US President Donald Trump has privately told donors that it will be “very tough” for Republicans to keep control of the Senate in the election because he would not support some of its candidates, the Washington Post reported.
“There are a couple senators I can’t really get involved in. I just can’t do it. You lose your soul if you do. I can’t help some of them. I don’t want to help some of them,” Trump told a fundraiser last week, the paper reported on Sunday citing an attendee. Republicans hold a 53-to-47 majority in the Senate. To control the upper chamber, Democrats need to win three seats if Joe Biden wins the presidency in the November 3 polls.
Trump, meanwhile, appears to have gone back to the 2016 playbook for the final nine days of the race, hoping to pull off a similar win. Biden, on the other hand, has kept the focus on the present and is seeking to expand the battleground states. On Saturday, Biden and his former boss Barack Obama hammered Trump at separate rallies on his failure to contain Covid-19.
“There’s something going on. It happened this time four years ago. This time more,” Trump told supporters in Ohio, a battleground state he had won in 2016 but now leads Biden by a razor-thin margin of 1.5 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight weighted average of polls.
{{/usCountry}}“There’s something going on. It happened this time four years ago. This time more,” Trump told supporters in Ohio, a battleground state he had won in 2016 but now leads Biden by a razor-thin margin of 1.5 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight weighted average of polls.
{{/usCountry}}Trump has striven to paint Biden as a corrupt politician just as he did with his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, and indulgently watched his supporters chant “Lock him up,” a 2020 version of “Lock her up”.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told Post, “There are striking similarities to the president’s campaign in 2016 — a tight race, an enthusiasm advantage and clear momentum down the stretch for Donald Trump.”
Trump had trailed Clinton in polls at this stage in 2016 by similar margins — by 6.1 percentage points in the FiveThirtyEight average on October 24, 2016. Four years since, Trump trails Biden by 9.1 percentage points.
Biden is seeking to expand his advantage by taking the battle into Republican territory: Georgia, where he will address two rallies on Tuesday.
Obama was scathing in his remarks on his successor. “Eight months into this pandemic, new cases are breaking records,” he said. “He can’t even take the basic steps to protect himself.” That was a reference to Trump’s own bout with Covid-19.
Vice-President Mike Pence’s chief of staff, Marc Short, has tested positive for coronavirus along with key adviser Marty Obst, raising the prospect of another outbreak within the White House. Pence himself has tested negative and will continue to campaign for Trump’s re-election, his office said.