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      The 10 swing state counties that tell the story of the 2020 election | Ben Davis

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      Looking at the results of the 2020 election at the more granular level of counties and precincts, it can mostly be defined by one thing: stasis. But beneath that stasis the results of this election and the changes from previous elections say an enormous amount about where the country is and is going. The counties that swung the most mostly fall into two categories: Latino areas swinging strongly towards Trump, and white-majority suburban areas swinging towards Biden. These 10 swing state counties were crucial to the final results, and help tell the story of what happened in 2020.Maricopa county, ArizonaHome of Phoenix and environs, Maricopa county is perhaps the most important individual county to the 2020 presidential election. The county makes up an absolute majority of the population of the swing state Arizona, and the winner of the state almost always wins the county. This year, Biden was able to flip Arizona by just over 10,000 votes, his margin coming entirely from winning Maricopa county by around 45,000. It was the first time the county had voted for the Democratic nominee for president since 1948. In many ways, Maricopa was a microcosm of the election: narrowly won by Trump in 2016 and Biden in 2020, containing urban and suburban areas, and having large communities of both college-educated white moderate voters and Latino voters. Maricopa was one of the linchpins of the Biden strategy of flipping white suburban voters – which he did just enough to win. Precinct results show Biden doing clearly better than Clinton in the white-majority suburban areas. They also show the result of Democrats’ failure to keep their margins among working-class Latino voters, especially in the seventh congressional district, which was carried by Bernie Sanders in the primary. Within Maricopa we can see the results of the trade-off Democrats made to win this election.Hidalgo county, TexasOn the border with Mexico, Hidalgo county, centered on McAllen, is over 90% Hispanic. Working-class and with very high rates of poverty, historically solidly Democratic Hidalgo represents the center of Biden’s failures with Latino voters and working-class voters more broadly. Hidalgo swung 23 points towards Trump, destroying any hopes Democrats had of winning Texas. Hidalgo saw a 27% increase in turnout, as Trump was able to break expectations by activating low-turnout voters to his side. Young, rapidly growing and working-class, Hidalgo is exactly the type of place Democrats need to win to enact any sort of progressive agenda in the future. For many years the conventional wisdom was that turnout in places like Hidalgo would benefit Democrats, but the consequence of Democrats’ focus on flipping white suburban voters was that these new voters were ignored by the party and Trump was able to capitalize. Like most working-class Latino areas, Hidalgo voted for socialist Bernie Sanders in the primary. Going forward, Democrats need a message of class-focused populism to build a base in communities like Hidalgo and build a progressive governing majority.Collin county, TexasThe flip side of Hidalgo county, Collin county in suburban Dallas is an example of the places that powered Biden to competitiveness in Texas and other suburb-heavy sun belt states. Collin county, like other suburbs in Texas, has long been a Republican bastion, giving enormous margins to GOP candidates up and down the ballot. George W Bush twice won Collin by over 40 points, and Mitt Romney won by over 30 in 2012. This year, however, Collin went for Trump by just four points, a 13-point swing to the Democrats from 2016. Collin and Hidalgo counties represent the twin patterns of this election: affluent white suburban areas swinging towards Democrats and working-class Latino areas swinging to Republicans.Miami-Dade county, FloridaMiami-Dade county is fairly unique politically, but you can’t tell the story of the 2020 election without talking about it. Miami and the surrounding area are heavily influenced by the politics of the Cuban diaspora, but the county is also home to many other communities. Miami-Dade saw one of the strongest swings in the country towards Trump, from going to Clinton by 30 points to Biden by just seven. While much of this was powered by Cuban-majority areas, Biden lost ground all over the county, including Black-majority areas. The immense losses in Miami-Dade are one of the biggest swings, and biggest shocks, of the election, costing two Democratic seats in the House of Representatives and putting Florida nearly out of play. The story in Miami-Dade is that the Republicans can mobilize massive numbers of working-class people who usually don’t vote. This has scrambled the entire American political landscape, and put Democrats in a precarious position going forward.Gwinnett county, GeorgiaGwinnett county, in suburban Atlanta, was key to Biden flipping Georgia. The suburbs were the first area of Georgia to support Republicans as the state moved from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican, and are now in the vanguard again as the state has moved back into the Democratic column. Gwinnett voted Republican every year between 1980 and 2012, voting for George W Bush by over 30 points twice. After going narrowly to Clinton in 2016, the county followed the pattern of suburban realignment more strongly than almost anywhere else in the country, voting for Biden by 18 points, a 75,000-vote margin. Winning big in places like Gwinnett was the key to Biden’s strategy for victory, and he was just able to do it.Lackawanna county, PennsylvaniaLackawanna county is the home of Scranton, Joe Biden’s home town, and is a longtime working-class Democratic stronghold. Lackawanna tells two stories in 2020: one of Biden doing just enough for victory and another of a permanent realignment of historic Democratic working-class areas away from the party. Lackawanna voted for Biden by eight points, a five-point swing towards native son Biden that helped push him just over the top in Pennsylvania. Biden was able to recapture enough support in north-east Pennsylvania and places like it in the midwest and north-east, combined with his increased support in the suburbs, meant that he was able to recapture the states Trump so surprisingly captured in 2016. But under the surface, the result in Lackawanna shows a long-term realignment brought about by decades of neoliberalism and declining union density and accelerated by Donald Trump. Obama was able to win Lackawanna twice by over 25 points. The 2020 result is a swing of nearly 20 points since the Obama era, despite Biden’s local connections. It is clear that many working-class regions have permanently moved away from solid Democratic status.Chester county, PennsylvaniaChester county, in suburban Philadelphia, is one of the GOP’s historical bastions, voting Republican every year but the landslide of 1964 until 2008. This year, Biden won Chester by 17 points and nearly 54,000 votes. Biden’s strength in the Collar counties around Philadelphia was crucial to his win in the state, and is the main thing keeping Democrats competitive since their collapse among voters in rural and post-industrial areas. Places like Chester form the heart of the new Democratic coalition, and Democrats will have to keep and improve Biden’s margins – and match his margins in down-ballot races – to put together governing coalitions in the future.Mahoning county, OhioMahoning county, home of Youngstown, is maybe the most powerful symbol of Democratic loss in the working-class midwest. After voting Democratic by enormous margins for decades, Mahoning went to Trump this year, the first time a Republican has won it since Nixon in 1972. Mahoning went for Hillary Clinton in 2016, Obama by over 25 points twice, and even Michael Dukakis by over 25 points. Biden’s shocking loss this year shows a combination of further erosion among white working-class voters and among black voters. Mahoning represents perhaps the final nail in the coffin of the class-based New Deal coalition that has shaped American politics since 1932.Waukesha county, WisconsinCrucial Waukesha county, in suburban Milwaukee, has long been a bastion of Republicanism. This year, however, Biden’s strength with suburban voters closed the gap just enough for Biden to win the state. While Trump won by 21 points, the swing in Waukesha and the rest of the Milwaukee suburbs was just enough for Biden to win the state by around 20,000 votes. While the movement in suburban Milwaukee and the suburbs more broadly was enough to win the election for Biden, it was not as much as many Democrats expected.Northampton county, North CarolinaNorthampton county is a strong example of a serious problem for Democrats: erosion among black voters. These losses may indeed have cost Biden the state of North Carolina. Northampton county is 60% black, and this year went for Biden by 20 points. This was a five-point swing against the Democrats, and the smallest margin for Democrats in the county since the Republican landslide of 1972. Losses among black voters this cycle should be very worrying to Democrats.While the results of the election mostly show stasis, within these results, there was some confounding of expectations. First, the sheer scale of Latino defections to Trump was shocking to many. On the other hand, the swing toward Biden was enough to win the election, but below the expectations of many Democrats, and these voters often split their ticket for down-ballot Republicans, costing the Democrats a chance at a governing majority. Furthermore, the stasis in rural, white areas was a surprise itself. Many of these areas swung dramatically towards Trump in 2016, and it was expected that Biden would rebound at least a bit as there was no more room to fall for Democrats. Instead, these areas mostly stayed the same or even swung to Trump a bit. The results of 2020 confirm the huge swings and coalitional realignment of 2016 are here to stay. We head into the future with a Democratic party weaker than ever among working-class voters of all races and more reliant than ever on a wealthier, whiter and more affluent coalition. More

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      Fight for $15 minimum wage boosted in Florida but Biden faces tough task

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      It has been a long time coming but Hector Rivera is hopeful that one day soon he will be able to take a day off work. The 61-year-old works as a janitor in Miami, Florida, making just over $9 an hour. Because the pay is so low, Rivera works two janitorial jobs and scrambles to find gig jobs on the weekends in order to cover his rent and bills every month.“Trying to survive on this salary is extremely difficult because I’m constantly looking for more work,” said Rivera, a Dominican and one of the millions of Latino and Black Americans who are disproportionately represented in the low-wage sector.On 3 November Rivera, and the millions of Americans fighting for a raise for low-wage workers, were given a boost when Florida passed a resolution to increase its minimum wage to $15 an hour.Raising the minimum wage was a central plank of Joe Biden’s election campaign and Florida’s vote came even as the state voted for Donald Trump. But while workers and activists are cheering the victory, the road ahead for Biden and a raise in the minimum wage looks tough.It’s been eight years since fast-food workers walked off their jobs in New York City and began calling for a $15 minimum wage. In that time the Fight for $15 movement grew to be the largest protest movement for low-wage workers in US history and has won some important victories.Florida is the first state in the south and the eighth state overall to adopt such a measure. And some big corporations including Amazon, Target and Walt Disney have raised, or promised to raise, their minimum wages to $15.After Biden’s win, Senator Elizabeth Warren, a longtime supporter of the movement, urged the incoming Biden administration to use all the “tools in their toolbox” to push a raise through and Biden has promised to back unions who are also pushing hard for a statewide raise for low-wage workers.Rivera was among the low-wage workers who got involved with a union organizing drive for change at his workplace with Service Employees International Union Local 32BJ. The Florida ballot, known as amendment two, will gradually increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 an hour by 2026 from its current minimum wage set at $8.56 an hour.“With amendment two passing, I’ll be able to spend more time with my family,” said Rivera, who recently spent 35 hours working straight without any sleep. “Hopefully now I’ll be able to take a day off,” Rivera added. “The only way we can live a decent life here in Miami is if they raise our wages because everything is expensive. It’s impossible to save money without making more.”A raise has broad support in the US, even in Republican states. Over 60% of Florida voters approved the measure. In Louisiana, another Republican state where the minimum wage is just $7.25 an hour, a Louisiana State University poll 59% of residents support raising it to $15.Nor is there much evidence that a raise would be bad for business. A UC Berkeley report published in July 2019 found even low-wage areas in the US can afford a $15 minimum wage, which would reduce poverty and have no adverse effects, such as job losses. Most economic research on the subject has demonstrated little to no negative consequences to employment while providing positive gains for the low-wage workforce. The last time Florida increased its state minimum wage in 2004, unemployment dropped and 200,000 jobs were added the following year. More

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      Latinos could swing Georgia. Don't repeat the mistakes of Florida and Texas | Chuck Rocha

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      In less than eight weeks, voters of the now-blue state of Georgia will head to the polls to vote in the Senate runoff election on 5 January 2021 to decide if the Rev Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff will join their Democratic colleagues in Congress. These two seats are crucial to deliver the mandate needed by Joe Biden to enact his ambitious vision for America’s future.
      With the Democratic party’s hopes and dreams resting on Georgia’s shoulders, it would be a costly misstep to overlook a key demographic: Latinos. There are nearly a million Latinos living in Georgia, the majority of whom live in and around the Atlanta metro area. About 300,000 persuadable Latino voters who are registered to vote identify as neither Democrat nor Republican. These voters represent a small but decisive 5% of the electorate. In a world in which races are won on razor-thin margins, that 5% is a crucial swing vote.
      In the days leading up to the 2020 general election, I watched my colleagues’ hopes rise at the sight of a string of polls showing Biden with the lead in Florida and record-breaking early voter turnout in my home state of Texas. These hopes were quickly dashed. In the wake of defeat, my phone started to buzz with people asking, urgently: what went wrong with the Latino vote? It was the first time in my 30 years of political experience that the nation finally learned a truth that Latino organizers have been trying to convey for ages. We are not a monolith and you must ask us for our vote if you want to earn our vote.
      Let’s set the record straight: President-elect Joe Biden won Latino voters. He spent more money engaging with Latino voters in his 2020 campaign than either Barack Obama or Hilary Clinton. This investment paid off for Biden, with decisive Latino victories in the states he focused on competing in, including Florida.
      By now, we have all heard about the heroine of Georgia’s historic blue shift. Stacey Abrams’ unprecedented grassroots voter registration and mobilization efforts have unequivocally proven that the antidote to poisonous voter suppression tactics and lagging voter engagement involves two key ingredients: both statewide and community-led operations.
      Fair Fight Action was responsible for the registration of over 800,000 voters in Georgia – a force to be reckoned with in the once reliably red south. This level of mobilization, focused on Latinos, will be critical to swing the Georgia special election toward Democrats and clinch these two remaining Senate seats.
      Every 30 seconds in America, a Latino turns 18 and becomes eligible to vote. Over half of Georgia’s Latino population is under the age of 18. This means there are thousands of Latino youth in Georgia who will turn 18 on or before 5 January who qualify to register to vote in the Senate elections. This is in addition to hundreds of thousands of Latinos already over the age of 18 who are currently unregistered to vote.
      The registration deadline for all Georgians who wish to vote in the runoff elections is less than a month away, on 7 December. These next three weeks present a small window of opportunity for Democrats to expand their electorate. Emerging Latino populations can and will tip the balance in this election.
      Latino organizers and groups on the ground such as Galeo, a non-profit that helps register new Latino voters across Georgia, need funding and resources right now in order to mobilize Latinos in large enough numbers to swing the state. Over the past four months, Nuestro Pac – now the largest Latino-focused Super Pac, which I helped found – spent over $5m to galvanize Latino voters for Biden in swing states like Arizona, Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. These efforts helped deliver the margins of victory for Biden in many of the states he won.
      Georgia presents an enormous opportunity for Democrats, in part because the unique nuances of Latino voters in Texas and Florida, who are culturally distinct from elsewhere, are not present to the same extent in Georgia. The most pressing issue for Latinos in Georgia – and Latinos in general – is Covid relief funds, which are currently being held hostage by the Senate majority leader, Mitch McConnell. Healthcare is a similarly critical issue for Latinos in Georgia – yet the Republican party has voted over 50 times to strip Americans of health protections provided by the Affordable Care Act, and are trying to defeat it through the supreme court.
      Through the appointment of a new and diverse Covid-19 taskforce, Biden has already taken a crucial first step to instill confidence in these voters. Now it is time for investment in grassroots organizing so that Latinos can deliver Biden a mandate.
      Chuck Rocha is the president of Solidarity Strategies and the founder of Nuestro Pac. He was a senior adviser to the Bernie Sanders campaign More

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      Biden lost Florida but he helped raise the minimum wage there. Policy matters | Greg Jericho

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      In this presidential election it was easy to think that policy did not matter.
      After all, Trump did not have any policies. Literally. The easiest way interviewers could trip him up was to ask what he would do with the next four years. His only answer was “we’re going to be great again”.
      If asked what he would do specifically, he answered a version of “well, we’re specifically going to be great again”.
      And yet policy did matter. It always does.
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      In Florida, a vote was held to raise the state minimum wage to $15 over the next six years, from its current rate of $8.56.
      It was a policy Donald Trump outright rejected in the second presidential debate and Joe Biden strongly supported.
      It needed 60% support to pass and it made it, in a state where Biden only got 48% of the vote.
      And so around 12% of voters voted for a policy Biden supported, but then didn’t vote for him to be president.
      Now clearly there are many more reasons to vote for a president than just their position on the minimum wage. But the important aspect of this is not that it shows Biden should have had a better ground game.
      In the far too early wash-up, commentators overreacted before the votes had all been counted and looked at Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania and rushed to claim Biden failed because he was too “woke” (never actually defined), and needed to be more centrist.
      And then the votes kept being counted, and they all looked a bit silly.
      The thing is, Biden is actually quite socially progressive.
      He took a while to get there, but as vice-president he actually came out in support of marriage equality before Barack Obama did.
      He also this year has strongly supported transgender rights, replying to the mother of a transgender child in his NBC town hall that “the idea that an 8-year-old child or a 10-year-old child decides, ‘you know I decided I want to be transgender. That’s what I think I’d like to be. It would make my life a lot easier.’ There should be zero discrimination.”
      He said in 2012 that transgender rights were the “civil rights issue of our time” – that is well ahead of many in his own party.
      And he won Michigan and Wisconsin – states that are your stereotypical blue-collar workers states.
      Guess what? If they like and trust you, they will go with you.
      Biden also has a strong climate change policy because, bizarrely for a Democratic candidate, he became more progressive after securing the nomination. His energy plan includes a commitment for complete carbon-free power by 2035.
      Alas the Senate, if it retains its Republican majority, will do everything it can to stop him, but again, he did not race to the centre during the election, and yet he did not lose the centre.
      Climate change is real, but you can’t win the debate if people truly don’t think you believe that is the case because you hedge about coalmines.
      Yes he lost Florida, but the people won. Workers there will be seeing a raise in the minimum wage. And this is why progressive parties must keep pushing progressive policies – they change the country and improve lives.
      Four years ago the move to raise the wage to $15 was still something Hillary Clinton could fudge, whether she really supported it or not. But grassroots organisations kept pushing, Bernie Sanders pushed, lobby organisations such as “Florida For A Fair Wage” kept pushing.
      This time around Biden was full-throated in his support, as is the entire Democratic party. And even in a state where Biden lost, over 60% voted in favour of it.
      So yes, Biden lost that state, but that pushing and advocacy meant the policy won.
      Policy matters, not because it might affect an election result but because it affects people’s lives – and that is something progressives should always fight for. More

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      'Republicans built the base': how Joe Biden lost Florida's Latino voters

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      As the coronavirus raged across Florida this summer, and the Democratic party was concentrating on locking in the support of the state’s hordes of senior voters, Donald Trump’s campaign was focused in an entirely different direction.
      In the streets of Miami’s Little Havana and Doral neighborhoods, the Puerto Rican communities of Orlando and Kissimmee, and Cuban-American areas of Tampa, activists from Latinos for Trump and other Republican groups were knocking on doors and talking to families and business owners. They delivered a simple message: “Joe Biden is a radical socialist. Donald Trump is your friend.”
      And for some of Miami’s Cubans and Venezuelans in particular, familiar with communism and authoritarian rule in their homelands, despite “red baiting” not being a new tactic, it was “kryptonite”, Trump activists claimed.
      Whatever their motivations, on Tuesday, across the state but mostly in Miami-Dade county, home to 2 million Latinos, voters turned out in droves to hand the president victory by a margin significantly larger than his 2016 success. More

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      Latinos offer lukewarm enthusiasm for Biden after Democrat fails to woo voters

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      In battleground states such as Florida and Texas, key communities with large Latino populations showed comparatively lukewarm enthusiasm for the Democratic presidential nominee, Joe Biden, after overwhelmingly supporting Hillary Clinton four years ago.
      Ahead of election day, activists, legislators and political operatives had warned the Biden campaign that it wasn’t doing enough to woo Latino voters, a diverse and fundamental constituency for the Democratic party.
      The apparent failure prompted some stern immediate criticism from some of the party’s leading figures.
      “I won’t comment much on tonight’s results as they are evolving and ongoing, but I will say we’ve been sounding the alarm about Dem vulnerabilities w/ Latinos for a long, long time,” tweeted the US congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “There is a strategy and a path, but the necessary effort simply hasn’t been put in.”
      As Latinos went to the polls this year, they had three clear priorities: the coronavirus pandemic, healthcare costs, and jobs and the economy, according to the 2020 American election eve poll.
      On Tuesday night, the news wasn’t all bad for Democrats. Biden won Arizona, where Latinos represented a key voter demographic. Overall, around seven in 10 Latinos voted for the former vice-president, polling showed.
      “In some ways, about Latinos, the story of the night is that they made a difference for both candidates,” said Clarissa Martinez, the deputy vice-president of the Latino civil rights and advocacy organization UnidosUS.
      Both presidential nominees had been polling neck-and-neck in Florida. But when Clinton’s nearly 30-point margin of victory in Miami-Dade county slipped to just over seven points for Biden, the coveted swing state threw its 29 electoral college votes behind Donald Trump.
      Trump won a majority of the state’s sizable Cuban-American vote, according to NBC News exit polls, after targeted campaigns painting Biden as a socialist.
      Biden also lost Texas, a reliably red stronghold that Democrats had hoped to turn blue through high voter participation. South Texas’ Nueces county went to Trump by a wider margin than four years ago, after O’Rourke had flipped Corpus Christi and its surroundings in 2018. Whether Republicans regained the south Texas territory because of Latinos voting for Trump or higher turnout by other demographics is unclear at this point, said Juan Carlos Huerta, a professor of political science at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi.
      In the nearby Rio Grande valley, where Clinton dominated in 2016, Biden also lost ground. He’s leading only by a five-point margin in Starr county, which is 96.4% Hispanic or Latino, and which Clinton claimed by a whopping 60 points.
      Meanwhile, he’s up 17 points in neighboring Hidalgo county, which is also majority Latino. That’s still a generous margin, but nothing like Clinton’s 40-point victory in 2016.
      Victoria M DeFrancesco Soto, an assistant dean at the University of Texas’ LBJ school of public affairs, hypothesized that Biden’s underperformance in the border region compared to 2016 could be attributed to two factors: the Clintons’ popularity among Texas Latinos and the fact that grassroots, old school campaigning couldn’t happen amid the pandemic.
      In the valley, it became clear that “the enthusiasm for Biden isn’t what the enthusiasm for Clinton was,” said Manuel Grajeda, the Texas strategist for UnidosUS.
      Both Republicans and Democrats haven’t focused on Latinos there as much as in other major counties, Grajeda said. That was “a missed opportunity” that showed up in the election results, he added.
      The relatively narrow margins for Democrats along the border came even as Latino voters flocked to the polls in Texas. During the incredible turnout in the state for early voting, an estimated 1.9 million Latinos voted, Grajeda said, including around 500,000 first-time voters.
      “The key to success with the Hispanic community in Texas is engagement, and very early on,” said congressman Joaquin Castro, who won re-election Tuesday night. “And making sure that we get to folks who have not participated in the political process before.
      “That continues to be a challenge that we’ve gotta make sure that we meet.” More

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      US election 2020 live: Trump and Biden pick up wins as votes counted in Florida

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      Key events

      Show

      10.23pm EST22:23
      Republicans pick up Senate seat in Alabama

      10.17pm EST22:17
      Biden underperforming in Florida and Georgia compared to polls

      10.09pm EST22:09
      Cornyn wins Senate race in Texas

      10.06pm EST22:06
      Trump wins Kansas

      10.02pm EST22:02
      Lindsey Graham wins re-election

      10.00pm EST22:00
      Polls close in four more states

      9.49pm EST21:49
      Democrats pick up first Senate seat with Hickenlooper win

      Live feed

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      10.23pm EST22:23

      Republicans pick up Senate seat in Alabama

      Republican Tommy Tuberville has been declared the winner of the Alabama Senate race, defeating Democratic incumbent Doug Jones.

      AP Politics
      (@AP_Politics)
      BREAKING: Republican Tommy Tuberville wins election to U.S. Senate from Alabama, beating incumbent Sen. Doug Jones. #APracecall at 9:10 p.m. CST. #Election2020 #ALelection https://t.co/lGfinjTqT4

      November 4, 2020

      Jones had been widely expected to lose his race, after narrowly winning the seat in a 2017 special election.
      Combined with Democrats flipping Cory Gardner’s seat in Colorado, the two parties have canceled out their Senate gains so far tonight.

      10.17pm EST22:17

      Biden underperforming in Florida and Georgia compared to polls

      We still have a long night ahead of us, but the results so far indicate Joe Biden has underperformed in Florida and Georgia in comparison to his polling there.
      With about 91% of the Florida vote in, Donald Trump leads Biden by about 3 points, 51%-48%.
      In Georgia, where 54% of the vote is in, Trump leads by 13 points, 56%-43%.
      Florida was seen as a toss-up, although a recent poll showed Biden ahead there by 5 points. The Democratic nominee was also seen as slightly favored to win Georgia. More

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      US election roundup: Joe Biden and Donald Trump descend on key battleground of Florida

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      [embedded content]
      Donald Trump and Joe Biden converged on Florida on Thursday in the final stages of the battle for the swing state, which the president must win to have a realistic chance of holding on to power.
      “You hold the key,” Biden told a rally in Broward county. “If Florida goes blue, it’s over. It’s over!”
      The rivals duelled over interpretations of new data which showed the US economy recovering fast in the third quarter, but still suffering from the impact of the Covid pandemic. And despite Trump’s efforts to push the issue aside, the candidates’ widely different approaches to the pandemic came into focus once more.
      The Trump campaign broadcast new Spanish-language advertisements showing the president wearing a mask – a tacit admission that his frequent derision of mask-wearing was damaging his standing among at least some of his supporters.
      But the president’s rally held outside a Tampa football stadium followed the pattern of his campaign, packing thousands of mostly maskless fans together.
      Adding to the irony, Melania Trump told the crowd that her husband and his team were focused on creating ways for people to “start gathering with friends again on safe distances”.
      The president’s disregard for masks has alienated many elderly voters, who are critical in Florida, where polls show the race to be more or less tied – and whose 29 votes in the electoral college have proved decisive in the past.
      Most electoral analysts argue that it would be virtually impossible for Trump to hold on to the presidency without winning the state.
      If Trump wins Florida, it would increase pressure on Biden to win the big battleground states to the north, Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. The Democratic challenger began the day in Broward county, part of the coastal urban sprawl north of Miami, before crossing the state to Tampa, where he was due to arrive in the evening, a few hours after Trump had departed for North Carolina, one of the traditionally Republican strongholds he is trying to defend against a Democratic surge.
      As part of the continuing deliberate contrast with the president’s campaign style, the Biden Broward county event was a socially distanced drive-in at a college campus, where supporters were cautioned not to stray more than an arm’s length from their cars. The evening rally scheduled in Tampa was also a drive-in.
      In a new advertisement launched on Thursday, Biden pledged to set up a special taskforce on his first day in office which would be devoted to finding the families of 545 children forcibly separated from their families under Trump immigration policies.
      Data released on Thursday showed GDP had bounced back dramatically in the third quarter of 2020, 33% on an annualized rate in the third quarter after dropping 31% in the second quarter, but the economy was still nearly 4% down compared with the end of 2019.
      On Twitter, Trump proclaimed the recovery to be the “Biggest and Best in the History of our Country”. Biden countered that the country was still “in a deep hole” and warned that the recovery was “slowing if not stalling” while benefiting the wealthiest Americans. More