls show him behind Biden both domestically and, by a narrower margin, in various battle states that will decide who sits in the White House on January 20, 2021.
Trump said those polls underestimated his support.
“I think we are leading in a lot of states that you don’t know about,” he told reporters at the White House.
Both candidates have been paying attention to Florida, a must-see state for Trump, where a Reuters / Ipsos poll this week found Biden moving toward a slight lead after being in a statistical tie a week earlier.
Former President Barack Obama, with whom Biden served as vice president for eight years, will campaign in Florida on Saturday.
Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, said the race was tightening in Minnesota and said the campaign would buy more television advertising there. Opinion polls show that Biden leads the state.
READ: No knockouts in Biden, Trump’s final debate before the US elections
Americans may have to wait days or weeks to find out who won, as election officials count tens of millions of votes sent by mail.
The final debate with Biden on Thursday offered Trump a chance to reverse his fortunes, but analysts said he was unlikely to alter the race in a fundamental way. Preliminary estimates showed that fewer people watched the debate than their first debate in September.
Trump, speaking to thousands of people gathered on a grass field at The Villages, said he expected to hold up to five demonstrations a day during the last leg of the race.
Democrats have cast roughly 5 million more votes than Republicans so far, though their margin has narrowed in recent days, according to TargetSmart, a Democratic analytics firm.
