Washington (AFP) - President Donald Trump and his challenger Joe Biden make dueling trips to the battleground state of Minnesota on Friday, rapidly upping the tempo -- and harsh tone -- ahead of their first debate.
With the two candidates also fresh from holding televised town hall sessions, the 2020 contest is finally starting to look more like a traditional battle for the White House six weeks before voting day November 3.
Biden has spent much of the year locked down, along with the rest of the country, to avoid exposure to Covid-19. But with a CNN town hall in Pennsylvania on Thursday and a visit to a trade union facility in Duluth, Minnesota on Friday, he is now hitting the campaign trail in earnest.
Trump, who appeared on an ABC town hall Tuesday, will arrive in Minnesota shortly after Biden to speak to supporters in the small northern town of Bemidji. Although the Republican has campaigned far more intensely than Biden, he is also ramping up the pace and scale of his trademark rallies after being forced mostly to shelve them during the worst months of the pandemic.
Minnesota is a historically Democratic state. However, Trump only narrowly lost there by less than two percentage points in 2016 against Hillary Clinton and despite polls showing Biden ahead now, he thinks he can flip it this time.
Biden's trip reflects that the Democrats are taking that threat seriously, with Trump likely to push his twin messages of protecting blue collar jobs and clamping down after a summer of sometimes violent street protests nationwide against police brutality and racism.
Heavily criticized by voters for his handling of the Covid-19 crisis, Trump has seized on stoking fears of leftwing violence as a way to refocus his campaign in the final weeks.
It's a sensitive topic in Minnesota, where the wave of unrest began in May when an African American man, George Floyd, died in police custody while a Minneapolis officer kneeled on his neck for almost nine minutes.
The intensifying campaign is seeing both candidates sharpen the tone, with Trump telling voters at a rally in Wisconsin on Thursday "the gloves are off."
On September 29, the rivals will hold their first of three debates, a moment widely seen as having the potential to inject real drama a race that has so far seen Biden holding a steady lead in the polls.
