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Donald Trump has raised the specter of “chaos” after the November 3 vote, raising fears that the US president will challenge the result as early voter numbers surpass record levels.
As of Saturday night, more than 90 million votes had been cast in the election, according to the US Elections Project, a database compiled by Michael McDonald, a professor at the University of Florida. That’s 65 percent of the total votes cast in 2016, suggesting massive turnout.
In a quartet of rallies in Pennsylvania just three days before the last day of voting, Trump offered stern warnings about delayed results, raised the possibility of electoral fraud in the key state and said that Democratic rival Joe Biden would trap the country in a “nightmare.” without end of confinements “if he won on Tuesday.
On Sunday, Trump will get his message back on the road with a final five-stop blitzkrieg that will take him from Michigan to Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida. Meanwhile, Biden, who spent Saturday campaigning with former President Barack Obama in Michigan, travels to Pennsylvania.
On Saturday, Trump warned that “very bad things” would happen in the wake of Tuesday’s vote and criticized a Supreme Court decision Friday that will allow Pennsylvania to accept absentee ballots for an additional three days after Tuesday.
“We will be waiting. November 3 will come and go, and we won’t know, and there will be chaos in our country, ”Trump said in Newtown, Bucks County.
Later in Reading, Pennsylvania, Trump warned that “the only way we’re going to lose this state [is if] someone is going to play.
Trump is behind Biden in Pennsylvania by more than 5 points, according to a Financial Times analysis of survey data from RealClearPolitics. Nationally, Biden leads 52 percent to 43 percent.
Trump’s message stands in stark contrast to that of Biden, who suggested that Tuesday’s vote would herald the end of the chaos that had ruled the past four years, and the past seven months in particular.
“In three days, we can end a presidency that has fanned the flames of hatred across this nation,” Biden said at a rally in Detroit. “It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home. We are done with the chaos. Tweets. The wrath. Hatred. The mistake. Irresponsibility “.
In the final days of the campaign, Biden has focused his attacks on what he says is Trump’s gross mismanagement of the pandemic, an area where polls show that most Americans believe the president is has fallen short.
The number of new infections increased by 90,000 on Saturday. While this fell from a record rise of 97,000 on Friday, the total number of cases since the start of the pandemic has risen to more than 9 million, according to the Covid Tracking Project.
Midwestern states comprise more than 40 percent of the most recent cases. Eleven of those 12 states had seven-day averages that hit a record high on Saturday, while eight of them reported their highest level of coronavirus hospitalizations.
“Imagine where we would be if we had a president who wore a mask instead of making fun of it?” Biden asked the crowd in Detroit. “I can tell you this: we would not have 9 million confirmed cases of Covid in this nation. We would not have more than 230,000 deaths ”.
Biden suggested that a victory for his campaign would usher in a new phase in the fight against the virus.
“We are going to beat this virus. We’re going to get it under control, ”Biden said. “And the first step in beating this virus is beating Donald Trump.”
Biden’s campaign on Saturday circulated the results of a Stanford University study that estimated that only 18 of Trump’s many rallies between June and September had resulted in an additional 30,000 cases of Covid-19 and 700 deaths.
Trump said Saturday that all Biden talked about was “Covid, Covid, Covid.”
“That is his only plan to make you a prisoner in your own home, a prisoner in your own country, and under Biden’s confinement, the recovery will be totally murdered. The economy will collapse. . . There will be no graduations, there will be no weddings, there will be no Thanksgiving, there will be no Christmas, there will be no Easter, there will be no Fourth of July. There will be nothing, ”Trump declared.
