Undeterred by Pandemic, Americans Prepare to
Deliver Verdict on Trump
President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. barnstormed
through battleground states, concluding an extraordinary campaign conducted
amid a health crisis and deep economic anxiety.
Shane
Goldmacher
By Shane
Goldmacher
Published
Nov. 2, 2020
Updated
Nov. 3, 2020, 12:37 a.m. ET
NEW HOPE,
Pa. — Voters on both sides of the nation’s widening political divide prepared
on Monday to render a verdict on President Trump’s four tumultuous years in the
White House and, in particular, his management of the coronavirus pandemic that
has upended American life for the past eight months.
As Mr.
Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. raced across the most important battleground
states in a frenzied final push for votes, the 2020 election was unfolding in a
country with urgent problems: an uncontrolled public health crisis, a battered
economy, deep ideological divisions, a national reckoning on race and
uncertainty about whether the outcome of the vote will be disputed.
Undeterred
by the pandemic, Americans have already displayed an uncommon determination to
have their voices and votes heard this year. Nearly 100 million cast their
ballots in advance of Election Day, shattering records as they endured long
lines at early voting sites or sent in their ballots by mail.
Much of the
country felt on edge, as if the often-predicted “most important election of a
lifetime” had finally arrived. Ahead of the polls opening on Tuesday,
businesses in cities from Denver to Detroit to Washington, D.C., were boarding
up their windows with plywood as they readied for the possibility of civil
unrest. Some governors were readying the National Guard.
“Everyone
is starting to panic,” Fernando Casas, a construction worker, said as he
pounded nails into a plywood frame at a storefront in a trendy shopping
district near Los Angeles.
Election
administrators braced themselves to pull off the twin challenges of holding an
election during a pandemic and fending off efforts by a president who is
trailing in the polls to undermine trust in the vote-counting process.
“Please be
patient,” Jim Kenney, the mayor of Philadelphia — the biggest city in one of
the most important swing states — urged, predicting long lines on Tuesday. Both
the Trump and Biden campaigns were readying armies of lawyers for a potentially
prolonged fight.
Still, the
unchecked spread of Covid-19 shadowed the election, and on Monday, a report
from the coordinator of the White House virus task force contradicted the
president’s repeated claims on the campaign trail that the United States was on
the way to defeating the virus.
The report,
by Dr. Deborah Birx, warned against the type of rallies that Mr. Trump had been
holding. It also predicted that the United States would continue to see days
when the number of new cases exceeded 100,000, according to a White House
official who has reviewed report, which was first reported by The Washington
Post.
Voters were
wracked with nervous energy. Katie Whelan, a high school history teacher from
New Jersey, crossed the Pennsylvania border to knock on doors over the weekend
for Mr. Biden in the key battleground. The previous night, she said, she had
awakened from a panic dream involving Hillary Clinton and the dread of falling
just short at the ballot box. “She was like, ‘Honey, I’ve been there,’” Ms.
Whelan recalled Mrs. Clinton telling her in the dream.
Adding to
her anxiety, Ms. Whelan could not tell if the nightmare was set in 2016 or
2020. “I stood over the sink and drank three pints of water,” Ms. Whelan said.
“And I said to myself, ‘I better get canvassing.’”
For Mr.
Trump and Mr. Biden, their final events on the last full day of 2020
campaigning offered as stark a display of their differences as anything they
said.
Seeking to
project a sense of normalcy even as infection caseloads surge, Mr. Trump
flouted public health guidelines with a slate of large rallies in North
Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin, and even made a winking nod to
firing the country’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci,
should he win another term, in a Florida rally that lasted past midnight on
Sunday.
In Ohio and
Pennsylvania, Mr. Biden argued there could be no return to routine until the
virus was under control and his itinerary of socially distanced, drive-in
rallies — “Honk if you agree with me!” he shouted in Cleveland — served a
visual expression of his sober approach. Mr. Biden, the former vice president,
cast race as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s stewardship of a pandemic that has
infected more than nine million people in the United States and cost more than
230,000 lives.
“The first
step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump,” Mr. Biden declared, adding,
“The power to change the country is in your hands.”
In his own
meandering and grievance-filled appearances, in which he lashed out against
Nancy Pelosi, Adam Schiff, Hillary Clinton and the news media, Mr. Trump framed
his re-election as an economic imperative to avoid “a deadly Biden lockdown” of
the economy’s fragile recovery.
“This is
not the crowd of a second-place finisher,” Mr. Trump said in Scranton, Pa.,
where Mr. Biden will also appear on Election Day, in a sign of Pennsylvania’s
potential to tip the election.
Mr. Trump
has signaled he may try to declare victory prematurely if the early tabulations
favor him, and the Biden campaign held an unusual public briefing on the eve of
the election to set expectations. At issue is not just the tallying of the vote
but how fast certain states can count. Some key battlegrounds, such as
Pennsylvania, are expected to take days while others, like Florida and North
Carolina, will likely process most votes within hours.
“Under no
scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night,” Jen
O’Malley Dillon, Mr. Biden’s campaign manager, bluntly declared.
As polling
places were set to open on Election Day, Mr. Trump’s road back to the White
House was plainly narrower than Mr. Biden’s pathway. Polls show Mr. Trump
trailing nationally and in most of the key battlegrounds needed to reach the
270 electoral votes required to win the presidency.
Mr. Trump
has been forced to defend not just the three Northern industrial states — the
former “blue wall” of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan — that he flipped in
a surprise victory four years ago but also an array of diversifying states
across the Sun Belt and the South, including Florida, Arizona, North Carolina,
Georgia and even Texas.
Those
latter five states combine for 109 Electoral College votes, nearly all of which
analysts believe Mr. Trump must win.
On Monday,
Mr. Biden dispatched his most potent surrogate, former President Barack Obama,
to two of those states: Florida and Georgia. The former president campaigned
for Mr. Biden and two Senate Democratic challengers in Georgia, then stumped
for Mr. Biden in Florida. Democratic Party strategists are hoping to win the
three Senate seats they need to wrest back control of that chamber, along with
the White House, and enact a progressive agenda in 2021.
The
widening map had some Democrats coveting not only victory on Tuesday but also a
landslide repudiation of Mr. Trump and his brand of Republicanism, including
aspirations of flipping Texas for the first time since 1976.
That Mr.
Biden himself began his final full day on the road in Ohio — a state Mr. Trump
carried by eight percentage points — appeared a sign his campaign hoped to run
up the score. Ohio was not among the dozen closest states in 2016.
But voters
in both parties are mistrusting of the polls. Mr. Trump has actively questioned
them on a near daily basis. And many Democrats are still scarred by the shock
of 2016.
Outside the
Polk County Auditor’s office in Des Moines, the line to vote early stretched
around the block. For 18-year-old Mikayla Simpson, who stood in line wearing
earbuds and a tan camouflage Trump 2020 baseball cap, the wait to cast her
first vote for Mr. Trump was well worth it.
“I’d stand
here all day if I had to,” she said.
Turnout on
Tuesday will be critical even with the record early voting.
Mr. Trump,
who for months has sown mistrust in mail-in ballots, is especially in need of a
huge in-person showing, banking that the Republican Party’s early investment in
door-knocking will pay off.
Mr. Trump’s
chances are mostly pinned on luring white working class voters to the polls —
many of whom have flocked to his rallies despite the health risks. Seeking to
recapture the energy of his surprise 2016 win, Mr. Trump’s final stop is
expected to be in Grand Rapids, Mich., the same city he finished his 2016
schedule.
The
Democratic ticket ended the day in Pennsylvania’s two biggest media markets
alongside pop stars at rallies in stadium parking lots, with Ms. Harris in
Philadelphia with John Legend and Mr. Biden in Pittsburgh with Lady Gaga. Lady
Gaga also performed at Mrs. Clinton’s final 2016 rally, then in North Carolina.
“Vote like
this country depends on it because it does,” she said Monday.
In the
final stretch, both parties were zeroing in on key demographics. Mr. Biden
spoke with the African-American community in Pittsburgh while his running mate,
Senator Kamala Harris of California, headlined a Latino get-out-the-vote effort
in Bethlehem. Mr. Obama campaigned in Miami-Dade County, Florida’s most
populous which is a majority Latino and Black.
Mr. Trump
continued to obsess aloud about how white suburban women had flocked toward the
Democratic Party during his presidency, helping to deliver Democrats the House
in 2018 and possibly the White House in 2020.
“I say to
the women of the suburbs: love me women of the suburbs,” Mr. Trump said.
For Mr.
Tump, the race’s waning days have been a characteristically chaotic closing
stretch. He has threatened to send in lawyers to stop vote counting, cheered on
supporters who surrounded a Biden bus on a Texas highway and baselessly accused
doctors of exaggerating how many people had died from the virus so that they
could make more money.
In
Fayetteville, N.C., on Monday, Mr. Trump condemned the Supreme Court decision
that will allow ballots to be counted in Pennsylvania after Election Day. “Do
you know what can happen during that long period of time?” Mr. Trump said
without evidence. “Cheating.”
Mr. Biden
and Mr. Trump’s closing messages captured their divergent approaches to
electoral politics.
“There will
be no red states and blue states, just the United States,” Mr. Biden said of
his potential presidency.
Mr. Trump
had a very different pitch. “You have the power to vote, so go out and vote,”
he said. “Unless you’re going to vote for somebody other than me, in which
case, sit it out.”
Reporting
was contributed by Maggie Haberman in New York; Glenn Thrush in Washington,
D.C.; Nick Corasaniti and Katie Glueck in Philadelphia; Louis Keene in Los
Angeles; and Mike Anderson in Des Moines.
An earlier
version gave an incorrect surname for the construction worker in Los Angeles.
He is Fernando Casas, not Fernando Salas.
Shane
Goldmacher is a national political reporter and was previously the chief
political correspondent for the Metro Desk. Before joining The Times, he worked
at Politico, where he covered national Republican politics and the 2016
presidential campaign. @ShaneGoldmacher
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