President Trump and Joseph R. Biden Jr. have waged two very different campaigns during the coronavirus pandemic. Mr. Trump has plowed ahead with his aggressive schedule of signature rallies packed with thousands of supporters, while Mr. Biden has proceeded with his socially distanced drive-in gatherings, public health briefings and speeches on unifying the nation.
The two have rarely crossed paths, besides the two debate stages. But Mr. Trump has added a Thursday trip to his itinerary in Tampa, Fla. — where Mr. Biden will also appear later in the day — to hold a rally outside a football stadium.
For a president lagging in the polls, any chance to sharpen a contrast with his rival with only a few days left in the campaign is a welcome opportunity. And Mr. Trump relishes and values the largely maskless crowds he draws by the thousands.
On Wednesday, Mr. Trump posted a video contrasting Mr. Biden’s arrival to a speech in Georgia, where the Democratic nominee appeared before a small group of attendees distanced and demarcated by white circles, with his own arrival in a military helicopter above a large, cheering crowd. In his speeches, the president uses the size of his crowds as evidence that he can’t possibly be losing.
The irony is that the same contrast — Mr. Biden’s adhering to public health guidelines while Mr. Trump flouts them — is exactly the message that the former vice president and his Delaware-centered campaign want to send to voters. Poll after poll shows Mr. Biden more trusted than Mr. Trump to handle the pandemic, just as cases are on the rise and the stock market suffered its worst day in months.
Guy Cecil, the chairman of the Democratic super PAC Priorities USA, said that Mr. Trump’s insistence on holding mass gatherings was “actually hurting himself.”
“He is making a difference,” Mr. Cecil said. “He is making people less favorable and less open to voting for him.”
For Mr. Trump, holding a rally in Tampa amounts to coming full circle. An event there in March, just as the virus was shutting down large parts of the country, was one of the first that he was reluctantly forced to cancel.
“We have over 100,000 requests for tickets, but I think we’ll probably not do it because people would say it’s better to not do,” Mr. Trump said at the time during a bilateral meeting with the prime minister of Ireland. “You know, we need a little separation until such time as this goes away. It’s going to go away. It’s going to go away.”
The president turned to someone for consultation. “What is the number as of this morning?” he asked. “Is it 32? You could tell me. Is it 32 deaths?”
It was.
On Wednesday, The New York Times’s coronavirus tracker showed that the country had reported 227,667 deaths.
In a pair of decisions welcomed by Democrats, the Supreme Court on Wednesday at least temporarily let election officials in two key battleground states, Pennsylvania and North Carolina, accept absentee ballots for several days after Election Day.
In the Pennsylvania case, the court refused a plea from Pennsylvania Republicans that it decide before Election Day whether the state can continue counting absentee ballots for three days after Nov. 3.
In the North Carolina case, the court let stand a lower court ruling that allowed the state’s board of elections to extend the deadline to nine days after Election Day, up from the three days called for by state legislators.
The court’s brief orders in the two cases were unsigned and gave no reasons.
Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who joined the court on Tuesday, did not take part in either case. A court spokeswoman said Justice Barrett said she had not participated “because of the need for a prompt resolution of it and because she has not had time to fully review the parties’ filings.”
The coronavirus pandemic — which has reshaped the presidential race by transforming the conventions, the debates, the way the candidates campaign and how voters cast their ballots — dominated the race on Wednesday as President Trump and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. held fast to the starkly different positions they have staked out.
Rallying supporters in Bullhead City, Ariz., the first of two stops in the state on Wednesday, Mr. Trump claimed that a vaccine for the coronavirus would be available “momentarily,” speeding up an already exaggerated timeline in the final days of the presidential race. (Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, said in an interview Wednesday with the JAMA Network that an emergency use authorization for a coronavirus vaccine might not come until January or later.)
Mr. Trump insisted again that the country was “rounding the turn” on the virus, even as it is raging in wide swaths of the country, and the nation set a record by reporting more than 500,000 new Covid-19 cases over the past week. He took aim at Mr. Biden, claiming without evidence that if the former vice president were to be elected, “there would be no graduations, no weddings, no Thanksgiving.” And he mocked a California mask mandate, saying, “You have to eat through the mask.”
And Mr. Trump, who was hospitalized with the coronavirus, played down the impact the virus had on his own family, claiming that Barron Trump, his youngest son, had had it for “two minutes” before it was gone from his system.
Mr. Biden struck a very different note.
transcript
transcript
‘The American People Deserve So Much Better Than This,’ Biden Says
On Wednesday, Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, addressed President Trump’s rally he held in Nebraska that left his supporters standing out in the cold for hours.
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The American people deserve so much better than this. Just look at what happened last night in Omaha after Trump, after the Trump rally ended, hundreds of people, including older Americans and children, were stranded in sub-zero freezing temperatures for hours. Several folks ended up in the hospital. It’s an image that captured President Trump’s whole approach to this crisis. He takes a lot of big pronouncements, and he makes a lot of big pronouncements, but they don’t hold up. He gets his photo-op and he gets out. He leaves everyone else to suffer the consequence of his failure to make a responsible plan. It seems like he just doesn’t care much about it. And the longer he’s in charge, the more reckless he gets. It’s enough. It’s time to change. Even if I win, it’s going to take a lot of hard work to end this pandemic. I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch. But what I can promise you is this: We will start on Day 1 doing the right things. We’ll let science drive our decisions. We will deal honestly with the American people and we’ll never, ever, ever quit. That’s how we’ll shut down this virus. So we can get back to our lives a lot more quickly than the pace we’re going at now.
“I’m not running on the false promise of being able to end this pandemic by flipping a switch,” Mr. Biden, who received a briefing from public health experts about the coronavirus pandemic, said in remarks at a theater in Wilmington, Del. “But what I can promise you is this: We will start on Day 1 doing the right things. We’ll let science drive our decisions. We will deal honestly with the American people. And we will never, ever, ever quit.”
In the brief speech, he continued to assail Mr. Trump’s handling of the virus as well as the president’s desire for the Affordable Care Act to be struck down by the Supreme Court.
In his speech, Mr. Biden declared that Mr. Trump was “on a single-minded crusade to strip Americans of their health care.” The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear arguments a week after Election Day in a case challenging the Affordable Care Act; the Trump administration has asked the court to overturn the law.
Since the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Mr. Biden has emphasized how the sprint by Mr. Trump and his fellow Republicans to appoint Judge Amy Coney Barrett to the court could have far-reaching consequences for health care, particularly for Americans with pre-existing conditions.
In his speech, Mr. Biden quoted from Mr. Trump’s recent interview with “60 Minutes,” in which the president said he hoped the Supreme Court would strike down the Affordable Care Act.
“There’s no question that’s why President Trump nominated Justice Barrett to the court,” Mr. Biden said.
Then Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, voted by appointment at a state office building in Wilmington, joining more than 70 million Americans who have already cast their ballots. They emerged wearing “I Voted” stickers.
Voters and poll workers in Texas will be required to wear masks at election precincts after a federal judge blocked the governor, a Republican, from exempting them.
The case is one of several related to voting that are testing the boundaries of public health orders as the number of infections surge in a majority of states, part of the latest wave of the coronavirus in the United States.
Judge Jason Pulliam of the U.S. District Court in San Antonio ruled on Tuesday that the polling place exemption, carved out of a July 2 statewide emergency order by Gov. Greg Abbott requiring masks in public, “creates a discriminatory burden on Black and Latino voters.”
The judge granted a preliminary injunction to the N.A.A.C.P. and Mi Familia Vota, a national Latino organization, which had asserted in a lawsuit that Black and Hispanic voters face a much higher risk of contracting the virus and developing complications from it than white residents.
“As a result, Plaintiffs argue Black and Latino voters in Texas are forced to make an unacceptable choice with respect to the 2020 election: exercising their right to vote — or — protecting their own health and lives and that of their loved ones and community by staying home,” Judge Pulliam wrote.
The state immediately filed a notice of appeal, which would be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit in New Orleans. Mr. Abbott has said that he did not want to deny anyone the right to vote if they did not have a mask.
The clash over masks and voting is playing out elsewhere.
In Maryland, a Harford County man was arrested on charges of violating a state emergency order and trespassing after he refused to put on a mask at an early-voting precinct on Monday, the county’s sheriff said in a Facebook post on Tuesday.
In Wisconsin, a poll worker in La Crosse sued the state’s governor, a Democrat, and the city clerk last month after he said that he had been stopped from working during the state’s partisan primary in August because he would not wear a mask.
The man said he had a medical condition that exempted him from the state’s mask order. In a July 31 memo, the Wisconsin Elections Commission wrote that cities and towns could not require voters to wear face coverings, even though masks were recommended.
In Kansas, the secretary of state, Scott Schwab, a Republican, reminded local elections officials earlier this month that they could not turn voters away from the polls for not wearing masks.
“Exercising one’s fundamental right to vote is not, and should not be, contingent upon whether or not they choose to wear a mask,” Mr. Schwab said.
Senator Susan Collins, Republican of Maine, clashed on Wednesday with Sara Gideon, her Democratic opponent and the speaker of the state house, in the final debate of the race. The two women battled over the handling of the pandemic and how to provide health care to thousands of voters, and they traded accusations over negative ads and attached each other’s records.
The nonpartisan Cook Political Report has rated the Maine Senate race a tossup, but several polls — including a New York Times/Siena College poll released in September — have found Ms. Collins, who is seeking a fifth term, trailing Ms. Gideon.
Ms. Collins is facing the toughest re-election contest of her career, in part because her decisive vote to confirm Justice Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court in 2018 infuriated moderate voters who had previously supported her. On Wednesday, she defended both her vote to confirm Justice Kavanaugh and her decision to vote against the confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett earlier this week.
Ms. Collins highlighted her work in approving nearly $3 trillion in legislation earlier this year and accused Ms. Gideon, as she has in the past, of failing to provide for Maine during the pandemic. (The Maine State House adjourned in March and has not yet returned.)
“I’ll hold our record in the State Legislature up to the record of Senator Collins and the G.O.P. Senate any day,” Ms. Gideon shot back, pointing out that Congress has failed to reach an agreement on another relief package.
Ms. Gideon, for her part, sought to frame the race as a referendum on the national leadership in Washington, repeatedly tying Ms. Collins to both Mr. Trump and Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the majority leader, characterizations Ms. Collins dismissed. And like other Democratic candidates, Ms. Gideon argued that she would do a better job of protecting health care for voters, particularly given that the Supreme Court is set to hear a case in the coming days that could overturn the Affordable Care Act.
“I will not stop fighting until we have health care that is affordable and accessible to everyone,” Ms. Gideon said. “This is why I am running for the Senate today, and this is what we have to see through.”