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In the closing hours of a campaign shadowed by a once-in-a-century pandemic, President Donald Trump charged across the nation Monday delivering an incendiary but unsupported allegation that the election is rigged, while Democratic challenger Joe Biden pushed to claim states once seen as safely Republican.
America stood at a crossroads. Never before in modern history have voters faced a choice between candidates offering such opposite visions as the nation confronts a virus that has killed 230,000 Americans, the starkest economic contraction since the Great Depression and a citizenry divided on cultural and racial issues.
The two men broke sharply Monday on the voting process itself while campaigning in the most fiercely contested battleground, Pennsylvania. The president threatened legal action to stop counting beyond Election Day. If Pennsylvania ballot counting takes several days, as is allowed, Trump charged that “cheating can happen like you have never seen.”
Going further, Trump even tweeted about election-related “violence in the streets," though none has occurred. Asked about it, Biden said “I’m not going to respond to anything he has to say. I’m hoping for a straightforward, peaceful election with a lot of people showing up.”
 

US President Donald Trump at a campaign rally in Wisconsin on October 30. Photo / AP
 
Biden, earlier in Pittsburgh, delivered a voting rights message to a mostly Black audience, declaring that Trump believes “only wealthy folks should vote" and describing COVID-19 as a “mass casualty event for Black Americans.”
“We’re done with the chaos, we’re done with the tweets, the anger, the hate, the failure, the irresponsibility,” said Biden, whose campaign has focused on increasing turnout by Black voters, who could prove the difference in several battleground states.
Both campaigns insist they have a pathway to victory, though Biden’s options for winning the required 270 Electoral College votes are more plentiful. Trump is banking on a surge of enthusiasm from his most loyal supporters in addition to potential legal maneuvers.
Trump spent the final full campaign day sprinting through five rallies, from North Carolina to Pennsylvania to Wisconsin with his final rally, just like four years earlier, in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Biden devoted most of his time to Pennsylvania, where a win would leave Trump with an exceedingly narrow path. He also dipped into Ohio, a show of confidence in a state that Trump won by 8 percentage points four years ago.
Biden emphasized the pandemic. He declared that "the first step to beating the virus is beating Donald Trump,” and he promised he would retain the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci, whom the president has talked of firing.
Trump in Grand Rapids insisted that the nation was “rounding the turn” on the virus. But Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, broke with the president Monday and joined a chorus of Trump administration scientists sounding alarm about the current spike in infections.
“We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic,” Birx wrote in a memo distributed to top administration officials. She added that the nation was not implementing “balanced” measures needed to slow the spread of the virus. One recipient confirmed the contents that were initially reported by The Washington Post.
Trump, meanwhile, made only passing mention of what his aides believe are his signature accomplishments — the nation's economic rebound, the recent installation of Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett — in favor of a torrent of grievance and combativeness. He angrily decried the media's coverage of the campaign while complaining that he also was being treated unfairly by, in no particular order, China, the Electoral College system and rock singer Jon Bon Jovi.
“I have been under siege illegally for three-and-a-half years. I wonder what it would be like if we didn’t have...