Two days before the midterm elections, President Donald Trump and big-name Democratic rivals will dominate the campaign trail as campaigns embark on a frenetic final get-out-the-vote push.
Trump is holding rallies Sunday afternoon in Georgia and evening in Tennessee. He’ll campaign with Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the Republican gubernatorial hopeful facing Democrat Stacey Abrams, in Macon. In Tennessee, he’ll visit Chattanooga in a bid to bolster Republican Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who faces former Gov. Phil Bredesen in a key Senate race.
Trump on Saturday continued his effort to use cultural divides to prod the GOP base to go to the polls. He told a crowd in Montana why he was hammering Democrats on immigration, rather than touting a roaring economy.
“When we’re fixing a problem or fixed a problem, there’s no reason to go on about it for 45 minutes. But we have a problem at the border,” Trump said at a rally in Belgrade.
He falsely claimed that Democrats support allowing undocumented immigrants to vote, and complained about their focus on the Russia investigation.
The Democrats make their case
Rivaling Trump on the campaign trail is former President Barack Obama, who will visit the Chicago suburbs of Gary, Indiana, to back Democratic Sen. Joe Donnelly — one of the Senate’s most endangered Democrats in a state Obama won in 2008 but that Trump won in 2016 by 19 percentage points. Obama will then head to Chicago to campaign with J.B. Pritzker, the frontrunner in the Illinois governor’s race.
Potential 2020 presidential candidates are on the trail Sunday as well.
Former Vice President Joe Biden will headline two events in Pennsylvania with Democratic Sen. Bob Casey, who is expected to win re-election on Tuesday.
On Saturday in Ohio, Biden cast Trump as dishonest.
“They’re trying to convince us that honesty is relative depending on where you stand,” Biden said of Trump and Republicans. “Truth is truth. Truth is truth. Honesty is honesty.”
And New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker will campaign at three stops in the state with his embattled colleague, Sen. Robert Menendez, who is attempting to save his seat after a corruption trial that ended in a mistrial after the jury reported it was deadlocked. Rather than selling Menendez personally, Booker on Saturday cast his vote as critical to Democrats’ ability to slow Trump’s agenda and his appointments.
“If we lose Bob Menendez, we lose the stand we can make on their attempts to roll back Medicaid, Medicare, Social Security. We need to get him back,” Booker said.
In Florida, Andrew Gillum, the Democrat facing Republican Rep. Ron DeSantis in the governor’s race, returned to the campaign trail after a break Saturday morning following a deadly shooting at a yoga studio in Tallahassee, where he is mayor.
Gillum, accompanied by singer Jimmy Buffett, campaigned in West Palm Beach alongside Democratic Sen. Bill Nelson, who faces Republican Gov. Rick Scott in a marquee Senate race, said the shooting — following the deadly Parkland shooting in Florida last year — “underscores what we have to do three days from now” and that “enough is enough.”
“We have to reject the politics of Trumpism where we’re convinced we have to step on our neighbors,” he said.
