President Trump’s re-election campaign committee ended September with only $63.1 million in the bank despite canceling some television buys late last month, leaving him badly outmatched financially against Joseph R. Biden Jr., who reported $177.3 million in cash on hand for the final stretch of the campaign.
New filings with the Federal Election Commission showed the extent of Mr. Trump’s cash troubles, which are severe enough that he diverted time from key battleground states and flew to California on Sunday for a fund-raiser with just over two weeks until Election Day. The president ended September with just over half as much money as he had at the beginning of the month.
While Mr. Trump’s campaign and its shared committees with the Republican National Committee have raised $1.5 billion since the start of 2019, the disclosures late Tuesday showed that his main re-election committee — the account that must pay for many of the race’s most important costs, including most television ads — had only a small slice remaining.
All told, Mr. Trump’s campaign and its shared committees with the R.N.C. had $251.4 million entering October, compared with the $432 million that Mr. Biden’s campaign and its joint accounts with the Democratic National Committee had in the bank.
Fortunes have reversed sharply from this spring, when Mr. Trump and the Republicans had nearly $190 million more in the bank than Mr. Biden and the Democrats did when he emerged as the presumptive Democratic nominee. Now, entering October, Mr. Biden had close to triple as much of the most flexible campaign dollars as the president.
“The Trump campaign has all the resources we need going into the homestretch of this election,” said Samantha Zager, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign.
She added, “As Hillary Clinton proved when she outspent us two to one in 2016, no amount of money can buy the presidency.”
Speaking in Pennsylvania on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump tried to excuse the state of his fund-raising operation. “I could be the king of all fund-raisers,” claimed Mr. Trump, whose campaign has aggressively pursued large contributors, saying he simply did not want to “owe them.”
Democrats took glee at the diminished size of a war chest that Mr. Trump’s former campaign manager once compared to the Death Star from “Star Wars.” The campaign arm of House Democrats, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, issued a news release with the subject line “DCCC Has More COH Than Trump Campaign,” referring to cash on hand.
President Trump falsely insisted on Tuesday that the United States is “rounding the turn on the pandemic” and distorted Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s position on fracking as he sought to close ground in the battleground state of Pennsylvania.
Mr. Trump hammered his Democratic opponent’s energy policies, repeating a false claim that Mr. Biden supports a total ban on fracking, a major industry in the state. In what Mr. Trump said was a first for one of his campaign rallies, he played on large video screens a montage of several clips in which Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California, talked about phasing out fossil fuels to combat climate change.
“If Biden is elected, he will wipe out your energy industry,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump also offered a litany of false claims about Mr. Biden’s position on the coronavirus, saying that the former vice president would “delay therapies, postpone the vaccine, prolong the pandemic, close your schools, shut down our country.” But his claim that under his own leadership, the country was “rounding the turn” on the pandemic was sharply at odds with the reality that the virus was surging both nationally and in Pennsylvania, where cases are at a level the state has not seen since April.
Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump by an average of 7 percentage points in the state, according to the Upshot’s calculator. Mr. Trump, seeming to acknowledge that deficit, pined for the days earlier this year when his electoral standing looked brighter. Before “the plague” arrived, he said, “I wasn’t going to Erie. I mean, I have to be honest, there’s no way I was coming. I didn’t have to.”
He added, “We had this thing won.”
Mr. Trump had one other warning for voters during his rally: that Mr. Biden would fail to entertain them as he has. “If you want depression, doom and despair, vote for Sleepy Joe,” he said. “And boredom.”
MILWAUKEE — Despite the unseasonably cool 35-degree temperature, lines were already snaking around two sides of the Frank P. Zeidler Municipal Building in downtown Milwaukee by 7:30 a.m., as crowds waited for more than two hours to cast their ballots on the first day of early voting in Wisconsin.
Jon Berlin, 70, a psychiatrist, arrived with his partner, Susan Hrlevich, 60, at 5:20 a.m. The pair, who are independent voters, wore parkas and brought folding canvas chairs as they walked from their downtown residence to cast votes for Joseph R. Biden Jr.
They said they feared even longer lines — and exposure to the coronavirus — if they had waited until Nov. 3 to vote.
“I don’t feel safe in this country for the first time,” said Mr. Berlin. “We have this horrible pandemic and we need a leader who can face the truth and tell the truth.”
Early voting has drawn crowds around the nation, and both campaigns are seeking to turn out their supporters. Senator Kamala Harris of California, Mr. Biden’s running mate, planned to participate in a virtual Milwaukee rally with Senator Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin and several local officials to encourage early voting there.
Chrystal Gillon-Mabry, a 68-year-old artist, and her sister, Coral Hegwood, 59, a retired city employee, brought books to read and chairs when they arrived before 5:30 a.m.
Ms. Hegwood said that she was still undecided as she stood in line. “I don’t want to vote for Trump, but I don’t want to compromise my Christian beliefs,” she said. Afterward, she said she had voted for Mr. Biden. “I prayed and prayed on it,” she said, concluding that “Biden has more compassion than Trump — he has no compassion or empathy for anybody.”
Before in-person early voting began Tuesday, more than 915,000 Wisconsinites had voted since officials began mailing absentee ballots Sept. 17, a figure that amounts to about 30 percent of the state’s total vote in 2016. The turnout has been far higher in the state’s traditionally Democratic strongholds.
Dane County, which includes Madison and is by far the state’s most Democratic county, has had turnout already that amounts to close to half the votes cast there four years ago. No other county’s turnout eclipsed more than 37 percent of its 2016 numbers.
While Wisconsin Democrats have encouraged voters to cast ballots as soon as they are able, the state’s Republican Party urged supporters to wait until early voting began. “Avoid the long lines on Election Day,” read a flyer the Republican Party of Wisconsin mailed to supporters last week, urging them to make plans to vote early, which the state describes as voting “absentee” in person. The mailing made no mention of voting by mail.
Denise Williams, 67, who uses a walker and has been staying mostly at home since the pandemic, was glad to socialize — from at least a few feet apart — with fellow voters, all of whom wore masks. She arrived at 6 a.m. and waited almost three hours.
“Our country is too divided, I want it back together again,” said Ms. Williams, a retired nursing assistant who voted for Mr. Biden. She would have voted by mail, she said, but she never received a ballot. “I wanted to make sure my vote got in, and with my health, I don’t know how I’ll be on Election Day.”
— Kay Nolan and
The top election officials in Michigan and Pennsylvania, two battleground states where many fear that an avalanche of mail ballots could significantly delay the reporting of election results next month, said Tuesday that they hope to finish counting nearly every ballot within three days of Election Day.
Secretaries of state Jocelyn Benson of Michigan and Kathy Boockvar of Pennsylvania said election officials in both of their states have made sweeping preparations to process absentee ballots quickly, even though they will have to begin their tabulations long after many other states.
Ms. Benson said Michigan had doubled or tripled the number of high-speed ballot-processing machines in counties with large numbers of absentee voters and had recruited 30,000 workers to verify and count them.
In Pennsylvania, Ms. Boockvar said, outside experts had helped state and local election officials “figure out what was most important and where we could eliminate bottlenecks” in the tabulations. Workers in more populous counties will be counting around the clock until tabulations are largely complete; a handful of ballots, like those from voters living abroad, are counted later.
“All the counties have really upped their game,” she said. “By Friday, I expect the overwhelming majority of ballots will be counted in Pennsylvania.”
The two secretaries, both Democrats, spoke with Secretary of State Frank LaRose of Ohio, a Republican, at a seminar held by the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard University.
Their pledges appeared aimed in part at addressing concerns that prolonged tabulations in the two states would raise public concerns about election fraud that could be exploited by losing candidates. President Trump has repeatedly said that he could lose only if the presidential election were rigged, and has claimed without evidence that voting by mail is riddled with fraud.
Pennsylvania and Michigan are perhaps the two most hotly contested states where delays in tabulating absentees votes have seemed likely to be significant. In Pennsylvania, where voters requested nearly 3 million ballots and have returned just over 1 million of them according to the United States Elections Project, workers cannot even open ballots until the polls have closed.
Michigan voters have already sent in almost 1.7 million of the nearly 3 million absentee ballots they have requested, but state law only allows election workers to begin opening and verifying mail ballots — but not tabulating them — on the day before Election Day.
Ohioans also are voting by mail in record numbers and have already returned half of the 2.4 million ballots they have requested. But the state’s tabulation rules, which allow counties to process absentee ballots as they arrive, make it likely that some absentee results will be posted even before in-person ballots are counted, Mr. LaRose said.
All three officials said they had taken steps to ensure that their vote counts were as transparent as possible to debunk claims of fraud. Ohio will revise election night reports to highlight the number of absentee ballots that remain to be counted, Mr. LaRose said. Both Pennsylvania and Michigan will give regular updates on the results of tabulating absentee ballots “to demonstrate to the public exactly what’s happening and exactly how the process is working,” Ms. Benson said.
THE EARLY VOTE
When early voting began in Florida on Monday, 366,436 Floridians went to the polls and cast ballots in person, according to data collected by the United States Elections Project.
The total eclipsed the record set on the first day of early, in-person voting four years ago, when about 291,000 people cast ballots, according to The Miami Herald.
Including mailed-in ballots, more than three million people have now voted so far this year in Florida. That’s more than 30 percent of all the votes cast in the state in the entire 2016 election, data shows.
Both parties, and campaigns up and down the ballot, are trying to figure out whether the big early numbers are likely to translate into record turnout or simply indicate that people are voting earlier than usual because of coronavirus fears and mail delays.
The early data, collected by Michael P. McDonald, a professor of political science at the University of Florida, shows that registered Democrats in Florida have been far more likely to vote by mail than Republicans, suggesting that President Trump’s frequent broadsides against voting by mail may have resonated with Republicans.
“This is a dynamic we’re seeing elsewhere, too,” Dr. McDonald said in an interview.
But Republicans nearly tied Democrats when it came to casting ballots in person on the first day of early voting.
Here is what the Florida data reported:
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3,033,702 Floridians have already voted.
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Turnout is already 31.7 percent of what it was in the entire 2016 election.
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366,436 people had voted in person, including 154,004 Democrats and 153,743 Republicans.
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2,667,266 people had voted by mail, including 1,293,994 Democrats and 812,363 Republicans.
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Democrats have requested 802,576 more mail-in ballots than Republicans.
President Trump and his allies have tried to paint Joseph R. Biden Jr. as soft on China, in part by pointing to his son’s business dealings there.
But Mr. Trump’s own business history is filled with overseas financial deals, and some have involved the Chinese state. He spent a decade unsuccessfully pursuing projects in China, operating an office there during his first run for president and forging a partnership with a major government-controlled company.
And it turns out that China is one of only three foreign nations — the others are Britain and Ireland — where Mr. Trump maintains a bank account, according to an analysis of the president’s tax records, which were obtained by The New York Times. The foreign accounts do not show up on Mr. Trump’s public financial disclosures, where he must list personal assets, because they are held under corporate names. The identities of the financial institutions are not clear.
The Chinese account is controlled by Trump International Hotels Management L.L.C., which the tax records show paid $188,561 in taxes in China while pursuing licensing deals there from 2013 to 2015.
The tax records do not include details on how much money may have passed through the overseas accounts, though the I.R.S. does require filers to report the portion of their income derived from other countries.
In response to questions from The Times, Alan Garten, a lawyer for the Trump Organization, said the company had “opened an account with a Chinese bank having offices in the United States in order to pay the local taxes” associated with efforts to do business there. He said the company had opened the account after establishing an office in China “to explore the potential for hotel deals in Asia.”
“No deals, transactions or other business activities ever materialized and, since 2015, the office has remained inactive,” Mr. Garten said. “Though the bank account remains open, it has never been used for any other purpose.”
Mr. Garten would not identify the bank in China where the account is held. Until last year, China’s biggest state-controlled bank rented three floors in Trump Tower, a lucrative lease that drew accusations of a conflict of interest for the president.
China continues to be an issue in the 2020 presidential campaign, from the president’s trade war to his barbs over the origin of the coronavirus pandemic. His campaign has tried to portray Mr. Biden as a “puppet” of China who, as vice president, misread the dangers posed by its growing power. Mr. Trump has also sought to tar his opponent with overblown or unsubstantiated assertions about Hunter Biden’s business dealings there while his father was in office.
As for the former vice president, his public financial disclosures, along with the income tax returns he voluntarily released, show no income or business dealings of his own in China. However, there is ample evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to join the myriad American firms that have long done business there — and the tax records for him and his companies that were obtained by The Times offer new details about them.
Jo Becker contributed reporting.
President Trump abruptly cut off an interview with the “60 Minutes” star Lesley Stahl at the White House on Tuesday and then taunted her on Twitter, posting a short behind-the-scenes video of her at the taping and noting that she had not been wearing a mask.
Mr. Trump then threatened to post his interview with Ms. Stahl ahead of its intended broadcast date on Sunday evening, calling it “FAKE and BIASED.”
The spectacle of a president, two weeks out from Election Day, picking a fight with the nation’s most popular television news program began on Tuesday after Mr. Trump grew irritated with Ms. Stahl’s questions, according to two people familiar with the circumstances of the taping.
One person briefed on what took place said that Mr. Trump had spent more than 45 minutes filming with Ms. Stahl and her CBS News crew, and that the taping had not wrapped up when the president’s aides had expected it to.
So Mr. Trump cut the interview short, and then declined to participate in a “walk and talk” segment with Ms. Stahl and Vice President Mike Pence, the people said.
It appeared that Ms. Stahl’s approach did not sit well with the president. Hours later, Mr. Trump said on Twitter that he was considering posting the interview with Ms. Stahl “PRIOR TO AIRTIME!” He described it as a “terrible Electoral Intrusion” and suggested that his Democratic opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., had been treated less harshly by journalistic interlocutors.
Mr. Trump also posted a six-second video clip of Ms. Stahl at the White House, writing: “Lesley Stahl of 60 Minutes not wearing a mask in the White House after her interview with me. Much more to come.”
In fact, Ms. Stahl had worn a mask at the White House up until the start of her taping with Mr. Trump, including when she first greeted the president, according to a person familiar with the interview. The video posted by Mr. Trump showed Ms. Stahl immediately after the interview ended, as she conferred with two CBS producers, both wearing masks.
The CBS crew was tested for the coronavirus before entering the White House on Tuesday, the person said.
Ms. Stahl has interviewed Mr. Trump twice since the 2016 election, including his first televised interview after winning the presidency. She also filmed with Mr. Trump at the White House in October 2018. Ms. Stahl was hospitalized with the coronavirus in the spring and has since recovered.
The president and Mr. Pence were participating in a “60 Minutes” episode set to air on Sunday. The episode is also expected to feature interviews with Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris of California.
Mr. Biden taped his interview with the “CBS Evening News” anchor Norah O’Donnell on Monday. He has not yet tweeted about it.
A federal civil rights lawsuit against Mississippi’s top election official was withdrawn on Tuesday after the state agreed to expand curbside voting options in response to the coronavirus pandemic and to give voters the opportunity to fix absentee ballots that are rejected.
The state will now allow voters with symptoms of Covid-19, the illness caused by the coronavirus, or who have been exposed to someone with the virus, to vote curbside on Election Day.
Mississippi must also now notify residents within one business day if their absentee ballots are rejected and give them up to 10 days after the election to correct the problem. Voters previously had no way of knowing that their ballots had been rejected, which critics said was quite common because of the state’s flawed system of matching signatures on the ballots with those on file.
The changes came after the N.A.A.C.P., the League of Women Voters in Mississippi and several other plaintiffs sued the secretary of state, Michael D. Watson Jr., a Republican, in August over the state’s election rules, which they asserted would prevent many residents from exercising their right to vote.
“Just because a record number of voters in Mississippi will vote by mail this year does not mean there needs to be a record number of disenfranchised voters,” Jennifer Nwachukwu, a counsel for the Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, said in statement.
The civil rights groups who filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Mississippi advised voters who cast their ballots by mail to include their phone numbers and email addresses so election officials can contact them if there is a problem.
A shift against President Trump among white, college-educated voters in Georgia has imperiled Republicans up and down the ballot, according to a New York Times/Siena College poll released Tuesday, as Republicans find themselves deadlocked or trailing in Senate races where their party was once considered the favorite.
In the presidential race, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mr. Trump were tied at 45 percent among likely voters, unchanged from a Times/Siena poll last month.
But over the same period, Senator David Perdue’s lead evaporated against his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, while another Democrat, the Rev. Dr. Raphael G. Warnock, pulled ahead in a special election for the state’s other Senate seat.
Mr. Ossoff is now tied with Mr. Perdue, who led by four percentage points a month ago, at 43 percent. The race will head to a January runoff if no candidate wins 50 percent of the vote, making the standing of Shane Hazel, the Libertarian candidate who held 4 percent of the vote in the survey, potentially crucial to the outcome.
The survey, conducted from Oct. 13 to 19, found that Mr. Perdue’s favorability ratings declined significantly since the last Times/Siena poll of the state, though it found no immediate evidence of a shift in Mr. Ossoff’s favor after Mr. Perdue made national headlines by mocking the first name of the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, Kamala Harris, on Oct. 16.
The special election for Senate, meanwhile, is all but certain to go to a January runoff, with no candidate near 50 percent. Dr. Warnock has opened a comfortable 32-23 percent lead over Senator Kelly Loeffler, a Republican who was appointed to the seat, with Representative Doug Collins, another Republican, in third at 17 percent.
The findings are the latest indication that Democrats could be on the cusp of realizing their often tantalizing but elusive dream of a Blue Georgia. A victory there for Mr. Biden would doom the president in his bid for re-election, and even one Senate victory could be the difference in giving Democrats control of the Senate.
The Trump campaign has run millions of dollars’ worth of oftenuncontested television advertisements to hold a state that he carried by five percentage points in 2016; the results suggest that his efforts have done little to nudge the state in his favor.
The poll’s margin error was plus or minus 4.1 percentage points.
A federal appeals court ruled Monday that Texas election officials can continue to reject mail-in ballots because of perceived signature discrepancies without giving voters a chance to correct them.
The ruling reversed a Federal District Court judge’s ruling last month that it was unconstitutional to reject a mail-in ballot because of a possible signature mismatch if the voter was not first informed of the problem and offered the opportunity to address it.
The appeals judges, from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, wrote that the lower court’s ruling “takes it upon itself to rewrite” the state’s procedures.
“Texas’s strong interest in safeguarding the integrity of its elections from voter fraud far outweighs any burden the state’s voting procedures place on the right to vote,” the appeals court held. The three-judge panel stayed the injunction that had been issued by the District Court pending a further order from the appeals court.
Monday’s was just the latest in a flurry of decisions handed down by courts in recent weeks related to voting in the November election, several of which have made casting a ballot more difficult amid the pandemic, which is scaring many voters away from polling stations.
There is an ongoing legal battle in Texas over Gov. Greg Abbott’s effort to limit the number of drop boxes that each county in the state can offer. There have also been legal disputes over the availability of and ease of access to mail-in voting in the state and when early, in-person voting should be allowed to begin.
Texas has long been reliably Republican, but the race for president is relatively close there this year — President Trump leads Joseph R. Biden Jr. by only a few points in the polls — and the Republican Senator John Cornyn’s re-election race is fairly competitive.
Democrats are strongly considering boycotting a Senate Judiciary Committee vote on Thursday to approve the nomination of Judge Amy Coney Barrett for the Supreme Court, a symbolic move designed to protest the Republican rush to confirm President Trump’s nominee before Election Day.
The party has reluctantly conceded that it does not have the votes to block or substantially delay Judge Barrett’s confirmation. But Democrats believe that dilatory tactics can help make their case to voters that Republicans are shredding Senate norms in a mad dash to install her and cement a 6-to-3 conservative majority at a time when millions of voters have already cast their ballots.
If, for instance, Democrats followed through with their idea of skipping the committee vote on Thursday, Republicans would be forced to postpone it or break the panel’s rules requiring the presence of Democrats to conduct official business.
“The overwhelming feeling right now is no more business as usual,” said Senator Richard Blumenthal a Connecticut Democrat who sits on the judiciary panel. “Our tools and time are limited, but we are determined to use every one of them, even if they seem somewhat unorthodox.”
The plotting came as Democrats tried again on Tuesday to shut down the Senate entirely until after the election.
“Because of this illicit process, this rush to judgment, the worst nomination proceeding of the Supreme Court in American history that has so defiled the Senate, I move to adjourn,” Senator Chuck Schumer of New York, the Democratic leader, said.
A similar tactic on Monday had failed, and Republicans objected again on Tuesday.
Republicans have trudged on unperturbed, dispensing with Democrats’ procedural maneuvers as they arise.
After the Judiciary Committee’s vote on Thursday, votes on confirming Judge Barrett are expected to begin in the full Senate on Friday and run through early next week. Republicans appear to have the votes they need to confirm her, despite unified Democratic opposition.
Before then, Judge Barrett is scheduled to resume courtesy visits with Republican senators. Senators John Barrasso of Wyoming, Lamar Alexander of Tennessee and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska this week will join dozens of senators in both parties who have already met with Judge Barrett.
Senator Kamala Harris issued a forceful call to Wisconsin voters on Tuesday, urging them on the first day of early voting in the state “to honor the ancestors” by casting their ballots in the presidential election.
“Even though some people are trying to confuse folks about the election and the process of voting, some people are trying to suggest that your vote won’t matter — no,” Ms. Harris, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, said at a virtual Milwaukee rally that was live-streamed on the Biden campaign’s website. “They understand the power of your vote — that’s why they’re trying to discourage you. But let’s not let anyone ever take our power from us.”
“We vote to honor the ancestors, which includes folks like the great, late John Lewis,” Ms. Harris said in a tribute to the civil rights icon who was brutally beaten in 1965 while demonstrating for voting rights in Selma, Ala. “We vote to honor the ancestors, like those suffragettes 100 years ago this year, who passed and helped pass the 19th amendment.”
It was not immediately clear how many people watched the remote rally, which came on the first day of early voting in Wisconsin, a critical battleground whose voters could determine the outcome of the election. In 2016, President Trump won the state by less than 23,000 votes — a razor-thin margin that continues to haunt Democrats to this day.
That Ms. Harris spoke directly to Wisconsin voters on the first day of early voting there underscored the attention the Biden campaign and Democrats have paid to the state.
“Wisconsin, you’re the key,” Ms. Harris said during the rally. “Milwaukee, we need you!”
Ms. Harris’s address, which lasted for about 11 minutes, emphasized the Supreme Court confirmation battle and Republican efforts to overturn the Affordable Care Act. She also denounced her Republican Senate colleagues for attempting to “ram through a Supreme Court nominee” while refusing to pass a coronavirus relief bill.
“We vote because we know what’s at stake, from health care to the economy to the standing of our nation and the unity of our nation,” Ms. Harris said. “And we vote because we know our power, and we vote because when we vote, things change and we win.”
Voters in Florida and Alaska reported receiving menacing and deceptive emails on Tuesday that used false claims about public voting information to threaten voters: “Vote for Trump on Election Day or we will come after you.” (There is no way for any group to know for whom individual voters cast their ballots.)
One of the emails, obtained by The New York Times, came from an address that suggested an affiliation with the Proud Boys, a far-right group. But metadata from the email shows that it did not come from the displayed email address — “info@officialproudboys.com” — but instead originated from an Estonian email server.
The email obtained by The Times had been sent to a voter in Gainesville, Fla., and was nearly identical to dozens of others that had been reported in the city. Voters in Brevard County, Fla., and Anchorage, Alaska, also reported receiving similar emails.
Mayor Lauren Poe of Gainesville said in an interview that the emails were “a very brutish way of trying to intimidate people from going to the polls,” but that none of the voters he had talked to seemed to have been fooled.
Federal and local law enforcement authorities in Florida are investigating the emails, and have put out alerts on social media to warn voters.
“We here at the Sheriff’s Office and the Alachua County Supervisor of Elections are aware of an email that is circulating, purported to be from the Proud Boys,” the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office wrote on Facebook. “The email appears to be a scam and we will be initiating an investigation into the source of the email along with assistance from our partners on the federal level.”
Don Schwinn, 85, a retired environmental engineering consultant and snowbird who is registered as a Democrat in Melbourne Beach, Fla., said in an interview that he received one of the emails on Tuesday afternoon and reported it to the sheriff’s office.
He said it was troubling that Mr. Trump had not condemned the Proud Boys when he was asked about the group during his debate last month with former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee.
“I actually thought it was real. The message was so threatening that it took over,” Mr. Schwinn said.
Mr. Schwinn said that he and his wife, who were both registered Republicans before the 2016 election, had already voted by absentee ballot.
President Trump and the first lady will campaign on Tuesday in Pennsylvania, one of the key battleground states where Joseph R. Biden Jr. leads in the polls exactly two weeks before Election Day.
Mr. Trump trails Mr. Biden, his Democratic opponent, in all of the swing states that he carried in 2016, according to a New York Times snapshot of polling averages. That includes Pennsylvania, where Mr. Biden’s polling lead is averaging eight percentage points.
At his airport rally in Erie, Pa., on Tuesday night, Mr. Trump was planning to be joined by the first lady, Melania Trump, in her first public appearance since recovering from the coronavirus, but on Tuesday afternoon she canceled, with an aide citing a lingering cough.
Mr. Biden, who was born in Pennsylvania and has been trying to flip blue-collar voters there who supported Mr. Trump four years ago, is not expected to make any public appearances before the final presidential debate on Thursday in Nashville.
But as the debate nears, his presence is looming large over Mr. Trump’s campaign.
On Monday, Mr. Trump unleashed a torrent of anger about Mr. Biden and the business practices of his son Hunter Biden during a morning conference call with campaign staff members that several reporters listened in on.
Mr. Trump also called Mr. Biden “a criminal” during a rally in Arizona, and his re-election campaign announced a $55 million advertising blitz that will focus on reaching older voters in battleground states — a demographic that polls suggest is moving toward Mr. Biden.
Mr. Trump’s Pennsylvania rally comes a day after the Supreme Court let stand a ruling by the state’s highest court that allowed election officials to count some mailed ballots received up to three days after Election Day, citing the pandemic and postal delays.
The ruling is a major victory for Democrats who have been pushing to expand access to voting in the pandemic, and for a party that has been requesting absentee ballots in far greater numbers than Republicans.
Josh Shapiro, Pennsylvania’s attorney general, said on Monday that the ruling “makes clear our law will stand despite repeated attacks.”
“With nearly a million votes already cast in Pennsylvania,” he added, “we support the Court’s decision not to meddle in our already-working system.”
The ruling was a defeat for Pennsylvania Republicans who had asked the Supreme Court to intervene. Yet the court’s action — the result of a deadlock — suggested that Judge Amy Coney Barrett, Mr. Trump’s Supreme Court nominee, could play a decisive role in election disputes if she is confirmed to the court as expected next week.
Melania Trump, the first lady, was expected to accompany President Trump to his rally in Erie, Pa., on Tuesday evening, but canceled her campaign stop hours before the event because she has a lingering cough, according to an administration official.
Mrs. Trump, who had the coronavirus earlier this month, announced last week that she had tested negative. She has not joined her husband at a rally since his re-election “kick-off” rally in June 2019, and she was set to appear with him in a state that is essential to his re-election chances.
Outside of her speech at the Republican National Convention, Mrs. Trump has resisted the campaign’s requests for more of her time headlining fund-raisers or other events for her husband.
“Mrs. Trump continues to feel better every day following her recovery from Covid-19,” said Stephanie Grisham, her chief of staff. “But with a lingering cough, and out of an abundance of caution, she will not be traveling today.”
Mr. Trump spent Monday attacking Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease specialist, and said, despite signs that the nation was headed toward another coronavirus peak, that people were “tired” of hearing about the virus from “these idiots” in the government.
President Trump called on the attorney general on Tuesday to take action against his political opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., over his son’s foreign work, an extraordinary push to use the levers of the federal government to sway an election in its final days.
“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Mr. Trump said on the show “Fox and Friends,” when asked whether he wants to see investigations into unverified information about Mr. Biden and his son Hunter that the president’s personal lawyer claims he recently obtained from Hunter’s laptop.
“He’s got to act. And he’s got to act fast,” Mr. Trump said of Attorney General William P. Barr, calling on him to appoint a special prosecutor or a similar official. “This is major corruption, and this has to be known about before the election. And, by the way, we’re doing very well. We’re going to win the election.”
A spokesman for Mr. Biden declined to comment.
Last week, The New York Post published an unsubstantiated article based on material provided by allies to Mr. Trump claiming that when the elder Biden was vice president in 2015, he met with an adviser to a Ukrainian energy company on whose board Hunter Biden served. Mr. Biden’s campaign rejected the assertion and said his schedule showed no meeting with the adviser.
A call for authorities to take action against a political opponent is remarkable, especially two weeks before a presidential election. A day earlier, Mr. Trump repeatedly called his opponent “a criminal,” using the same word for a reporter he chided for not focusing on the Post story.
The president has repeatedly called on Mr. Barr to intervene in issues since he was confirmed by the Senate.
Mr. Biden is leading or tied with Mr. Trump in nearly every public poll in the battleground states that handed Mr. Trump his 2016 victory.
Mr. Biden has significantly cut into Mr. Trump’s edge on issues like the economy, and the president’s poor performance in handling the pandemic has brought his poll numbers down.
The president made the comments during an interview in which his answers were studded with lies and falsehoods about a range of issues, and in which he criticized the Bidens, the news media and the infectious disease expert Dr. Anthony S. Fauci.
After spending Monday attacking Dr. Fauci, who remains popular in public opinion polls, Mr. Trump claimed Tuesday he was “not at odds” with him, before renewing the attacks.
The president falsely described Dr. Fauci as a “Democrat,” and claimed he was a “good friend” of the family of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo of New York.
“He’s been there for a long time, I leave him there, and he’s been wrong,” Mr. Trump said of Dr. Fauci.
He then accused reporters of favoring Dr. Fauci “because they think he’s against me.”
To help spur voters to the polls, most politicians conduct in-person canvassing or send mass emails. But Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has taken a novel approach: She asked her nine million Twitter followers to watch her play a video game.
“Anyone want to play Among Us with me on Twitch to get out the vote?” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, tweeted on Monday afternoon, referring to the popular livestreaming platform. She added that she had never played it “but it looks like a lot of fun.”
Among Us is a cartoony game in which players try to stay alive on an alien spaceship. In a nutshell: Players who are designated as “crewmates” must run around completing a set of tasks while trying to root out and avoid getting killed by other players who are acting as “impostors.”
The game was created in 2018 and has soared to popularity during the pandemic. Major streamers, YouTube stars and TikTok influencers now play it for millions of fans.
On Tuesday night, more than 300,000 users went online to watch Ms. Ocasio-Cortez play Among Us with a handful of popular streamers. It was another illustration of how Ms. Ocasio-Cortez has a degree of internet literacy that was not seen in Congress before she entered politics.
As Ms. Ocasio-Cortez’s pink “aoc” avatar bounced around the spaceship, a video beneath the action showed the headphone-clad congresswoman smiling as she played — and occasionally gasping when her avatar ran into trouble.
Ms. Ocasio-Cortez talked a little about politics — including health care and transgender rights — and the presidential election. She said that she planned to vote in person, rather than by mail, because she wanted her vote counted on Election Day.
“I’m so excited by this upcoming election,” Ms. Ocasio-Cortez added a few minutes later. “We can overwhelm the polls, and we can get things back on track.”
For the most part, though, Ms. Ocasio-Cortez was absorbed in the game itself, and the spaceship where her avatar was competing. At one point she observed that some of its features seemed anachronistic.
“What kind of futuristic spaceship still runs a combustion engine?” she asked. “I mean, really?”
Ad Watch
A series of ads featuring poll workers and election officials begins airing Tuesday, meant to assure Americans that the voting process is safe and secure. The $1.7 million campaign was produced by VoteSafe, a bipartisan voting rights group, and it says as much about the national psyche as it does about the political race.
The Message
In one ad, Sue from Pennsylvania introduces herself as “an Army wife, a mother, a grandmother and a die-hard believer in our right to vote.” She is not a politician, she says.
She is a poll worker, who has worked in Pennsylvania for the last eight years. As she is shown setting up a polling location and placing bilingual “Vote Aquí/Here” signs outside a community center near Easton, Pa., Sue addresses concerns about whether voting will be secure this November.
Her answer is clear.
“I know the process. I have seen it up close,” Sue says. “It is safe, it is secure, and I promise I am going to protect your vote as if it was my own.”
Fact Check
Election officials across the country have faced unprecedented difficulties in shoring up trust in the November elections amid the pandemic and a constant flood of misinformation and falsehoods about the election from the Trump campaign and conservative media outlets.
Though some states face a shortage of money and poll workers and the threat of foreign interference is real, the vote-casting process remains both safe and secure, and voter fraud in the United States is exceptionally rare.
Where It’s Running
Digital ads are targeting independent voters in Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and Florida. The campaign is also airing daily on Fox News in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin.
The Takeaway
The constant attacks by the president on the nation’s electoral system have started to wear on public faith in the process. But rather than turn to celebrities or lawmakers to defend the system, VoteSafe’s use of trusted and familiar local elections workers could help the ads land among an increasingly skeptical public.
In an election year functioning in a seemingly constant state of enmity, one in which few politicians and institutions have been unscathed from attacks, the two rival candidates vying to become Utah’s next governor are an outlier.
The Republican lieutenant governor, Spencer Cox, and the Democratic candidate, Chris Peterson, appeared together in a series of new public service announcements promoting civility in politics.
In the ads, which were shared by the rivals on social media on Tuesday, the two candidates stand about six feet apart, with Mr. Cox wearing a red tie and an elephant button and Mr. Peterson in a blue tie with a donkey button.
In one ad, Mr. Cox says, “While I think you should vote for me,” before Mr. Peterson interjects, “Yeah, but really you should vote for me.”
Mr. Cox then concludes: “there are some things we can both agree on."
The candidates, who are both members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, said that they wanted to set an example of how politicians should conduct themselves.
“We can debate issues without degrading each other’s character,” says Mr. Peterson, a first-time candidate and a law professor at the University of Utah.
Mr. Cox adds, “We can disagree without hating each other.”
In another one of the ads, Mr. Cox and Mr. Peterson both pledged to accept the outcome of the presidential election, something that President Trump has repeatedly balked at when asked in interviews and in his first debate with his Democratic challenger, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
“Whether you vote by mail or in person, we will fully support the results of the upcoming presidential election, regardless of the outcome,” Mr. Peterson says.
Mr. Cox echoes his opponent.
“Although we sit on different sides of the aisle we are both committed to American civility and a peaceful transition of power,” he says.
Mr. Peterson and Mr. Cox conclude the ads by saying in unison that they approve the messages.
A federal appeals court ruled that North Carolina election officials can continue to accept absentee ballots up to Nov. 12, provided they were postmarked by Election Day.
The ruling, issued by the Fourth Circuit of Appeals late Tuesday night in a 12-3 ruling, rejects a Republican appeal to block a ballot deadline extension issued in late September by the North Carolina Board of Elections, which changed the day ballots must be received by election officials from Nov. 6 to Nov. 12.
Republicans in the state had argued that the extended deadlines created two sets of rules for voting in North Carolina, an argument the court rejected.
“As for applying different rules to different voters, again, the Board’s change does no such thing,” Judge James A. Wynn wrote. “All voters must abide by the exact same restriction: they must cast their ballots on or before Election Day. The change impacts only an element outside the voters’ control: how quickly their ballots must be received to be counted.”
“This change, of course, may have its own important consequences for the health of our citizenry — in terms of unnecessary infections avoided — and our democracy — in terms of lawful ballots cast and counted,” Judge Wynn added.
The ruling comes after the Supreme Court of the United States declined to rule on a ballot deadline extension in Pennsylvania, which kept in place a ruling that allowed for ballots to be counted if they were received three days after Election Day.
As Americans head to the polls in states across the country for early voting, a New York Times/Siena College survey of the country released Tuesday showed just how divided the voting process is shaping up to be this year.
Roughly one-third of voters said they planned to vote in person on Election Day. Nearly as many said they had already cast an early ballot, and about another third said they still planned to vote early — either in person or by mail.
An intractable gender divide has come to define this election season, and it plays out in voting habits as well as in vote choice. Although they were no more likely than men to report having voted already, women were nearly 20 percentage points likelier to say they planned to vote before Election Day, the poll found.
Of the more than two-thirds of male likely voters who have not yet voted, a majority plan to vote in person on Nov. 3, compared to just 41 percent of their female counterparts. Perhaps related, men tended to express a lower level of concern about the coronavirus: Fifty-eight percent of female voters said that they thought the worst of the virus was still to come, but just 44 percent of male voters agreed.
Asked which candidate they trusted to handle five separate political issues, women chose Joseph R. Biden Jr. over President Trump on each one by no fewer than 13 percentage points. On the question of who would better unify the country, female voters were more than twice as likely to choose Mr. Biden as to pick Mr. Trump.
Men tended to favor the president on most issues, although on unifying America and handling the coronavirus pandemic they were basically split.
Looking simply at vote choice, Mr. Trump’s advantages among men and white voters, at six points each, are not much changed from a Times/Siena poll last month. And they’re an insufficient counterweight to Mr. Biden’s strength among women and nonwhite voters.
With nonwhite women in particular, Mr. Biden leads Mr. Trump, 70 percent to 20 percent.
A drop-off box for ballots in the Los Angeles suburb of Baldwin Park was intentionally set on fire on Sunday night, ruining a collection of completed ballots before firefighters could put out the blaze, local officials said.
The police are collecting video footage and investigating the incident as arson. There were more than 200 ballots inside, Mayor Manuel Lozano of Baldwin Park told CBS Los Angeles.
Firefighters dropped a hose into the ballot box to put out the flames, then cut open the box and removed dozens of damaged ballots, which appeared to be charred or soaked.
“We’re going to save as many ballots as we can,” a firefighter can be heard saying in a video taken by a bystander.
The Los Angeles County Registrar’s office said in a statement that it would notify voters whose ballots were affected “and will ensure they can exercise their fundamental right to vote.”
Hilda L. Solis, a Los Angeles County supervisor, said the fire had “all the signs of an attempt to disenfranchise voters and call into question the security of our elections.”
“Tampering, or attempts to tamper, with our democracy will not be tolerated,” she said.
At the time of the fire, it had been nearly 36 hours since the last time ballots had last been picked up from the box. The registrar’s office said it was “immediately increasing the frequency of ballot pickup at all other boxes.”
In addition to the Los Angeles police investigation, the registrar’s office reported the incident to the F.B.I. and the attorney general.
The State of the States
President Trump is headed back to Pennsylvania Tuesday evening for a rally in a state he narrowly won in 2016, and hopes to hold in his column this year. Current Pennsylvania polls show that Joseph R. Biden Jr. is leading Mr. Trump by an average of 7 percentage points, according to the Upshot’s calculator.
Here is how the state is doing on two of the biggest issues of the day: the coronavirus and the economy.
The Coronavirus
Pennsylvania has reported at least 189,970 cases, the 11th most in the nation, and 8,591 deaths, the nation’s eighth highest death toll, since the beginning of the pandemic, according to a New York Times database.
And the virus is surging there again: over the past week, there have been an average of 1,514 cases per day, an increase of 42 percent from the average two weeks earlier, according to the database — a level the state has not seen since April.
The Economy
Pennsylvania’s unemployment rate in September was 8.1 percent, according to data collected by Moody’s Analytics, above the national average of 7.9 percent. The situation has improved since April, when the state’s unemployment rate hit 16.1 percent.
But to answer one of the most basic questions of a re-election campaign — are you better off today than you were four years ago? — unemployment in the state is higher than it was in September 2016, when it stood at 5.4 percent.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California is racing against a self-imposed Tuesday deadline for a compromise with congressional Republicans on a coronavirus stimulus package that could be considered before the election.
She and Steven Mnuchin, the Treasury secretary, held their latest talks on Monday afternoon, speaking for nearly an hour by phone. The two “continued to narrow their differences,” said Drew Hammill, a spokesman for Ms. Pelosi. He added that “the speaker continues to hope that, by the end of the day Tuesday, we will have clarity on whether we will be able to pass a bill before the election.”
The odds of a last-minute deal remain long, with Democrats and the Trump administration still haggling over funding levels and policy issues. Even if they could agree, Senate Republicans have all but ruled out embracing a plan anywhere near as large as the more than $2 trillion package under discussion.
If such a deal were struck, Senator Mitch McConnell, Republican of Kentucky and the majority leader, said the chamber would consider it, but he also made a point of scheduling two separate votes in the coming days on narrower bills of the kind senators in his party are more willing to accept. One would revive a lapsed federal loan program for small businesses and the other would provide $500 billion for schools, testing and expired unemployment benefits.
President Trump has insisted in recent days that he wants to spend more than the $2.4 trillion Ms. Pelosi has put forward in negotiations, and claimed he could easily cajole enough Senate Republicans into supporting an agreement of that size — a notion that many of them have told his top deputies would never happen.
In a private call with Democrats on Monday, Ms. Pelosi instructed committee chairmen to work with the top Republicans on their panels to try to resolve critical differences holding up the deal. She outlined a number of remaining areas of disagreement, including Democratic demands for hundreds of billions of dollars in funding for state and local governments, support for restaurants devastated by the pandemic and additional health provisions, according to a person on the call, who disclosed the details on condition of anonymity. Democrats also remain wary that the administration would spend the funds as Congress intended.
Still, Ms. Pelosi insisted she was optimistic a bargain could be reached and said she was intent on reaching one before a new Democratic administration began in January.
“I don’t want to carry over the droppings of this grotesque elephant into the next presidency,” Ms. Pelosi told her members. “We’ve got to get something big, and we’ve got to get it done soon and we’ve got to get it done right.”
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