26/02/2023

In a campaign surge that mirrors his winning 2016 strategy, the US President is planning to hold between three and four rallies a day until election day.

That’s the narrowest gap between the two candidates since October 13, the day after Mr Trump returned to the White House from hospital, when the difference stood at 5 points.
The slight shift in momentum has come largely thanks to a rise in support for Mr Trump, rather than any change in the underlying support for Mr Biden, which has remained steady in recent weeks.
While most pundits and flash viewer polls awarded Mr Biden victory in last week’s final debate, Mr Trump is sticking to his 2016 strategy of scheduling as many rallies as is physically possible to reach voters directly.
Mr Biden’s campaign, by contrast, is built around fewer events in front of only very small socially-distanced crowds, and relies instead on an avalanche of TV advertising courtesy of a record fund-raising haul.
A new advert narrated by Hollywood actor Brad Pitt was aired during the fourth game on Saturday of this year’s baseball World Series. It portrayed the candidate as being the right person to bring the country together.
Mr Biden held two “drive-in” rallies on Saturday, one in the Philadelphia suburbs and a second in the Pennsylvania’s north-east, which Democrats are keen to win back from Mr Trump and where Mr Biden’s comments last week on “transitioning” out of oil and gas have been seized on by Republicans.
“I”m not banning fracking in Pennsylvania or anywhere else,” he said. “And I’m going to protect Pennsylvania jobs, period.”
Mr Biden also emphasised that he wants to end subsidies for the fossil fuel industry. “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t think big oil companies need a handout from the federal government.”
case Financial Times
In a sign of growing confidence in his prospects, Mr Biden will travel to Georgia on Tuesday, his first campaign trip to a state that hasn’t voted for a Democrat since 1992. The former vice-president is ahead by 0.8 points, according to RealClearPolitics.
Meanwhile, Mr Trump continued to lash out at media coverage of the worsening US pandemic. The US registered a record 83,304 new cases on Friday (Saturday AEDT), with many of them across battleground states and where Mr Trump’s support is strong.
The latest surge has taken the US toll to more than 8.6 million cases and more than 225,000 deaths.
“Cases, cases. You know why we have cases? Because we test so much,” Mr Trump told supporters in North Carolina, his first of three stops on Saturday that added visits to Ohio and Wisconsin to his trail.
“And in many ways it’s good. And in many ways it’s foolish. In many ways it’s very foolish,” he said.
“If we tested half, cases would be half. And they would have a headline ‘cases dropped magnificently’, but they want us to test, test, test.”
Experts with actual knowledge of the topic, including the President’s own infectious diseases officials, say cases are going up because the rate of positive tests is climbing.
Mr Trump again asserted the country is “rounding the turn” on the pandemic and chided Mr Biden for saying in last week’s debate that America was on the cusp of a dark winter.