Joe Biden faces, Thursday evening, his first direct meeting with citizens since his victory in the primary, during a televised discussion which will offer him a new opportunity to exhaust Donald Trump on his management of the pandemic.
• Read also: Pennsylvania, keystone of the election
• Read also: Obama’s memoir to be released two weeks after election
It is on the edge of his hometown of Scranton, in key Pennsylvania state, that the Democratic White House candidate will return to the live questioning ring, less than 50 days before the US presidential election on November 3. .
Joe Biden, 77, leads the national polls by a long way, but the gap is narrower and nothing is being done in a half-dozen pivotal states, which actually make the US election by flipping one party to the other.
Known for his blunders, mocked by his Republican rival, who nicknames him “sleeping Joe”, for his supposed small size, he will be closely scrutinized at the time of greatest audience.
For the former vice-president, with a life marked by tragedies, the “town halls” are also an opportunity to show his empathy, which is not the strong point of Donald Trump, 74 years old.
Except that because of the pandemic, the television format should offer curious scenes. Gathered in the open air in a parking lot in the town of Moosic, some 100 people will participate in the program in “drive-in” mode.
Installed in 35 cars, they will face the stage from which Joe Biden will answer their questions. This is to respect physical distancing standards, while gatherings are limited to 250 people in Pennsylvania.
It is in this same eastern American state that he narrowly won against Hillary Clinton in 2016 that Donald Trump took to the exercise Tuesday, on the ABC channel.
During 90 minutes in prime time, he answered questions sometimes bluntly from the public and the journalist. And, on this occasion, he claimed that a vaccine against COVID-19 could be available in the United States within a month.
A schedule questioned by his team of experts and by Joe Biden, who says he does not “trust” the president.
With nearly 200,000 dead and more than six million cases, the pandemic continues to hit the United States and has brought its economy to its knees. And Joe Biden has made the crisis management of his rival his great campaign argument.
“Patriotic education”
“The first responsibility of a president is to protect the American people and he does not do it,” said the former vice president Tuesday, during a televised speech to a handful of journalists.
Unlike the Republican billionaire, he scrupulously respects the standards of physical distancing. By waving this instruction, the Democrat’s team has so far hardly organized any spontaneous meeting with voters, except for a few interactions in the street.
The pandemic overshadows all campaign topics, but its impact on the economy isn’t as bad for the Republican billionaire as some Democrats had hoped.
If he lags behind in the polls, voters continue to trust him more than Joe Biden on this subject.
Faithful to the same angle of attack for several weeks, Donald Trump denounced, from Washington, the “assaults” against the police of a “left” which, according to him, endangers the very foundations of democracy. American.
“Riots and chaos are the direct result of decades of left indoctrination in our schools,” he said, calling for “reestablishing patriotic education”.
The Republican billionaire is expected to attend an open-air meeting in the evening in front of hundreds of excited supporters in Wisconsin, another key state.
After Florida on Tuesday, Joe Biden will be in Minnesota on Friday, a state that Donald Trump almost won in 2016 after decades of Democratic votes.
Sign that his voters are this time very courted, the Republican will also be there, the same day, before North Carolina on Saturday and Ohio on Monday.
Their “lieutenants” are not to be outdone: Vice President Mike Pence is expected Thursday in New Hampshire and Democratic Vice Presidential candidate Kamala Harris is also in Pennsylvania, in his largest city, Philadelphia.