Democratic candidate Joe Biden and his wife Jill Biden cast their votes in their hometown of Wilmington, Delaware on Wednesday after a speech on his plans to tackle Covid-19 if elected, while attacking President Donald Trump’s handling of the pandemic.
“I’ll be a president who is not in it for himself, but for others. A president who doesn’t divide us — but unites us. A president who appeals not to the worst in us — but to the best in us…A president guided not by wishful thinking — but by science, reason, and facts,” he said in the speech.
Trump, who voted in Florida last Saturday, is rallying supporters in Arizona on Wednesday, defending a traditionally Republican state he won in 2016, but where the race has turned competitive, with just six days left for polling to close for the presidential election.
Biden was in Georgia on Tuesday, a Republican state he hopes to breach and expand the battleground in a growing sign of confidence that will take him also to Iowa, another state that Trump carried in 2016. “There aren’t a lot of pundits who would have guessed four years ago that the Democratic candidate for president in 2020 would be campaigning in Georgia one week before Election Day,” he said in Georgia. “But we do — because something is happening.”
Trump will hold two rallies in Arizona, hoping to hold on to the state whose creeping leftward tilt due to growing Latino and young demographics in recent years has been accentuated by frustration with the president’s handling of the pandemic.
Trump trails Biden in all national polls and battle ground states. He is behind the Democrat by 8.7 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight weighted average of polls and by 7.3 points in RealClearPolitics average.
In Arizona, Trump trails Biden by 2.8 and 2.4 points in FiveThirtyEight and RealClearPolitics averages respectively. He had won the state by 3.5% in 2016, which was a considerably lower margin than Mitt Romney, who won it in 2012.
Trump will hold the first rally at an airport in Bullhead City, Arizona that also serves adjoining Nevada’s Laughlin, and then in Phoenix. He will not go into Nevada; his second son Eric Trump was there on Tuesday.
Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris is also campaigning in Arizona on Wednesday — among Latina business owners in Tucson and Blacks in Phoenix.
More than 71 million Americans have already voted, a record for early balloting, in person, voting stations or through ballots. That’s more than a third of the total of 240 million eligible voters. The unprecedented early voting has already passed the halfway mark for the 2016 total.
Trump had held rallies in Michigan and Wisconsin — the two states that won him the presidency in 2016 with Pennsylvania — and Nebraska, a conservative state that comes into play because of its unique system (which it shares only with Maine) of granting electoral college votes by congressional districts, not winner-takes-all.
Trump is trailing Biden in both Wisconsin and Michigan — by 7.1 percentage points and 8.3 points respectively in the FiveThirtyEight average of polls and by 5.5 points and 9 points in the RealClearPolitics average. His path to victory will shrink dramatically without these states.
First Lady Melania Trump addressed her first rally this cycle in Chester, Pennsylvania, the most critical of the key states this election.
And former President Barack Obama was in Orlando, Florida, where he launched a scathing attack on Trump. “What’s his closing argument? That people are too focused on Covid,” he said at a rally, referencing the president’s complaints about the epidemic. “He said this at one of his rallies. ‘Covid, Covid, Covid’ he’s complaining,” Obama said. “He’s jealous of Covid’s media coverage.”
