US Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden with Lady Gaga in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.KEVIN LAMARQUE / REUTERS
Although the polls insist on proclaiming his probable victory, Joe Biden cast the rest on Monday on the last day of the campaign, less than 24 hours before a vote that will decide whether the former vice president of Barack Obama occupies, on the third attempt, the Office Oval of the White House.
In a marathon day, with four events scheduled, three of them in Pennsylvania - including the end of the party in Pittsburgh with the claim of Lady Gaga as a guest - the Democratic candidate tried to scratch until the last vote in a key state of the industrial belt of the North America, where his antagonist, Donald Trump, still reserves the benefit of the doubt of a comeback.
Among the most disputed territories, Pennsylvania is, after Florida, the one that grants the highest number of Electoral College votes (20).
And in 2016 he gave up on Trump.
After a campaign to idle, forced by the security measures of the pandemic, and before stopping in Cleveland (Ohio), Biden toured the confines of Pennsylvania on Monday, lavishing himself in meetings with different groups representing the economic and social fabric of the State.
In the morning, he met with trade union leaders, in an industrial state that was damaged by the first impact of the economic crisis and, now, of the covid-19;
later, with representatives of the African-American community, while his wife, Jill Biden, traditionally oblivious to her husband's public activities, visited a rural area and later met with a group of women called in English “suburban”: white who They live in the residential neighborhoods of the cities, a voting niche especially pampered by both candidates in this call and that in 2016 clearly favored the Republican.
Meanwhile, the Democratic vice presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, also turned to her husband, Doug Emhoff, in the closing acts of the campaign, in Philadelphia, also in Pennsylvania.
After the closing of the campaign in Pittsburgh, Biden planned to return to his home in Wilmington (Delaware) to spend the election night and address the nation from the same convention center in the town where he agreed to be a candidate in August.
Participation
The advantage that Biden enjoys in the polls lies, in part, in the participation of voters who stayed at home in 2016 and who this year have gone to the polls en masse, forming long lines in front of schools like the ones that this Monday they could still be seen in downtown Pittsburgh, once the early voting deadline was extended by the influx of people.
So Biden insisted again on the importance of each suffrage.
"Every vote counts," said the Democratic candidate, recalling that Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by just 44,000 votes ahead of Hillary Clinton.
"The power to change this country is literally in your hands, voting is the only way to achieve a better world for our children," he stressed Sunday in Philadelphia.
"Pennsylvania is key," he added.
But the fact that President Trump also dropped by the state, on the same day, fighting for the same votes that could give Biden the victory - his advantage over the Republican is 49.8% compared to 45, 5% in the State -, gave Biden no truce, especially in an industrial State that mistrusts his plans on fracking, hydraulic fracturing to extract shale gas, or the social measures of his campaign, such as increasing the hour of work at 15 dollars (almost 13 euros).
"He wants to ban fracking, Biden is going to cost Pennsylvania 600,000 jobs," a Trump campaign ad repeated on local Pittsburgh television.
Indeed, in this green and wooded state, where the landscape is a succession of factories, chimneys, hangars, slopes and gigantic silos, with a frenzy on the roads, Biden needed to guarantee the workers - hence the meeting with the representatives unions - that none of their proposals harms them as Trump wants to believe.
The president even tweeted that Lady Gaga, the pop icon who planned to put the final touch on the Democratic campaign, is a member of a platform in favor of banning fracking.
As an argument in his favor, the Democratic candidate recalled the president's attempt to destroy what remains of Obamacare, a legacy that he intends to recover if he reaches the White House.
“Trump and the Republicans, through an appointment to the Supreme Court [of Justice Amy Coney Barrett] want to end the program.
If they succeed, one million Pennsylvanians will lose their health coverage, as will 100 million Americans with prior illnesses, including five million here in Pennsylvania.
Trump thinks that health is a privilege, I believe that it is a right, and I will not only restore Obamacare, but I will build on it. "
A threat to the many private clinics that line the route from one factory to another on the outskirts of Pittsburgh.
Subscribe here to the
newsletter
about the elections in the United States
