Scrambling for Battlegrounds: Busy Hours for Trump, Biden Ahead of Tuesday’s Election

The United States presidential contenders are making their final canvassing for votes across the swing states that are considered battlegrounds. Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina, Texas, Michigan, Georgia are among the few states that will determine who between the incumbent president Donald Trump and Democrat’s Joe Biden will acquire the required 270 electors’ vote to assume the leadership of America. 

Joe Biden was blitzing Pennsylvania on Monday and is expected to continue to Cleveland, Ohio later the same day. His counterpart president Trump started the day in Georgia before proceeding to another swing state Florida, Miami.

Addressing supporters in Georgia, Trump gave a clumsy picture of Biden’s presidency if he’s elected. “Joe Biden is promising to postpone the vaccine, delay therapies and turn America into prisons, lock you in your homes, letting in Antifa and other far left, rioters. Look, letting Antifa is bad news, you do know that right.”

For Biden who campaigned in Pennsylvania, he told voters to end the ‘divisive’ presidency which characterized Trump’s leadership. “The last time President Trump won this state by 44, 000 votes. So, every vote matters. The power to change this country is literally in your hands.  I don’t care how hard Donald Trump tries. There’s nothing, nothing he can do to stop this nation from voting no matter what he tries.”

So far, almost 92 ballots have now been casted and a judge ordered the postal service to ensure extraordinary measures to ensure that each ballot is delivered before the cut-off.

Tipping points in various states

While in Pennsylvania, Biden called on the African Americans to come all out and vote as he discourages stepping aside. This U.S election has been described as the most important election in the U.S history because everything is at stake, as put by Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris. In this particular election, racial injustices became blatant and even more worrying, coronavirus pandemic continues killing and cases jumped in millions and America losing allies due to the character of the president are what are considered to be tipping issues to determine how a particular state could vote for which candidate.

“There are all kinds of issues and there are some people who have a very specific small set of issues. Some people are just voting because they are just sick of all the fighting and they want it to end. And that’s where their vote is. And other people are feeling very threatened by healthcare, the coronavirus, the economic impact. There are small businesses going out of business, worrying about their elderly parents and feel kind of personally connected to the coronavirus impact in a very real way. And then there are others who are thinking about the Supreme Court, either Democrats or Republicans, thinking about the Supreme Court,” says Margie Omero is a Principal at the Democratic Polling Firm, GBAO.

She described this election as a referendum on President Trump who is behind Biden in most of the national polls at various battlegrounds including Pennsylvania, Florida and North Carolina although that does not determine the winner of the election.

“But it bears repeating that the battleground is extending toward Democrats when it comes to the presidential battleground. So, Ohio, North Carolina, Arizona, Texas, those states are moving toward Biden. If the battleground was extending toward Trump, you would see Virginia, Colorado, Minnesota, New Mexico perhaps, be more battleground states than there are. So, that’s a sign that things are moving in the Democratic direction.” 

Jon McHenry, Vice President, North Star Opinion Research has counted economy as one of the tipping points especially for Pennsylvania, saying it’s going to be very important there. “You’ve seen a lot of talk from Republicans about fracking. Fracking’s really important to the economy in Pennsylvania, so you do see a lot of attention on that. You can sort of argue back and forth about whether it’s a good thing or a bad thing, but it does create a lot of jobs in Pennsylvania.”

He said it will be hurtful for any candidate to take certain tipping points lightly and the winning of states lies on how they deal with certain issues. “What they think some of those, not just a tipping point, but almost tripping point issues, where they’re afraid to say one thing on it, because it might hurt them in a key state.

Huge spending also says a lot about winning the battlegrounds

The presidential nominees have been frequenting their visits and increasing their TV ads

at the swing states in order to be successful in sending their messages across. “But it’s not just the presidential, it’s also spending and visits, the fact that you see Trump having gone off the air in a lot of states having money trouble, so that’s a sign that they’re not able to compete to expand to their battleground while you have the Biden campaign spending money in Texas with visits and so on. So, you see that in effect, but it’s also the Senate and the House too. There’s been a lot of news, folks maybe have seen it about the massive low dollar donations that have come in for battleground Senate races on the Democratic side,” Margie Omero said. 

According to Jon McHenry, even a state like Texas where President Trump has a lead in the polls, he needs to do more spending to safeguard his lead. “President Trump has a lead, but he’s under 50 percent. He’s the incumbent. There’s really not a third-party candidate to speak of in this contest. So, you would hope that the incumbent would be at 50% to say that he’s going to win. And he still shorts of that. So that shows, do I expect the President to win Texas after everything is said and done? Yes, but in theory, they’ve got to spend some money on Houston TV, on Dallas TV that they should be spending in some other places.”

According to Facebook data, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential campaigns have spent a combined $175, 325, 675 on Facebook ads through Oct. 13 this year. That’s compared to about $750 million on television ads this year so far, according to Advertising Analytics.