DES MOINES (Iowa) • President Donald Trump stunned the political universe in 2016 with a sweep of critical northern swing states, winning Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by less than 1 percentage point and forcing Democrats into four years of soul-searching about what went wrong in their historic geographic base.
Four years afterwards, the chilly Midwest looms again as the main battleground of the vote. On Friday, Mr Trump and his rival, previous VP Joe Biden, criss-crossed the region campaigning in states that are not only must-wins for the President but also central to the identities of both parties.
For Democrats, their blue wall in the Midwest was for years their only defence against the Republican Party's stronghold in the South, a demonstration that they were still the party of labour, working-class families and predominantly black urban centres.
For Republicans, these states are a key part of their rural base, and Mr Trump has made his pitch to farmers and white working-class voters here.
As the country reported a record number of coronavirus cases in the past week, Mr Trump continued to insist on Friday that the disease the virus causes was not serious. At a rally in Michigan, a state that reported a 91 per cent increase in new Covid-19 cases from the average two weeks earlier, he made the extraordinary and unfounded accusation that American doctors were profiteering from coronavirus deaths, claiming they were paid more if patients died.
Afterwards, in Minnesota, Mr Biden lashed out at Mr Trump for his comments. He said: "Doctors and nurses go to work every day to save lives. They do their jobs. Donald Trump should stop attacking them and do his job."
Trailing in most opinion polls and with an increasingly narrow path to victory, Mr Trump had been forced to hold a series of large rallies in states he can't afford to lose, namely Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, on Friday.
"He's sort of trying to repeat the 2016 playbook," said Professor Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School poll.
"He's coming back to these three states. He did that effectively, surprised us all, and won with that strategy."
But this time, Mr Trump is trailing Mr Biden by 8 percentage points in Michigan in a recent poll by The New York Times and Siena College, underscoring his troubled standing in Midwestern battleground states where his base of white voters without college degrees appears to be drifting away from him.
In Wisconsin, an average of opinion polls shows Mr Biden with a 10-point lead.
Mr Trump's campaign advisers, while expressing confidence in the President's prospects, have pointed to a number of outside factors that make this year more challenging in northern battlegrounds.
The governorships of Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin are all now held by what they called "anti-Trump Democrats". Early voting, they concede, is a major "X factor" whose impact is not yet fully understood. And the pandemic remains a top concern for voters, blunting to an extent the economic gains that Mr Trump had hoped to run on.
Mr Biden's Midwestern swing on Friday included stops in Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin, an itinerary that showed both the promise and peril for his campaign.
Iowa dealt Mr Biden a "gut punch" early this year, as he afterwards put it after finishing fourth in the state's caucuses. The state voted twice for Mr Barack Obama. But it swung sharply to the right in 2016, when Mr Trump won by 9 percentage points. Surveys have suggested a tight race in this election.
On a bright autumn day, Mr Biden held a drive-in car rally at the Iowa State Fairgrounds in Des Moines, where supporters decorated their cars with Biden signs and honked to show their support.
One of them was Ms Linda Garlinghouse, 69, who said she was hoping for a big win by Mr Biden. "I'm just hoping for a landslide," she said, so there will not be "any doubt cast on the election".
NYTIMES