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SCRANTON: Donald Trump was stumped by the votes in Joe Biden’s hometown on the eve of Election Day, dismissing polls that show him heading for defeat when his Democratic rival urged Americans to draw a line under four years of “chaos”.
The septuagenarian rivals spent Monday (November 2) invading the decisive states that will decide the elections before converging on Pennsylvania’s pivotal battlefield, where both were holding major demonstrations.
Trump won the state surprisingly in 2016, but Biden has maintained a steady, albeit shrinking, lead and will make an 11-hour drive on Election Day to Scranton, his childhood hometown.
US President Donald Trump is behind in the polls but has five more rallies on the last day of the campaign. (Photo: AFP / Brendan Smialowski)
Trump traveled to the city for a raucous event on Biden’s own turf, but not before gathering supporters in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
“I see these fake polls,” Trump said there. “We are going to win anyway.”
The Republican’s complaint to pollsters, combined with attacks on journalists, social media CEOs and his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton, reflected the bitter mood at the prospect of being removed from the White House.
As he went back to his months-long attempts to paint Biden as “sleepy” or “corrupt,” the crowd chanted, “Lock him up!”
And Trump tried to recapture the spirit of his shocking victory four years ago, telling the crowd: “You elected an outsider as president who is finally putting America first.”
“Go out and vote, that’s all I ask.”
But Biden, who has based his campaign on calling Trump a reckless failure during the coronavirus pandemic, smells victory.
Opinion polls give you small but steady advantages in all the swing states that favor closed elections and even threaten Republican strongholds like Georgia and Texas.
Opinion poll averages for Donald Trump and Joe Biden across the country and in 6 key states on the battlefield, as of November 1 (Chart: AFP)
“It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home,” Biden, 77, told supporters at a socially estranged event in Cleveland, Ohio.
“We end the chaos! We end the tweets, anger, hatred, failure, irresponsibility.”
After Ohio, Biden headed to Pittsburgh in Pennsylvania, where he was joined by pop superstar Lady Gaga, in black platform shoes and a dazzling “VOTE” mask, for a drive-in movie.
FEAR OR VIOLENCE, CHAOS
In cold downtown Pittsburgh, Justine Wolff said she had already cast her vote for Biden and was wary of waiting for him to take over the state.
“I hope people have seen the writing on the wall,” said the 35-year-old nurse. “We need some kind of change because this is not working for anyone.”
Biden will return to Pennsylvania on Tuesday (the US Election Day campaign is rare but legal) and will head first to Scranton and then to Philadelphia, the largest city in the state.
Barack Obama was also lending political star power to his former vice president, rallying supporters in Georgia and then Florida, where voting is razor-sharp.
Tuesday is formally Election Day, but it actually marks the culmination of a lengthy election month.
With a huge expansion in voting by mail to protect against the COVID-19 pandemic, nearly 100 million people have already cast their votes, highlighting the passion in what is becoming a referendum on the first Republican term that breaks the rules.
Across central Washington, businesses boarded up windows in anticipation of rioting, and a new “impossible-to-climb” fence was reportedly planned around the White House, behind growing layers of fortifications since a summer. of protests against racism.
The FBI said it was investigating an incident in Texas where Trump supporters in trucks swarmed around a Biden campaign bus while it was on a highway.
LEE: Trump condemns the FBI investigation of supporters surrounding the Biden bus
‘RED WAVE?’
Trump, who scoffs at Biden’s modest attendance at events as proof that opinion polls must be wrong, was limiting his rise to 14 rallies in three days with visits to North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan.
The final rally will be Monday night in Grand Rapids, the site where Trump delivered the final speech of his victorious 2016 campaign and where he hopes to once again cause a surprise.
Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden flies into the final campaign stops of 2020 (Photo: AFP / Jim Watson)
Lynn Gionte, a 60-year-old nurse who attended Trump’s rally in Scranton, predicted “a red wave” that the president will ride toward re-election.
“I have seen more posters of Trump than of Biden,” Gionte told AFP. “I’ve never seen so much emotion for a president.”
But Trump has clearly been concerned about the record early vote count, which tends to lean toward the Democrats.
The president, who falsely claims that mail-in ballots will lead to massive fraud, has upped the ante by suggesting he will push to disqualify votes that come in after Tuesday, a practice that is in fact legal in several key states, as long as the ballots are postmarked. on time.
