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By Trevor Hunnicutt and Alexandra Alper
MILWAUKEE / ROCHESTER, Minn. (Reuters) – President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden on Friday sought support in Midwestern states where the coronavirus has reappeared, and Trump falsely accused doctors of profiting from COVID deaths. 19, while Biden said Trump had given up. to the pandemic.
Trump criticized Democratic governors who have imposed restrictions aimed at curbing the spread of the virus and said Biden would bar Americans from gathering for the holidays or other special occasions if elected. Many of those who came to see him did not wear masks.
“You have to open your state and you have to do it fast!” Trump said at a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin, with only four days left before the election.
At a later event in Rochester, Minnesota, he greeted hundreds of supporters who were excluded from a rally that state authorities limited to 250 participants.
Trump also directed his anger at America’s medical system, falsely saying that doctors are somehow incentivized to increase the death count.
“Our doctors get more money if someone dies from COVID,” he said in Waterford Township, Michigan.
Biden accused Trump of “giving up” on the fight against the virus and said he should not attack medical personnel caring for his victims.
“Unlike Donald Trump, we will not surrender to this virus,” he said at a rally in St. Paul, Minnesota. Supporters, socially estranged in their cars at the state fairgrounds, honked their horns in agreement.
The coronavirus pandemic, which has killed nearly 230,000 people in the United States and cost millions more their jobs, has dominated the final days of the campaign.
A record increase in cases is pushing hospitals to the brink of capacity. The news brought Wall Street to its worst week since March, undermining one of Trump’s main arguments for re-election.
Trump, who recovered from COVID-19 weeks ago, has played down the health crisis for months and told his supporters in recent weeks that the country is “turning the corner” even as cases increase. Biden warned of a “dark winter” ahead and promised a renewed effort to contain the virus.
Biden leads Trump 52% to 42% in Reuters / IPSOS national opinion polls, in part due to widespread disapproval of his handling of the pandemic. Opinion polls show closer competition in the most competitive states that will decide the elections.
The focus on the upper Midwest underscored the importance of the region in the race. Michigan and Wisconsin were two of the three historically Democratic industrial states, along with Pennsylvania, that narrowly voted for Republican Trump in 2016, giving him an upset victory.
Biden leads Trump by 9 percentage points in Michigan and Wisconsin and 5 points in Pennsylvania, according to a Reuters / IPSOS poll (https://polling.reuters.com/).
‘DO NOT TAKE ANYTHING GRANTED’
Minnesota, which has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, is one of the few Democratic states that Trump is trying to change this year. Biden said his visit was not a sign that he was concerned about the state, where he maintains a consistent lead. Trump was supposed to visit him later that day.
The pandemic and an extraordinary level of enthusiasm have led Americans to vote early in unprecedented numbers.
More than 86 million votes have been cast by mail or in person, about 63% of the total number of votes in all of the 2016 elections, according to the University of Florida US Elections Project.
In Texas, a traditionally Republican state where polls show Biden and Trump close together, more than 9 million people have voted, dwarfing the overall turnout for 2016, the Texas secretary of state’s office said. Texas is the second state, along with Hawaii, to already exceed its 2016 total.
Trump has repeatedly claimed, without evidence, that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud, and more recently has argued that only results available on election night should count.
Early voting data shows that many more Democrats have voted by mail, while Republicans are expected to run in greater numbers on Tuesday.
This means that preliminary results from states like Pennsylvania that don’t start counting mail-in ballots until Election Day could show Trump in the lead before shifting as more ballots with large numbers of Democrats are added.
Last minute legal battles have added to the uncertainty.
On Thursday, a federal appeals court said Minnesota’s plan to count ballots that arrive after Election Day was illegal. That ruling came after the Supreme Court allowed North Carolina and Pennsylvania to maintain similar deadlines.
Meanwhile, a federal judge in Washington ordered the United States Postal Service to take additional steps to ensure prompt delivery of ballots by mail in areas where service has been slow.
(Additional reporting by Tim Reid, Julia Harte, Raphael Satter, and Doina Chiacu in Washington and Joseph Ax in Princeton, NJ; written by Andy Sullivan and John Whitesides; edited by Scott Malone, Mary Milliken, and Sonya Hepinstall)
