Trump Holding Rallies in 5 Swing States, Biden in Philadelphia
With just two days of campaigning left before Election Day in the United States, President Donald Trump and his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joe Biden, will once again visit battleground states.
Trump will hold rallies in the hotly contested states of Michigan, Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
Biden will deliver remarks at a “Souls to the Polls” event in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and at a drive-in event there later.
Saturday, Trump and Biden focused on two battleground states, with the president visiting Pennsylvania while the former vice president in Michigan.
Trump held four rallies in cities across Pennsylvania, where he narrowly won in 2016 and where polls currently show Biden with a slight advantage.
Trump’s first rally was in Newtown, where he criticized the U.S. Supreme Court for refusing a Republican Party effort to block a three-day extension for Pennsylvania election officials to receive absentee ballots, meaning the court would not intercede in the state’s vote count.
On the final rally in Montoursville, Trump confirmed that he had signed an executive order that called on the Energy Department to lead a study on the effects of restricting fracking for natural gas, which is a major source of jobs in western Pennsylvania. Trump has accused Biden of planning to ban fracking if elected, something Biden denies.
Trump also thanked U.S. Special Forces for an operation carried out in northern Nigeria on Saturday to rescue an American citizen, who was kidnapped earlier in the week and was being held by armed men.
Trump won Pennsylvania by a narrow margin in 2016, but polls show Biden ahead of Trump there.
Biden attended events alongside former President Barack Obama for the first time during the campaign season. The two visited the cities of Flint and Detroit the first of two days the campaign will spend in Michigan to garner voter support.
In Flint, Michigan, Biden focused on Trump’s handling of the pandemic. “We’re gonna beat this virus and get it under control and the first step to doing that is beating Donald Trump," Biden said.
National polls typically show Biden with a lead of 7 or 8 percentage points over Trump.
According to an average of major polls compiled by the website Real Clear Politics, Biden and Trump are virtually tied in the battleground states of Florida, Arizona, and North Carolina, while the president trails the former vice president in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
More than 92 million people had voted as of Saturday, well above half the overall 2016 vote count of 138.8 million, according to the U.S. Elections Project.
