U.S. President Donald Trump is taking his reelection campaign Thursday to Old Forge, Pennsylvania, a town less than nine kilometers from Joe Biden’s birthplace, hours before Biden formally accepts the Democratic nomination for president.Trump’s campaign said his speech in the Keystone State would address what it calls “a half century of Joe Biden failing America.”Trump’s visit to the battleground state comes as recent opinion polls have him trailing Biden. Biden will deliver his acceptance speech hours later from his home in Wilmington, Delaware as the four-day virtual Democratic National Convention nears an end.Trump has been making campaign stops and holding news conferences during Biden’s week in the political spotlight, traveling to several political battleground states. Republicans are staging their virtual national convention next week, starting Monday and culminating with Trump’s renomination acceptance speech at the White House on August 27. Trump won Pennsylvania in 2016 by less than one percentage point, or 44,000 votes. But Trump, who has since clashed with Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor over efforts to reopen its economy in the midst of the pandemic, has trailed Biden, whose campaign is working to recapture the state that Democrats won from 1992 through 2016. Polls indicate Biden, the former vice president in the Obama administration, is well-positioned to win Pennsylvania with his deep roots in Scranton and his appeal to white working-class and Black voters in Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.Biden spokesman Andrew Bates said that Trump has “put the health of countless families across the Keystone State in danger and plunged the strong economy he inherited from the Obama-Biden administration into a tailspin.”Trump’s campaign is concerned about losing support among suburban voters, particularly women, in the areas around Philadelphia. The campaign hopes to offset the loss by pushing for high voter turnout among rural and exurban voters.
…