US election: Joe Biden takes a strong whiff of victory over Donald Trump, but is it real?
The unknown unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, are haunting the Biden campaign as it stands on the cusp of a historic victory.
Joe Biden can almost smell victory, but he doesn’t dare to inhale it. With just two days to go until America chooses its next president, everything points to a Biden win — or it would in normal times against a normal president.
But there is nothing normal about Donald Trump or an election held in the midst of a raging pandemic. The unknown unknowns, to quote Donald Rumsfeld, are haunting the Biden campaign as it stands on the cusp of a historic victory.
It is still spooked by Trump’s come-from-behind win in 2016 at a time when the President is holding up to four rallies a day — as he did in Pennsylvania on Sunday, Australian time — pulling huge, frenzied crowds.
Biden’s camp asks: could it be that his national lead over Trump of 7.8 percentage points, compared with just 1.8 points for Hillary Clinton at this stage in 2016, is somehow not enough? Could the polls really be that wrong?
His campaign frets that despite this national lead, the US President remains within striking distance of Biden in most of the key swing states where the poll will be decided: Florida, Pennsylvania, Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia.
Biden, who never came close to this moment of glory in two previous failed runs for the White House, seems determined not to suffer the same fate as Clinton did.
The 77-year-old former vice-president has abruptly scrapped his low-key election campaign. In the final days of this race, he has jumped into the spotlight, holding multiple events in multiple states.
At each, like the one he held with Barack Obama in Flint, Michigan, Biden actually jogs up to the microphone, as if to show voters he is not over the hill, as Trump claims. Biden looks more energetic than he has for months, campaigning with a spring in his step as if he knows this election is his to lose.
The pandemic has surged in the US to an astonishing 100,000 new cases a day, helping Biden’s main campaign argument that the President has mishandled the crisis.
Wearing aviator sunglasses in Flint, Biden declared: “We’re done with the chaos, the tweets, the anger, the hate, the failure, the refusal to take any responsibility.
“When America is heard, I believe the message is going to be loud and it’s going to be clear: It’s time for Donald Trump to pack his bags and go home.
“The only thing that can tear America apart is America itself and that’s what Donald Trump has been doing. It’s wrong, it’s not American, it’s not who we are. It’s time to stand up and take back our democracy.”
Biden, who travelled to three states on Saturday, held two events in the swing state of Michigan on Sunday with Obama, including one in Detroit where he was joined on stage by singer Stevie Wonder.
Democrats are increasingly hopeful of winning Michigan and neighbouring Wisconsin — two traditionally Democrat states Trump won in 2016. Biden leads Trump in Michigan by 6.5 points, in Wisconsin by 6.4 points.
Trump, who is holding 14 rallies in the final three days of the campaign, will campaign be in Michigan on Monday and Tuesday (AEDT) and in Wisconsin on Tuesday ahead of the poll the following day.
Both candidates are focusing on Pennsylvania, which alongside Florida is the key swing state. If Biden wins either state, it is almost impossible for Trump to win. Biden leads by 1.2 points in Florida, by 3.7 points in Pennsylvania.
In the first of Trump’s four rallies in Pennsylvania, he predicted “bedlam” in the US after the election, saying there would be widespread voter fraud, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision to allow states to keep counting mail-in ballots after the poll.
“This is a terrible thing they’ve done to our country. And that’s the US Supreme Court that I’m talking about. That’s a terrible, political, horrible decision that they made,” he said. “November 3rd is going to come and go, and we’re not going to know. You’re going to have bedlam in our country.”
An unprecedented 90 million people have already voted by mail or in-person — two-thirds of the total vote in the 2016 election.
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