Miami
President Donald Trump and challenger Joe Biden will rally voters just hours apart in the Florida city of Tampa on Thursday, their campaign paths crossing for the first time as the rivals’ fight for the White House enters its frenetic final days.
Florida is a must-win prize, and polls show the candidates in a dead heat in America’s third-largest state, which has sided with the winner in every presidential election since 1964, with one exception.
The candidates’ events are sure to be a study in contrasts, with Trump’s largely mask-less and densely packed supporters gathering in the afternoon, and Biden holding a socially distanced drive-in meeting later in the evening.
A day prior, Trump was stumping in Arizona, while Biden voted in his home state of Delaware and met with health experts, as he fine-tuned his pandemic response plan, seeking to reassure voters that he would use science to fight the contagion.
The virus has killed more than 227,000 people in the US and forced millions out of work in the world’s largest economy as a resurgent wave of cases was reaching record levels. “I’m not running on a false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch,” said the 77-year-old former vice president, who has a strong lead in opinion polls.
“But what I can promise you is this: We’ll start on Day 1 by doing the right thing. We’ll let science guide our decisions.” On Saturday, Biden is to get some star power when he is joined on the stump in Michigan by Barack Obama, whom he served as vice president.
It will be their first joint in-person appearance of the 2020 race, though Obama has been delivering strategically timed broadsides at Trump throughout.
Trump, by contrast, is finishing his campaign in an extreme test of endurance, with a final attempt to catch up both in swing states and also states that he won in 2016 but now has to defend.—APP
