In 2020 finale, Trump talks vote fraud, Biden’s on offense

Published 12:00 am Tuesday, November 3, 2020

PITTSBURGH – In the final day of a campaign unlike any other, President Donald Trump charged across the nation Monday, delivering his allegations that the election is rigged against him. Democratic challenger Joe Biden pushed into states once seen as safely Republican, looking to secure his path to the White House.

The two men broke sharply on the voting process itself while campaigning in the most fiercely contested battleground, Pennsylvania.

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The president threatened legal action to stop counting beyond Election Day. If Pennsylvania ballot counting takes several days, as is currently allowed, Trump charged that “cheating can happen like you have never seen. ”

Biden, who visited Pittsburgh, claimed Trump believes “only wealthy folks should vote” and described COVID-19 as a “mass casualty event for Black Americans.”

Biden’s campaign has focused on increasing turnout for Black voters, who could prove the difference in several battleground states.

Both campaigns insist they have a pathway to victory, though Biden’s options for winning the required 270 Electoral College votes are more plentiful. Trump is banking on a surge of enthusiasm from his most loyal supporters.

Trump spent the final full campaign day sprinting through five rallies, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin. Biden devoted most of his time to Pennsylvania, where a win would leave Trump with an exceedingly narrow path. Biden also dipped into Ohio, a show of confidence in a state that Trump won by 8 percentage points four years ago.

The two men delivered their final messages, with Biden emphasizing the pandemic. He declared that “the first step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump,” and he promised he would retain the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president has talked of firing.

Trump, meanwhile, made only passing mention of what his aides believe are his signature accomplishments – the nation’s economic rebound and the recent installation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett – in favor of a torrent of combativeness. He angrily decried the media’s coverage of the campaign.

“I have been under siege illegally for 3 1/2 years. I wonder what it would be like if we didn’t have all of this horrible stuff. We’d have a very, very calm situation,” Trump said at a rally in Michigan. “People see that we fight and I’m fighting for you. I’m fighting to survive. You have to survive.”

Biden planned to campaign on Election Day, saying he would head to Philadelphia and Scranton as part of a get-out-the-vote effort. His running mate, Sen. Kamala Harris, will visit Detroit, a heavily Black city in battleground Michigan, and both of their spouses will hit the road, too.

Trump, as of Monday evening, wasn’t scheduled to travel on Tuesday.

More than 93 million votes have already been cast, through early voting or mail-in ballots, which could lead to delays in tabulation. Trump has spent months claiming that the votes would be ripe for fraud.

Trump also rallied in Scranton on Monday, underscoring the importance of the state’s vote-rich northeast counties, and zeroed in on the state’s process to count votes. He has used stark terms to threaten litigation to stop the tabulation of ballots arriving after Election Day – counting that is allowed with earlier postmarks in some states.

He has said that “we’re going in with our lawyers” as soon as the polls close in Pennsylvania and on Monday spoke ominously about the Supreme Court decision to grant an extension to count the votes after Tuesday.

“They made a very dangerous situation, and I mean dangerous, physically dangerous, and they made it a very, very bad, they did a very bad thing for this state,” Trump declared.

He said of Pennsylvania’s Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf, “Please don’t cheat because we’re all watching. We’re all watching you, Governor.”

There is already an appeal pending at the Supreme Court over the counting of absentee ballots in Pennsylvania that are received in the mail in the three days after the election.

The state’s top court ordered the extension, and the Supreme Court refused to block it, though conservative justices expressed interest in taking up the propriety of the three added days after the election. Those ballots are being kept separate in case the litigation goes forward.

One of Biden’s top legal advisers, Bob Bauer, pushed back at Trump’s promise of mobilizing his lawyers after polls close to challenge certain ballots. “It’s very telling that President Trump is focused not on his voters but on his lawyers, and his lawyers are not going to win the election for him,” Bauer said.

Democrats also celebrated a decision by a federal judge to reject another Republican effort to invalidate nearly 127,000 votes in Houston because the ballots were cast at drive-thru polling centers during the pandemic.

Biden’s team pushed into states Trump won handily in 2016, hoping to deliver an Election Night knockout blow that could prevent further Republican challenges.

Biden said he returned to Ohio at the urging of Sen. Sherrod Brown and other Ohio Democrats in Congress, suggesting a final, late visit could win. And the Democrats’ most popular surrogate, former President Barack Obama, made one of his final campaign stops in Georgia.

But even as Biden enjoyed strong poll numbers, the move to expand the map revived anxiety among Democrats scarred by Trump’s 2016 upset over Hillary Clinton, whose forays into red states may have contributed to losing longtime party strongholds.