DES MOINES – President Trump stunned the political universe in 2016 with a number of critical swing states in the north, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin gaining less than a percentage point and forcing the Democrats to four years of soul searching, which was wrong in their historic geographic location ran Base.
Four years later, the chilly Midwest reappears as the main election battleground, and on Friday, Mr. Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. traversed the region fighting in states that are not only a must for the president, but also also central to the identity of both parties.
For the Democrats, for years, their blue wall in the Midwest was their only defense against the Republican Party stronghold in the south, proof that they were still the party of workers, working class families and the predominantly black urban centers. For Republicans, these states are an integral part of their rural base, and Mr Trump has spoken out here for farmers and white working-class voters.
With the country reporting a record number of coronavirus cases over the past week, Mr Trump continued to insist on Friday that the illness caused by the virus was not serious. At a rally in Michigan, a state where the number of new cases was up 91 percent from the average two weeks earlier, he made the extraordinary and unfounded allegation that American doctors profited from coronavirus deaths and claimed they were paid more when patients die. He also mocked Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who attended the rally for wearing a mask. “I’ve never seen her in a mask,” he said. “It is very politically correct.”
Mr Biden in Iowa took the opposite approach, highlighting the record number of new cases in the state and noting that the Iowa State Fair had been canceled this year for the first time since World War II. “And Donald Trump gave up,” said Mr Biden.
Later in Minnesota, Mr. Biden whipped Mr. Trump for his comments about doctors benefiting from virus deaths. “Doctors and nurses go to work every day to save lives,” he said. “They do their job. Donald Trump should stop attacking them and do his job. “
If the first round of election night is played in the Sun Belt – in southeastern states like Florida, North Carolina, and Georgia – the second round will be played in Pennsylvania and the Midwest. In most polls and with an ever narrower path to victory, Mr Trump has been forced to hold a number of large rallies in states he cannot afford to lose.
That pressure was reflected in the final shot of the Trump campaign, starting with layovers in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota on Friday. Just before Mr. Trump took the stage in a black coat and black leather gloves at his first rally in Waterford Township, Michigan, his campaign announced that he would be back in the state of Wisconsin on Monday for two more rallies with additional stops and Pennsylvania on the same day.
“He’s sort of trying to repeat the 2016 game book,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School survey. “He’s coming back to these three states. He did it effectively, surprised us all and won with that strategy. “
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This time, however, the landscape is more challenging. Mr Biden led Mr Trump by eight percentage points in a recent Michigan poll conducted by the New York Times and Siena College, underscoring his troubled standing in the battlefield states of the Midwest, where his base of white non-college voters seem to deviate from him . In Wisconsin, an average of the polls shows Mr. Biden is 10 points ahead.
In total, in all four states the candidates visited on Friday, the Biden campaign has put Mr. Trump on air in the past 24 hours, according to Advertising Analytics, $ 2.2 million to $ 1.4 million. The Trump campaign’s most broadcast message appeared to have been picked from his 2016 White House run: a promise to “bring jobs home”.
Mr. Biden runs a much more complex advertising campaign with 27 different ads across the four states. Its most popular ad was focused on fighting the virus.
Neither campaign made any significant changes to their paid media strategy on Friday, despite the Trump campaign adding $ 1.8 million to its national cable purchase and running on channels with a conservative audience like Fox News and the History Channel.
Trump campaign advisors, while expressing confidence in the president’s prospects, have highlighted a number of external factors that will make this year more difficult on battlefields in the north. The governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin are all now held by elected officials, who they call “anti-Trump Democrats”. They admit that early coordination is an important “X-Factor” the implications of which are not fully understood.
And the pandemic remains a top voter concern as it is, to some extent, undermining the economic gains Mr Trump was hoping for.
Campaign officials point to the suburb of Milwaukee as one of the few suburbs in the country that has moved in Mr. Trump’s direction since the summer. Unlike other regions where law and order is a top priority, it has remained a top priority since the shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin.
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Oct. 30, 2020, 8:22 am ET
But Mr. Franklin, who conducts Wisconsin’s most prestigious political poll, said his polls didn’t show the president’s law and order pitch would attract new voters. After the president’s visit to Kenosha in September, Franklin said Republican approval of his response to the protests rose 21 points. But the Independents only rose three points.
“It preaches to the choir and it gets a strong amen, but it doesn’t get more people in the pews,” Franklin said.
On this week’s campaign path, the president has focused more on personal feuds than political contrasts, and has insisted that the country corner the virus while despising public health precautions. On Friday, at his first of three rallies, Mr. Trump criticized one of his favorite slides, Governor Gretchen Whitmer, a Democrat of Michigan, and the crowd chanted, “Lock her up” in response.
“Not me, not me,” said Mr. Trump over the singing while doing nothing to dissuade him. “You blame me every time that happens.”
At his last stop of the day in Rochester, Minnesota, the president stomped off the stage in less than 30 minutes, visibly angry at government restrictions denying him the large crowd of followers he preferred. Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, a Democrat, has restricted meetings in his state to no more than 250 people.
Mr Trump claimed there were “at least 25,000 people who wanted to be here tonight” and accused Democratic leaders like Keith Ellison, the attorney general, of preventing his supporters from gathering. Mr Trump claimed his supporters were “banned from entry by radical Democrats”.
He left the stage without his usual success, where he talks about “win, win, win” and dance to the “YMCA” of the villagers.
Mr. Biden’s swing in the Midwest on Friday included stops in Iowa, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, a route that showed both the promise and danger of the voting card for his campaign, with the former vice president playing both offense and defense in a matter of hours.
Iowa gave Mr. Biden a “stomach blow,” as he later said earlier this year, after finishing fourth in state conventions, and it was not one of the battlefield states that his campaign has been most focused on. Although Iowa voted for Barack Obama twice, it swung sharply to the right in 2016 when Mr Trump won by nine percentage points.
However, polls have shown that there is a close race between Mr. Trump and Mr. Biden this time around, and Mr. Trump is expected to travel to the state on Sunday for a rally in Dubuque. Mr Biden’s visit also had the potential to empower a Democratic Senate candidate Theresa Greenfield who challenges incumbent Joni Ernst in a close race.
On a bright autumn day, at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, Mr. Biden hosted a car rally where supporters decorated their cars with Biden badges and honked their horns to show their support for him. Others stood next to their cars and waved American flags.
Linda Garlinghouse, 69, stood in front of her minivan, hoping for a big win from Mr. Biden – an outcome that would be more likely if Mr. Biden wins a state like Iowa. “I’m just hoping for a landslide,” she said so that there would be no “doubt about the choice”.
Iowa is in the midst of a surge in coronavirus cases and Mr Biden was introduced by an Iowa man whose 92-year-old father died from the virus, underscoring the personal pain the pandemic has inflicted on so many families. In a heavily agricultural state, Mr. Biden also criticized Mr. Trump for trade and accused the president of “weak and chaotic trade policies in China” of harming farmers and manufacturers.
During his swing in the Midwest on Friday, Mr. Biden also devoted valuable time to a layover in Minnesota, a state that has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972. But Mr Trump has long been fixating on Minnesota as one who escaped in 2016 when it lost just 1.5 percentage points.
Polls have shown Mr Biden has a bigger head start this year, despite Mr Trump’s efforts to turn the state around, and Mr Biden told reporters Friday morning that he was not concerned about that. “I don’t take anything for granted,” he said before leaving Delaware. “We will work on every single vote until the last minute.”
Thomas Kaplan reported from Des Moines and Annie Karni from Washington. Nick Corasaniti reported from Philadelphia and Sydney Ember from Connecticut.
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