READING: Donald Trump, challenger Joe Biden and their top surrogates barrelled through crucial states in the industrial Midwest and coastal southeast, pressing closing arguments in a frantic sprint days ahead of the US presidential election.
Using some of his most urgent language yet, Trump warned of “bedlam in our country” if no clear winner emerges quickly in Tuesday’s election, saying, without evidence, that it could take weeks to sort out a result and that “very bad things” could happen in the interim.
Biden meanwhile told backers it was “time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home.”
Underscoring the high stakes, and the disruptive impact of the coronavirus pandemic, a record 90 million early votes have already been cast, as the bruising contest heads toward the biggest turnout in at least a century.
The virus has killed over 230,000 Americans, ravaged the world’s largest economy and is infecting record numbers of people across the US.
The election takes place in a deeply divided country, with feelings so raw that gun sales have surged in some areas. Businesses in some cities, including Washington, are protectively boarding windows, and police are preparing for the possibility of violence.
Trump was focusing Saturday on the key battleground state of Pennsylvania “the state where the story of American independence began,” he said in the small city of Newtown, the first of four stops in that state amid a frenetic final sprint.
Biden made his first joint appearance of the campaign with his former boss Barack Obama, probably the most popular Democrat in the country, in Flint, Michigan as they scramble to boost turnout in a state Trump carried by a razor-thin margin in 2016.
Vice President Mike Pence was meanwhile campaigning in narrowly divided North Carolina as Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris was in Florida, another vitally important swing state.
Pennsylvania has emerged as one of the top prizes this year.
In his motorcade en route to rural Bucks County, the president passed hundreds of supporters holding up a forest of pro-Trump signs. The crowd then booed trailing vehicles that were carrying reporters, a regular target of Trump’s attacks.
Later in Butler, Pennsylvania, he arrived at a rally with well over 5,000 people crammed in, few in masks but many wearing red Trump hats. In remarks at an event in Bucks County, Trump lashed out at Biden, saying he would shut down the state’s fossil-fuel industry.
The president claimed credit for creating the “greatest economy in the history of this country, the history of the world”, while “foreign nations are in freefall.”
Despite recent signs of recovery from the virus-induced economic pain, however, millions remain jobless.
