Trump Boasts About Crowd’s Size in Florida as Fauci Warns Large Rallies Are ‘Asking for Trouble’

[Live updates of President-Elect Joe Biden.]

His voice hoarse and his attacks familiar, Trump returns to the campaign trail in Florida.

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President Trump spoke for about an hour at the Orlando Sanford International Airport in Sanford, Fla.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump, eager to prove he is healthy and energetic despite his recent hospitalization for Covid-19, returned to the campaign trail on Monday night in Florida, speaking for just over an hour in a state his advisers think he must win in November, but where voters were overwhelmingly repelled by his performance at the first general election debate.

Onstage at a hangar at the Orlando Sanford International Airport, Mr. Trump, whose voice sounded hoarse and strained as he began, claimed he was fully recovered and therefore immune to the coronavirus — a claim for which there is no conclusive scientific backing.

“I feel so powerful,” said Mr. Trump, who did not wear a mask while boarding Air Force One. “I’ll walk in there, I’ll kiss everyone in that audience. I’ll kiss the guys and the beautiful women. Just give you a big fat kiss.”

Mr. Trump, whose response to a pandemic that has killed more than 214,000 Americans remains the biggest threat to his re-election, claimed without any evidence that his Democratic rival, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., would delay the vaccine and “prolong the pandemic.” He made fun of the small and socially distanced campaign events that Mr. Biden has been hosting, and commended his own campaign for the massive crowds it has been turning out at rallies, calling them “the real polls.”

Mr. Trump’s arrival in Florida took place only hours after the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, said the president had tested negative “on consecutive days” using a rapid antigen coronavirus test not intended for that purpose. Experts cautioned that the test’s accuracy has not yet been investigated enough to be sure that the president is virus-free or, as his doctor claimed, “not infectious to others.”

Many supporters in the crowd did not wear masks, including some of those chosen to stand behind the president’s podium, and within the television camera shot.

Onstage, Mr. Trump also made fun of questions about whether he would agree to a peaceful transfer of power if he loses. He claimed, falsely, that President Barack Obama spied on his 2016 campaign and noted, “We’ll take care of it after the election,” adding, “gives you another reason to go out and vote.”

For the most part, however, the president was back to delivering his regular, factually challenged campaign stump speech, in which he brags about killing terrorists and building a wall along the southern border, and accuses the news media of being “frauds.” On Monday night, he boasted about being nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, even though the prize this year went to the U.N. World Food Program, and blamed the media for not giving him enough credit for a nomination when news outlets had covered Mr. Obama being awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009.

“I turned on the fake news, story after story, they talk about your weather in the panhandle,” he said, referring to hurricane coverage.

Supporters and critics of the president were likely to focus as much on how the president looked and sounded at the rally as on anything he said. The question of whether he will be healthy enough to regularly make it through a full Trumpian performance — usually at least 90 minutes — without flagging is one that will hover over him until the election on Nov. 3. On Monday night, he appeared virtually back to himself despite a scratchy sounding voice, clocking in at 65 minutes.

On Saturday at the White House, in his first public appearance since returning from Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, Mr. Trump spoke for only 18 minutes, uncharacteristically cutting an appearance short. His aides had said he would speak for 30 minutes. But top campaign officials said on Monday that they had no concerns about his energy or overall health, only enthusiasm that the candidate was ready to return to the campaign trail.

“This morning, in our morning conversation, he was getting on my case for not having enough rallies,” said Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s senior strategist. Mr. Miller said the president’s schedule would include “two to three events a day, and that will grow as we get closer to Election Day.”

The frenetic pace serves as a reminder that with three weeks left in the race, Mr. Trump is running behind Mr. Biden. His polling numbers with seniors, a crucial constituency that has been disproportionately harmed by the coronavirus, have been flagging.

Fauci cautions Trump against holding large rallies, warning it is ‘asking for trouble.’

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Dr. Anthony S. Fauci during a daily coronavirus briefing at the White House in April.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Hours before President Trump was set to return to the campaign trail in Florida on Monday, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, warned that holding large rallies was “asking for trouble” with cases of the coronavirus surging in many states.

Dr. Fauci, in an interview with CNN, said that Americans needed to be more cautious in the fall and winter months, and warned that rising rates of infections in a number of states suggested Americans should be “doubling down” on precautions rather than casting them aside.

“We know that that is asking for trouble when you do that,” Dr. Fauci said of Mr. Trump’s decision to begin a full schedule of campaign rallies. “We’ve seen that when you have situations of congregate settings where there are a lot of people without masks, the data speak for themselves. It happens. And now is even more so a worse time to do that, because when you look at what’s going on in the United States, it’s really very troublesome.”

He noted that many states were now seeing increases in positive tests. “It’s going in the wrong direction right now,” he said.

He said that people should continue to wear masks and practice social distancing — and avoid large gatherings — to prevent new outbreaks. “That’s just a recipe of a real problem if we don’t get things under control before we get into that seasonal challenge,” he said.

Dr. Fauci’s comments came one day after he objected to a new Trump campaign television ad that portrayed him as praising the president’s response to the pandemic.

Dr. Fauci reiterated on Monday that the ad had taken his past remarks out of context, and called his inclusion in it “very disappointing.” He said he had been speaking more broadly about the collaborative efforts of the federal government and was “not a political person.” Asked by CNN’s Jake Tapper whether the ad should be taken down, something the Trump campaign says it has no intention of doing, Dr. Fauci said, “I think so.”

In an interview with The Times on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he had been unsuccessful so far in having the ad removed.

“I wouldn’t know who to contact in the campaign to tell them to pull it down,” he said. “I spoke to someone who I know well in the White House to figure it out for me and tell me how to get it down. I haven’t heard back from them yet.”

Dr. Fauci said that he did not want to be pulled into the fray of the campaign.

“I never in my five decades ever directly or indirectly supported a political candidate and I’m not going to start now,” he said. “I do not want to be involved in it.”

Dr. Fauci made an even more pointed criticism of the Trump campaign in an interview on Monday with The Daily Beast.

“By doing this against my will they are, in effect, harassing me,” he said, adding that “not in my wildest freakin’ dreams” had he thought about quitting.

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Biden, asked about expanding the Supreme Court, says he is ‘not a fan’ of the idea.

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“The president would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would” add seats to the Supreme Court, Joseph R. Biden Jr. told a Cincinnati television station on Monday.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Joseph R. Biden Jr. on Monday gave his clearest answer in weeks regarding his position on expanding the Supreme Court, saying that he was “not a fan” of the concept but preferred to keep attention on Republican efforts to fill the seat of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg with their own nominee only weeks before Election Day.

“I’m not a fan of court packing,” Mr. Biden told WKRC-TV in Cincinnati as he campaigned there on Monday. “But I don’t want to get off on that whole issue. I want to keep focused. The president would love nothing better than to fight about whether or not I would in fact pack the court or not pack the court.”

Mr. Biden, who served for decades as a U.S. senator from Delaware, is a consummate institutionalist and as recently as last year had expressed firm opposition to the idea of court packing. Some on the left have called to increase the number of justices on the nation’s highest court as a countermeasure if Republicans rush through the confirmation of Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s Supreme Court nominee.

Since Justice Ginsburg’s death last month, Mr. Biden has been highly critical of the Republican approach to the process, but he has also repeatedly dodged questions about whether he would support expanding the court if Republicans rush through the confirmation as Americans are already voting.

“The focus is, why is he doing what he’s doing now?” Mr. Biden said of Mr. Trump. “Why now, with less than 24 days to go in the election?”

Hoping to capitalize on the issue, Republicans have seized on Mr. Biden’s evasiveness in recent days. During the vice-presidential debate last week, Vice President Mike Pence and Senator Kamala Harris, Mr. Biden’s running mate, clashed over whether she and Mr. Biden supported packing the court, with Mr. Pence demanding a “straight answer” and Ms. Harris declining to give one. Mr. Pence also brought up Mr. Biden’s lack of a clear answer on the issue during a campaign event in Florida over the weekend.

Mr. Biden continues to lead in many key battleground state polls.

Minnesota connects two dozen virus cases with campaign events, most of them visits by Trump.

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Sixteen coronavirus cases are tied to a Trump rally in Bemidji, Minn., on Sept. 18, Minnesota health officials said.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Facing a record number of infections in their state, Minnesota health officials have connected two dozen cases of the coronavirus to people who attended presidential campaign events during the past month, mostly airport rallies hosted by President Trump.

State officials said 16 of the cases were tied to a Sept. 18 outdoor rally at an airport in Bemidji, Minn., where Mr. Trump spoke to a sea of supporters crammed together and not wearing masks, according to data released by the state.

Four of those cases were reported by people who had gone to the rally to protest Mr. Trump’s visit, Kris Ehresmann, the state’s infectious disease director, said in a teleconference on Monday. The officials were careful not to conclude that the infected people caught the virus at the events they attended.

Three people who attended a Sept. 30 Trump rally in Duluth, Minn., and three people who attended a Sept. 24 rally featuring Vice President Mike Pence at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport also tested positive for the virus, Ms. Ehresmann said. One person was present at both events.

But the infections were not limited to Republican events: Health officials also reported that one person who attended a Sept. 16 event for former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. in Duluth later contracted the virus. A second case that the state on Monday had linked to another Biden event turned out to be inaccurate, health officials said on Tuesday. They said that they checked with the Biden campaign and that the second event had not happened.

The accounting of cases associated with political events came two days after Minnesota reported 1,537 new infections on Saturday, a record for a single day in the state.

It also came as Mr. Trump returned to the campaign trail in Florida after his own battle with the virus, and amid criticism that the president and many of those who have attended his rallies have ignored health guidelines.

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California’s G.O.P. confirms it set up unofficial drop boxes. State election officials say they’re illegal.

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An official mail-in ballot drop box outside a subway station in Los Angeles. Unofficial ones were placed in several counties.Credit...Mario Tama/Getty Images

California’s Republican Party revealed on Monday that it was responsible for placing unofficial drop boxes for mail-in ballots in Los Angeles, Fresno and Orange counties — sites that could be used to identify and eliminate the ballots of unsuspecting voters.

The disclosure came a day after state election officials opened an investigation into the use of the unofficial boxes, which they said were illegal and should be removed.

A spokesman for the state G.O.P. said Republicans had no plans to remove the more than 50 boxes that have been set up already in the state, and said they represented only half of the 100 boxes that the party bought to use during the election.

The spokesman, Hector Barajas, disputed that the drop boxes violated state election laws and deflected criticism toward Democrats.

“If Democrats are so concerned with ballot harvesting, they are the ones who wrote the legislation, voted for it, and Governor Jerry Brown signed it into law,” Mr. Barajas said. “California Republicans would be happy to do away with ballot harvesting.”

California’s attorney general, Xavier Becerra, a Democrat, ordered Republicans on Monday night to cease and desist in their use of the drop boxes.

“Anyone who tampers with the vote is tampering with free and fair elections,” Mr. Becerra wrote on Twitter. “We will do all that’s necessary under law to protect Californians’ right to vote.”

California’s secretary of state, Alex Padilla, also a Democrat, sent a memo late Sunday urging county elections officials to find and remove unauthorized boxes in order to “guarantee the security and chain of custody of vote-by-mail ballots deposited.”

In his memo, Mr. Padilla reminded local officials that creating an illegal polling site was a felony punishable by up to four years in prison.

“Operating unofficial ballot drop boxes — especially those misrepresented as official drop boxes — is not just misleading to voters, it’s a violation of state law,” Mr. Padilla said in a statement.

“Never hand your ballot over to someone you don’t trust,” he warned voters. “Official county drop boxes are built with specific security protections, and ballots are retrieved only by designated county personnel.”

Mr. Padilla did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the Republicans’ statements on Monday.

As Trump courts their votes, an extraordinary government bailout is funneling aid money to farmers.

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Sonny Perdue, left, the secretary of agriculture, improperly used his office to promote the president’s re-election by promising more aid to farmers, the Office of Special Counsel determined.Credit...Charlie Neibergall/Associated Press

Federal payments to farmers are projected to hit a record $46 billion this year as the White House funnels money to President Trump’s rural base in the South and Midwest ahead of Election Day.

The gush of funds has accelerated in recent weeks as the president looks to help his core supporters who have been hit hard by the double whammy of his combative trade practices and the coronavirus pandemic. According to the American Farm Bureau, debt in the farm sector is projected to increase 4 percent to a record $434 billion this year and farm bankruptcies have continued to rise.

But farmers are not the only constituency benefiting from the president’s largess: He has promised $200 prescription drug cards to millions of seniors, approved $13 billion in aid to Puerto Rico, which could help his prospects in Florida, and directed his Agriculture Department to include letters signed by him in millions of food aid boxes that are being distributed to the poor.

But few recipients have gotten more help than the agriculture sector, which this year is expected to receive the largest government contribution to farm income since its previous record in 2005, according to the University of Missouri’s Food and Agricultural Policy Research Institute. The breadth of the payments means that government support will account for about 40 percent of total farm income this year.

If not for those subsidies, U.S. farm income would be poised to decline in 2020.

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Voters flock to the polls as Georgia opens early voting.

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Hundreds of people lined up early Monday morning in Georgia to vote in the presidential election. Some voters said on Twitter there were 90-minute delays as multiple machines had to be rebooted.CreditCredit...Nicole Craine for The New York Times

Fired-up voters across Georgia descended upon polling sites in record-breaking numbers on Monday — the first day of early, in-person balloting — as state and local officials reported glitches with the state’s new and troubled touch-screen voting system.

In Atlanta and its suburbs, long lines of socially distanced voters began forming before dawn, some waiting for as long as eight hours to vote, after a federal judge rejected an attempt to replace the $107 million system with paper ballots until its problems could be sorted out.

“We thought we were going to get here early,” Norman Robinson III said as he stood in a line snaking for more than a half-mile outside his early voting site at the Gallery at South DeKalb in Decatur, near Atlanta. Still, he said, “it’s an awesome thing.”

“My parents were jailed in college during the 1960s for exercising their rights to vote,” added Mr. Robinson, an education administrator at a school specializing in science, technology and math. “This is in my blood, to make sure I honor and continue their fight for voices to be heard.”

In Gwinnett County, waiting times stretched as long as eight hours, according to a county website. Nabilah Islam, a politician and activist in Gwinnett who visited two polling places for the Democratic Party, accused the county of failing to provide an adequate number of early voting locations.

“It was clear that nobody was really prepared for it,” she said.

A spokesman for Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s Republican secretary of state, said Monday that the state was seeing “record turnout for early voting because of excitement and enthusiasm about the upcoming election.”

More than 125,000 voters had cast ballots by the end of the day, Mr. Raffensperger’s office said.

But the lines were not entirely the result of voter fervor. As lines formed at State Farm Arena in metropolitan Atlanta, problems emerged with electronic equipment there, according to Jessica Corbitt-Dominguez, a spokeswoman for Fulton County, which includes the city.

Aklima Khondoker, the Georgia director of the voting rights group All Voting Is Local, said that electronic poll pads on which voters check in had been creating problems around the state. “We’ve seen over 10 counties where this is happening,” she said.

In a ruling Sunday night, U.S. District Judge Amy Totenberg acknowledged the equipment had problems, but held that it was too late to revamp the voting system.

The state did not have the capacity “to turn on a dime and switch to a full-scale hand-marked paper ballot system,” she wrote, rejecting arguments by the Coalition for Good Governance that potential security holes in the system endangered the election’s integrity.

The White House physician says Trump has tested negative, but experts warn about trusting the results.

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President Trump boarding Air Force One at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Monday for a campaign trip to Florida.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Trump has tested negative “on consecutive days” using a rapid antigen coronavirus test not intended for that purpose, the White House physician, Dr. Sean P. Conley, said in a statement released Monday before the president began a rally in Florida.

The memo said the president tested negative on a rapid test called Abbott BinaxNOW, but experts cautioned that the test’s accuracy has not yet been investigated enough to be sure that the president is virus-free.

“It doesn’t make much sense in my mind that they should be using the BinaxNOW test for this,” said Dr. Michael Mina, an infectious diseases expert at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “But it’s one additional piece of information.”

The BinaxNOW, which costs $5 and functions like a pregnancy test, looks for a protein produced by the coronavirus. It is most effective when the amount of virus in the body is high, but is much less sensitive than the P.C.R., the gold standard laboratory test. The Trump administration has purchased 150 million BinaxNOW tests and plans to ship them to states for use in schools and nursing homes.

In an announcement of the tests’ deployment to states on Sept. 28, the Department of Health and Human Services cautioned that “results from an antigen test may need to be confirmed with a molecular test prior to making treatment decisions; this may be particularly true for negative results if there is a high clinical suspicion that the patient is infected.”

“Infectiousness should be based more on symptom onset,” said Dr. Ranu Dhillon, a physician at Brigham & Women’s Hospital in Boston. The BinaxNOW, he said, “could be giving false negatives.”

According to guidelines released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, people with severe Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, may need to isolate for up to 20 days. But it has been unclear when exactly Mr. Trump’s symptoms began, or how severe they have been. On Monday, he departed for his Florida rally without a mask covering his face.

Doctors said it was somewhat reassuring that Mr. Trump had tested negative more than once, but said that without more details from the more sensitive P.C.R. tests, it was impossible to be sure that he was past the point of infectiousness.

BinaxNOW’s “real power lies in marking someone who is transmissible, not the other way around,” Dr. Mina said. “I think they’re mixing things up a bit.”

In a memo released Saturday night with limited information, Dr. Conley said that Mr. Trump was “no longer considered a transmission risk to others.” That memo did not explicitly categorize the president as “negative” for the coronavirus.

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A Michigan gun store says a visit by Eric Trump was canceled after a former employee was charged in a plot to kidnap the state’s governor.

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Eric Trump canceled an appearance at a Michigan gun shop after an employee there was linked to the plot against Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.Credit...Nell Redmond/Associated Press

A Michigan gun store that had been scheduled to host a campaign stop on Tuesday by President Trump’s son Eric said that the event had been abruptly canceled after one of the shop’s former employees was arrested and charged in a plot to kidnap Gov. Gretchen Whitmer.

The business, Huron Valley Guns in New Hudson, Mich., which is about 37 miles northwest of Detroit, wrote on Facebook that the employee, who was arrested last week, briefly worked at the store’s shooting range earlier this year and “would show up for work in a LOT of tactical gear.”

“We found that a little odd,” the gun store’s Facebook post said. “We weren’t comfortable with him for a few other reasons and fired him after 3 weeks.”

Reached for comment on Monday night, the gun store would not identify the employee but referred to him in its post as a “fringe character.” The shop also wrote that it wouldn’t want to do anything that would undermine Mr. Trump’s campaign in Michigan, a battleground state that he won in 2016.

“The governor would have had a field day against the Trump campaign,” the gun store wrote. “They would accuse the administration of sending his son to a facility where terrorists work and train. This could not be further from the truth, but imagine the left spin.”

Pointing out that the venues for political events changed frequently, Trump campaign officials avoided answering questions on Monday night about Eric Trump’s scuttled appearance at the store. He will instead hold a campaign event at an exposition hall in the Detroit suburb of Novi on Tuesday afternoon, according to a list of events on the campaign’s website.

The cancellation came four days after the F.B.I. announced terrorism, conspiracy and weapons charges against 13 men for their part in a plot to try to overthrow the government in Michigan.

At least six of the people arrested, law enforcement officials said, had hatched a detailed plan to kidnap Ms. Whitmer, a Democrat who drew the president’s ire over coronavirus emergency orders in the state. In April, the president had called on his supporters to “LIBERATE MICHIGAN!” on Twitter.

A spokeswoman for Ms. Whitmer declined to comment on Monday night, citing the continuing law enforcement investigation.

Biden builds on his economic populist message and courts Trump voters in Ohio.

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Biden Pitches to Blue-Collar Workers in Pennsylvania

Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, said that his economic plan would raise taxes on the wealthy to create unionized infrastructure jobs and that he would not ban fracking.

“The fact is the president can only see the world from Park Avenue. I see it from Scranton. I see it from Claymont for real. You all know what I’m talking about. You all see it from Erie. That’s why my program to build back better is focused on working people.” “And I’m not going to raise taxes on anybody making less than 400 grand. But, but, you won’t pay a penny more. But those making more than that, I’m going to ask them to finally begin to pay their fair share. I’m going to ask the big corporations and the wealthy to begin to pay. Ninety-one of the Fortune 500 companies today pay zero tax. You hear me? Zero tax. How many of you pay zero tax?” “So I’m going to raise — the money I’m going to raise, we’re going to allow us to invest in working people and grow the middle class back and make sure everyone comes along this time. My plan is about making the kinds of investments that are going to stimulate economic growth.” “We’re going to fix water pipes — pipelines, replace lead pipes, upgrade treatment plants. We’re going to construct 1.5 million new affordable housing units. We’re going to build a hundred billion dollars rebuilding our schools. We’re going to retrofit — which we started our administration — four million buildings, including advanced heating and cooling systems. There’s going to be such a race to job creation for unions that you’re not going to believe it.” “The fact is that every time the word climate change comes up, Donald Trump thinks hoax. Every time it comes up, I think jobs. Let me be clear: No matter how many lies he tells, I am not, not, not banning fracking, period.”

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Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for president, said that his economic plan would raise taxes on the wealthy to create unionized infrastructure jobs and that he would not ban fracking.CreditCredit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Almost four years after Ohio so fully embraced President Trump that many Democrats wrote off the state for the 2020 election, Joseph R. Biden Jr. headed there on Monday, aiming to energize the Democratic base and engage suburbanites, and also to court white working-class Americans who supported Mr. Trump last time.

In an address brimming with populist fervor, Mr. Biden lashed his opponent as an out-of-touch plutocrat who repeatedly betrayed union workers while playing up his own Irish Catholic, middle-class background and stressing the Obama administration’s work on behalf of the auto industry.

“He turned his back on you,” Mr. Biden told the crowd of his opponent. “I promise you, I will never do that.”

And Mr. Biden escalated his criticism of Mr. Trump’s stewardship of the coronavirus — and of the president’s own diagnosis — accusing him of “reckless personal conduct” since testing positive for the coronavirus that has been “unconscionable.”

“The longer Donald Trump is president, the more reckless he seems to get,” Mr. Biden said.

Mr. Biden’s remarks came as part of a speech in Toledo, delivered at what the campaign called a “drive-in rally” outside the United Auto Workers’ Local 14 union hall.

Later Monday, he headed to Cincinnati, where he sought to both energize voters in the city and to appeal to to those who live in the suburbs, which have historically favored Republicans but appear more competitive this year. Reprising many of the themes he hit in a speech in Gettysburg, Pa., last week, Mr. Biden urged national unity, denounced racial injustice and stressed his continued belief in the possibility of bipartisanship even in a polarized environment.

“Those Republicans who are willing to cooperate get punished by this president,” he said. “I refuse to let that happen. We need to revive the spirit of bipartisanship in this country. I know that sounds bizarre in light of where we are.”

He also warned in stark terms about the possibility of voter intimidation.

“Don’t be intimidated by talk of having some of these Proud Boys stand there with their rifles in lines, where you can open carry, try to intimidate people without saying anything,” he said, referencing concerns that far-right supporters of Mr. Trump could be organizing for Election Day. “You, the American people, decide our future.”

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Senator Gary Peters shares the ‘gut-wrenching’ story of his ex-wife’s lifesaving abortion.

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“It’s a story of gut-wrenching and complicated decisions,” Senator Gary Peters of Michigan said, “but it’s important for folks to understand families face these situations every day.”Credit...Alexander Drago/Reuters

Senator Gary Peters of Michigan, a Democrat facing a competitive race for re-election, on Monday became one of only a handful of members of Congress to share a personal experience with abortion.

In an interview with Elle magazine, Mr. Peters said that in the late 1980s, his wife at the time, Heidi, had an abortion at four months’ gestation because the pregnancy was not viable and her life was in danger.

Her water had broken, Mr. Peters told the magazine, leaving the fetus with no chance of survival. When she did not miscarry naturally, she became ill and was told that without an abortion, she would lose her uterus and be at risk of dying from sepsis. She had to go to a second hospital to get an abortion, Mr. Peters said, because the first hospital had an anti-abortion policy and would not make an exception.

“My story is one that’s tragically shared by so many Americans,” Mr. Peters wrote on Twitter. “It’s a story of gut-wrenching and complicated decisions — but it’s important for folks to understand families face these situations every day.”

His campaign said he was not available for an interview Monday afternoon.

Mr. Peters is one of only two Democratic senators up for re-election who are vulnerable this year, the other one being Senator Doug Jones of Alabama. His Republican challenger, John James, is a vocal opponent of abortion, which has become a bigger issue in this year’s elections since Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death increased the chances of a Supreme Court majority against Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision by the court that established a constitutional right to abortion.

A spokeswoman for Mr. James’s campaign said Monday that he supported exceptions in situations where the woman’s life is in danger.

Kamala Harris rebukes Republicans for rushing Judge Barrett’s confirmation process.

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Senator Kamala Harris participated remotely on the first day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Supreme Court confirmation hearing.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

Just days after facing off against Vice President Mike Pence at the vice-presidential debate, Senator Kamala Harris was again in the spotlight as she delivered her opening remarks on the first day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearings before the Senate Judiciary Committee.

It was one of the most high-profile appearances in the political career of Ms. Harris, a former prosecutor who was first elected to federal office just four years ago, and who ran for the Democratic presidential nomination before being chosen as the party’s vice-presidential nominee.

Appearing remotely to deliver her opening remarks, Ms. Harris largely stuck to the party line, lashing Senate Republicans for rushing through a Supreme Court nomination even as millions of Americans were still suffering from the effects of the coronavirus pandemic.

“This hearing should have been postponed,” Ms. Harris said. “The decision to hold this hearing now is reckless and places facilities workers, janitorial staff and congressional aides and Capitol police at risk. Not to mention that while tens of millions of Americans are struggling to pay their bills, the Senate should be prioritizing coronavirus relief and providing financial support to those families.”

And just as Democrats before her did, she elevated the Affordable Care Act as a crucial issue, warning Americans that the health care law was at stake.

“I do believe this hearing is a clear attempt to jam through a Supreme Court nominee who will take health care away from millions of people during a deadly pandemic that has already killed more than 214,000 Americans,” she said.

In her dual role as a member of the Judiciary Committee and vice-presidential nominee, Ms. Harris has faced pressure from Democrats to carry the mantle of the Democratic ticket while also upholding her reputation as a skilled cross-examiner. On Monday, several Senate Republicans used the hearing to criticize Democrats who are calling to expand the size of the Supreme Court if Judge Barrett is confirmed — a particularly thorny issue for Ms. Harris and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., who have both refused in recent weeks to say whether they support the proposal.

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Independent Midwestern voters who turned to Trump in 2016 now prefer Biden, a poll finds.

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Joseph R. Biden Jr. has run up big gains among independent voters in the Midwest who cast their votes for Donald J. Trump in 2016.Credit...Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

Donald J. Trump’s surprise victory in 2016 centered on the Midwest — particularly the ambivalent voters there who chose him at the last minute as the lesser of two evils.

But many of these voters, often political independents, soured on the president’s leadership early in his term.

And according to a pair of newly released New York Times/Siena College surveys from Michigan and Wisconsin, President Trump’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden Jr., has been consolidating his support among these same voters in the final weeks of the race — putting him in a commanding position and forcing Mr. Trump to make up last-minute ground in the region that carried him to victory four years ago.

Mr. Biden leads the president by 10 points in Wisconsin, twice his margin from a Times/Siena poll there last month, and by eight points in Michigan.

In both states, Mr. Biden leads by close to 20 points among independent voters. He is also well ahead of Mr. Trump among those who said they supported a third-party candidate in 2016.

Partly because he has lost so many people who voted for him out of sheer antipathy to Hillary Clinton, the president’s support now runs slightly stronger among members of the Republican Party than it does among all voters who cast a ballot for him in the last election.

Across recent Times/Siena surveys of Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Minnesota, Iowa and Ohio, Mr. Trump retained the support of only 87 percent of those who voted for him in 2016. Mr. Biden is holding on to considerably more of Mrs. Clinton’s supporters.

Both Wisconsin and Michigan could be on track for very high voter turnout this year, based on a comparison of the polls’ findings with actual requests made to date for mail-in ballots.

In Wisconsin, the number of absentee ballots already requested represents roughly 43 percent of all votes expected to be cast there this year, according to state estimates. But only 24 percent of Wisconsin voters told the pollsters they planned to vote by mail.

If the poll figure turns out to be anywhere near accurate, that would mean an even greater increase in turnout than state officials were already predicting. It also provides potentially good news for Democrats, who make up an outsize share of mail-in voters.

Similarly, in Michigan, the number of mail ballots requested exceeds 50 percent of expected turnout, even though just 38 percent of the state’s voters told Times/Siena interviewers they planned to vote by mail.

In both states, the Times/Siena polls found Republicans more than twice as likely as Democrats to plan on voting in person on Election Day. This all sets up a complex voter-turnout calculus on Election Day, when Republicans will potentially have far more get-out-the-vote work to do than Democrats, a reversal of the typical scenario.

At Amy Coney Barrett’s confirmation hearing, Republicans decry attacks that Democrats didn’t make.

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The first day of Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s Senate confirmation hearing was marked by the expected partisan divides.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Amy Coney Barrett, President Trump’s nominee to replace Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the Supreme Court, began along predictable partisan lines, with Democrats emphasizing abortion and health care and Republicans sticking to their prepared rebuttals even when they did not correspond to what Democrats were saying.

Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, including Senators Ben Sasse of Nebraska and Josh Hawley of Missouri, accused Democrats of attacking Judge Barrett on the basis of her religion, suggesting that they were anti-Catholic and wanted to impose an unconstitutional religious test for Supreme Court nominees. But no Democrat on the committee mentioned religion at all.

Instead, the Democrats focused on how Judge Barrett might rule on cases involving major issues like abortion and the Affordable Care Act. And, as they have done consistently since Justice Ginsburg died last month, they accused Republicans of hypocrisy for holding the hearings at all after blockading President Barack Obama’s election-year nominee in 2016.

Senators Dianne Feinstein of California and Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota argued that confirming Judge Barrett could amount to overturning the Affordable Care Act, whose constitutionality the court will consider in a case scheduled for oral arguments just a week after the election. Others noted the prospect of reversing Roe v. Wade, which anti-abortion and abortion-rights groups alike expect that Judge Barrett would vote to do.

And Senator Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut argued that Judge Barrett should commit to recusing herself from any cases related to the election: the elephant in the room given that Mr. Trump’s efforts to delegitimize mail-in voting have made legal challenges to the results more likely, and because some Republicans have expressly argued that she must be confirmed before the election precisely so that a full nine-member court can rule on such challenges.

The threat of the coronavirus hung over the hearings on Monday, especially given that two members of the Judiciary Committee tested positive this month. Judge Barrett and most senators on the committee who appeared in person wore masks, except during their statements, but the chairman, Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, generally did not. Senator Mike Lee of Utah, one of the members who tested positive, removed his mask when it was his turn to speak.

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Georgia’s first Senate debate was hard to tell apart from a presidential debate.

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President Trump with the Republican senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue of Georgia last month. Mr. Perdue’s debate on Monday against his Democratic opponent, Jon Ossoff, focused more on national than state issues.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

The first debate on Monday between Senator David Perdue, Republican of Georgia, and his Democratic challenger, Jon Ossoff, spoke to the degree to which state races have been nationalized in the face of the coronavirus pandemic, the struggling economy and President Trump’s gravitational pull.

Mr. Perdue used attack lines essentially identical to the ones Mr. Trump has used against Joseph R. Biden Jr., claiming falsely that Mr. Ossoff supported the Green New Deal, open borders and defunding the police. He used the words “radical socialist agenda” at least seven times, prompting Mr. Ossoff to respond at one point, “We can see you’re reading from your notes that your staff has prepared for you.”

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Mr. Ossoff sought to tie Mr. Perdue to the Trump administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.Credit...Bob Andres/Atlanta Journal-Constitution, via Associated Press

For his part, Mr. Ossoff, who narrowly lost a special election in 2017 in Georgia’s Sixth Congressional District, sought to tie Mr. Perdue to the Trump administration’s mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic, noting several times that Mr. Perdue had echoed the president’s false characterization of the virus as no worse than the flu.

When pressed on specific policies, Mr. Perdue promoted the Paycheck Protection Program — which had provided some initial support for small businesses hurt by the coronavirus pandemic but has not been renewed since relief negotiations stalled in Congress — and argued that the best way to prepare for future pandemics was to build up the country’s strategic reserve of medical supplies and to “knock out” regulations to allow vaccines to be developed faster. (Many of the regulations that slow down the development process exist to ensure vaccine safety.)

Mr. Ossoff said he supported a large infrastructure program that would “make Georgia the leading producer of renewable energy” in the Southeast and called for a series of racial justice policies, including a new Voting Rights Act and a national standard for use of force by the police.

Also participating in the debate was Shane Hazel, a Libertarian, who said the government should have imposed no restrictions at all on movement or commerce in response to the coronavirus and suggested that Congress had almost no authority beyond “war, peace, negotiation and foreign commerce.”

In Trump country, Democrats aren’t as bashful about backing Biden.

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Vicki Simon, a Biden supporter in Scottdale, Pa.Credit...Nate Smallwood for The New York Times

When Vicki Simon passes the rare fellow Biden supporter in her small town in western Pennsylvania, she quietly flashes a covert hand signal.

“There’s a secret society of us,” said Ms. Simon, 54, of Scottdale, Pa. “We give each other the peace sign.”

Standing near Ms. Simon as they waited to catch a glimpse of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in nearby Latrobe recently, Mike Sherback, 55, said that he, too, was not typically outspoken about his political views. The two cited the vocal Trump supporters in their conservative communities who sometimes shout down dissenters.

“The Biden supporters don’t like to come out as Trump supporters do,” Mr. Sherback said. “Usually I wouldn’t do this, either. But it’s the biggest election in my lifetime. He needs the support because the Trump people, Trump supporters, show their support whether through radical ways or not.”

As a divisive presidential campaign enters the final stretch, there is evidence that some Democrats deep in Trump country — the kind of voters who avoided political discussions with their neighbors, tried to ignore Facebook debates and in some cases, sat out the last election — suddenly aren’t feeling so shy.

It’s a surge in enthusiasm that reflects the urgency of the election for Democrats desperate to oust President Trump, one that could have significant implications for turnout in closely fought battleground states that the president won in 2016.

The task for Mr. Biden is to cut into the overwhelming margins that Mr. Trump posted in 2016 in working-class regions while expanding on the advantage that Hillary Clinton had in the cities and suburban areas.

“Even if we just cut the margin,” Mr. Biden said on his recent train tour through eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, “it makes a gigantic difference.”

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As a contentious census count wraps up, questions remain over accuracy and objectivity.

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For decades, the Census Bureau has performed the crucial duty of using its new population totals to calculate the decennial allocation of seats in the House of Representatives.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

The Census Bureau, long the gold standard for nonpartisan probity and statistical rigor in the federal government, is rushing toward the close of the most imperiled and politicized population count in memory with two huge issues in dispute.

The first is the overall accuracy of a hurried count, buffeted by the coronavirus on the one hand and partisan interventions by the White House on the other. The second is whether the use of that count will result in figures for congressional reapportionment shaped by political considerations instead of an objective count of all the nation’s residents as the Constitution requires.

The second is who calculates the allocation of seats in the House of Representatives using the census’s fresh population totals. For decades, the Census Bureau has overseen reapportionment. The process has been walled off from partisan influence, its methodology set by law and its results available for anyone to double-check.

But this time, court documents indicate that, as one Justice Department legal filing stated, the bureau “will provide the President with information” for the calculations.

That has further fueled fears that partisan politics will taint a reapportionment process that the White House already has vowed to recast by removing unauthorized immigrants from state-by-state population totals. Analysts say that probably would increase Republican ranks both in the House and in state legislatures.

Neither the Census Bureau nor the Commerce Department, its overseer, responded to questions about the bureau’s role in the next reapportionment.

“The only interpretation I can give you is that the Census Bureau itself will not control the allocation of population numbers for apportionment,” Kenneth Prewitt, a Columbia University professor who ran the bureau during the 2000 census, said. “The Census Bureau is simply not in charge of what it has been in charge of.”

High school students are stepping up to fill poll worker shortages.

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Melissa Thompson, 19, and Kyle Thompson, 20, preparing ballots to be sent to voters in West Bloomfield Township, Mich. Credit...Sylvia Jarrus for The New York Times

With many traditional volunteers — especially older people who have long been the main pool of poll workers — reluctant to spend hours in direct contact with large groups, thousands of high school students and other young people are stepping forward.

“I’m sure from whatever side of the political spectrum someone comes from, they can agree that currently in our country and in our world, there are a lot of problems that need solving,” said Jacob, 17, who plans to work at a polling place in Milwaukee on Election Day. “For me, that’s being a poll worker.”

The pandemic has only accelerated the impending need to replace those who have long worked the polls, 58 percent of whom in 2018 were 61 or older, a group for whom the virus is a high risk. In an effort to prevent long lines at polling locations across the country, some jurisdictions have offered hazard pay to compensate poll workers. And even before the pandemic, 70 percent of jurisdictions reported in 2018 that they faced at least some difficulties recruiting the necessary number of poll workers.

Many states and counties allow 16- or 17-year-old high school students to help others cast their ballots even if they cannot do so themselves. Some have additional requirements, such as a minimum grade point average, to qualify. Tired of simply posting on social media, young people have volunteered in droves after many watched the chaotic primary election season that shed light on the demand for new poll workers.

Ben Hovland, the chairman of the Election Assistance Commission, the federal agency that provides support to state and local election authorities, called the new generation one of the potential “silver linings” of an election season filled with new challenges. The critical need caused by the pandemic prompted an outpouring of volunteers, many of whom would have never known otherwise about the impending poll worker crisis, he said.

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Biden’s most-aired ad last week promises a president who listens.

As early voting begins, former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s most-aired television ad last week was a grab-bag of his 2021 agenda that also featured his willingness to listen and consult with “the nation’s top health experts” on the coronavirus, drawing an unstated contrast with President Trump.

The Message

The ad is a bit of a mish-mash. With seemingly disparate elements of the Biden agenda strung together over 60 seconds, the ad amounts to a list of some of the more politically persuasive messages for Democrats in general — cutting taxes for the middle class, creating jobs, managing the pandemic — and highlights Mr. Biden’s willingness to listen to all sides.

The ad begins with the coronavirus, touting how Mr. Biden followed the advice of experts, before pivoting to his role in listening to doctors and patients when crafting a health care plan, making sure to highlight the key Democratic point that the party will protect coverage of those with pre-existing conditions.

The ad then pivots to the economy, before touting Mr. Biden’s promise to cut taxes for the middle class while raising them for the wealthy and to create “18 million jobs in his first term.”

“For Joe, it’s never been about ego,” the narrator says.

Fact Check

Mr. Biden has listened closely to experts in crafting his own response to the coronavirus, sharply limiting his travel and working to ensure proper social distancing at his events when on the trail, in contrast to Mr. Trump, who has mostly disregarded recommendations from health experts.

Mr. Biden’s ad pledges that his economic plans would create 18 million jobs in his first term, but job creation is mostly done in the private sector, and such job gains are notoriously hard to achieve. The ad also vaguely mentions “raising wages by as much as $15,000 a year” without specifying for whom or why that number is featured.

Where It’s Running

Just about everywhere that is a 2020 battleground. The ad had nearly $5 million in airings in the last week, with some of the heaviest rotation in Philadelphia, Phoenix and Detroit.

The Takeaway

The ad is a positive spot about Mr. Biden that casts him as a Democrat who cares about the economy and who listens to the experts on the pandemic.

Anti-Trump G.O.P. groups occupy a crowded, competitive space.

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President Trump’s opponents within the Republican Party are eager to be listed as having been on the right side of history.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

The two biggest groups on the anti-Trump Republican landscape, the Lincoln Project and Republican Voters Against Trump, have become multimillion-dollar operations that conduct their own sophisticated data research and polling.

Then there’s the Bravery Project, led by Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois; Stand Up Republic, which recently introduced a spinoff, Christians Against Trumpism & Political Extremism; the Republican Political Alliance for Integrity and Reform, known as Repair and led by two former top Trump administration officials; and 43 Alumni for Joe Biden, made up of members of President George W. Bush’s administration.

And don’t forget about the short-lived Right Side PAC, founded by Anthony Scaramucci, the former White House communications director, and Matthew Borges, a former chairman of the Ohio Republican Party. The group formed in June with the mission of turning out Republican voters for Mr. Biden in battleground states, but shut down after Mr. Borges was arrested on federal corruption charges. Mr. Scaramucci has since given the money to the Lincoln Project and teamed up with Repair.

The crowded, competitive arena of party-less anti-Trump Republicans is, in some ways, a product of the fact that not having a party means not having any clear leader. Groups with similar missions engage in little coordination or sharing of resources.

The groups’ leaders say this is all fine, and organic. Mr. Schott’s competitors in the conservative anti-Trump space say there is little downside to another player spending $1 million on advertising criticizing the president.

But what is less clear is whether more coordination among anti-Trump Republicans — who harbor deep worries about what would happen to the country if Mr. Trump were re-elected, and are eager to be seen as having been on the right side of history — would better serve the collective project to unseat the president.

“The Never Trump movement is having a moment,” said Lucy Caldwell, a Republican strategist who advised Mr. Walsh’s failed primary challenge to Mr. Trump this year. “But on the whole, the last four years have been a lot of throwing spaghetti against the wall and seeing what sticks, and a lot of head chefs in the kitchen.”

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Why many Latino evangelicals back Trump, despite his anti-immigration policies.

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The evangelical congregation that Pastor Jose Rivera leads in Phoenix is divided on President Trump.Credit...Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times

At the Church of God of Prophecy in Phoenix, hundreds come each Sunday for two hours of worship in Spanish. They share passages from the Bible, sing and embrace each other tightly. The evangelical congregation, led for nearly 25 years by Pastor Jose Rivera, is nearly all Latino, the vast majority with roots in Mexico.

They are not unlike the people President Trump tried to demonize from the outset of his first campaign, or all that different from those he is trying to keep out with his border wall and hard-line immigration policies.

But they do not agree on Mr. Trump — some see him as a savior, others as a predator. By Mr. Rivera’s estimate, somewhere between a quarter and a third of his congregants support Mr. Trump, a rate that is echoed in national polls.

When Pastor Rivera looks at his congregation, he sees a microcosm of the Latino vote in the United States: how complex it is, and how each party’s attempt to solidify crucial support can fall short. There are not clear ideological lines here between liberals and conservatives.

Conversations with dozens of members of Rivera’s congregation and with other Hispanic evangelicals around the country over the course of the year make clear that religious identity is often a more fundamental part of their political affiliation than ethnic identity.

“I believe that he’s just doing the courageous things based on Scripture, and making our country become what it should become and bring us all our blessings,” said Carlos Ruiz Esparza, 52, a steadfast supporter of the president who regularly worships with Mr. Rivera.

Latinos are projected to be the largest minority to vote in the presidential election this year, with 32 million eligible voters who could play a decisive role in who wins the White House. And while Hispanic evangelicals make up a small slice of the electorate, they are key to Mr. Trump’s consistent support from roughly one-third of Hispanic voters, particularly in battleground states like Florida and Arizona.

Mr. Rivera, who has been a bishop for the last three decades, said, “They try to present him as the messiah, but if he is the messiah, he is not doing what we are supposed to do.”

Eric Trump conceded that his father had ‘lost a fortune,’ but dismissed questions about influence-peddling.

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Eric Trump spoke at a rally for his father in Monroe, N.C., last Thursday.Credit...Nell Redmond/Associated Press

President Trump’s son Eric on Sunday angrily dismissed a New York Times investigation showing that more than 200 companies, special-interest groups and foreign governments obtained favors from the Trump administration while patronizing Mr. Trump’s properties, earning the president millions of dollars.

Appearing on the ABC News program “This Week,” Eric Trump deflected when asked to comment on the investigation. He denounced the news media, listed what he said were accomplishments of his father’s administration, insinuated financial impropriety by Joseph R. Biden Jr. and said his father had “lost a fortune” as a result of being president.

But he did not rebut any of The Times’s specific findings or give a clear answer to any of the questions asked by the host, Jon Karl.

“The last thing I can tell you Donald Trump needs in the world is this job,” the younger Mr. Trump said. “He wakes up in the morning, and he has to fight you and he has to fight the entire media and he has to fight the Democrats, and he gets punched in the head every single day. And he wakes up and he fights for this country, and he fights against the lunacy of the radical left.”

In contrast to the president’s contention that he was a Washington outsider who would “drain the swamp” when he took office, The Times investigation revealed that Mr. Trump not only did not disentangle himself from his business empire, but fostered a pay-to-play culture during his presidency.

Mr. Trump turned his own resorts into the Beltway’s new back rooms, with companies and other special-interest groups spending millions booking conferences and rooms at his hotel in Washington and other properties, and on membership fees at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida. They have been able to parlay their access to the president into federal funding, contracts, regulatory changes and ambassadorships.

When Mr. Karl suggested to Eric Trump that the Times investigation showed “at the very least a huge appearance of a conflict of interest,” the younger Trump responded that tens of millions of people stayed at the family’s properties every year. The president placed his two adult sons at the helm of the Trump Organization when he took office in 2017, but The Times reported that he still kept watch on properties run by the company.

The Times’s investigation found that President Trump’s finances had been in steep decline before he entered the White House.

The reporting was part of an ongoing examination of Mr. Trump’s finances by The Times, which revealed that he had used much of his reality television fortune to buy and prop up a collection of money-losing golf courses that required regular infusions of cash.

The Times found that he had personally guaranteed more than $300 million in loans coming due within four years.

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The financial record of Tommy Tuberville, the Alabama Republican Senate hopeful, raises questions about his judgment.

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A review by The New York Times found that Tommy Tuberville, who is leading Senator Doug Jones in the polls in Alabama, has been involved with at least three people who were later convicted of financial fraud.Credit...Anna Moneymaker for The New York Times

Tommy Tuberville, the Republican candidate for Senate in Alabama, is running in large measure on his experience in college football’s Southeastern Conference, known as the S.E.C., where he coached Auburn University.

But he has had experience with another S.E.C., the Securities and Exchange Commission, and other financial regulators.

A review by The New York Times found that Mr. Tuberville, who leads Senator Doug Jones, a Democrat, in the polls, has a history of involvement with at least three people who were later convicted of financial fraud in what were described as Ponzi schemes. Mr. Tuberville was largely seen as a victim and never charged with a crime.

In two episodes, Mr. Tuberville lost millions of dollars. A third was more minor, when Mr. Tuberville and his wife, Suzanne, bought a home through a company created by a lawyer who was later convicted of running a real estate-related Ponzi scheme.

The Times review included a small charitable foundation created by Mr. Tuberville, finding that its tax records indicated that less than a third of its proceeds went to the veterans’ causes it was set up to advance. The foundation also had bookkeeping issues.

The review raised questions about Mr. Tuberville’s judgment and financial acumen. While he has said on the campaign trail that he hoped to serve on the “banking finance” committee — the Senate has separate, and prestigious, banking and finance committees — he has at times undercut his own qualifications. Regarding an ill-fated hedge fund venture, he once told a reporter, “I’m not smart enough to understand all the numbers.”

In a statement, Mr. Tuberville’s campaign largely deflected financial questions. “Doug Jones, Chuck Schumer, and other liberal, Swamp Democrats are spreading lies in an attempt to smear Coach Tuberville’s career, accomplishments, and charitable service,” the statement said, adding, “Coach is focused solely upon serving his fellow Alabamians and faithfully representing their conservative values, beliefs, and desires.”

In one fraudulent scheme, Mr. Tuberville was an investor and a 50/50 owner of a financial firm, TS Capital, that was shut down by state and federal regulators. A 2012 complaint from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission said that Mr. Tuberville’s partner, John David Stroud, racked up trading losses of nearly $1.2 million and misappropriated nearly $2.3 million for “car payments, travel expenses, entertainment and retail purchases.” As one of Mr. Stroud’s lieutenants put it, the firm had “the optics of a Ponzi scheme.”

A Trump road rally unfolds in Michigan.

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A group decorated their vehicles in support of President Trump near Bay City, Mich., on Sunday.Credit...Allison Farrand for The New York Times

With just over three weeks left until Election Day, hundreds of supporters of President Trump took to Michigan’s highways on Sunday afternoon for a loud and visible display of devotion to their candidate.

It was similar to the Trump boat parades that took over waterways this summer, only on wheels. Festooning their cars with Trump banners and American flags, cardboard cutouts of the president and hand-painted slogans, hundreds of people gathered at rest stops along I-75 and U.S.-31, the main freeways that run north and south along the eastern and western sides of the state. At noon, with horns honking, all headed north, driving for an hour or more as they passed people heading home from fall foliage tours.

“The American people have two choices: Either vote socialism, or you vote for capitalism,” said Vern Mueller, 77, of Reese, who worked in the agriculture industry and met up with more than 60 cars at a Bay County rest stop. “Trump is a capitalist. That’s the way America should be. That’s how it was founded.”

The Trump campaign has reveled in public displays of support from boat parades and road rallies in Michigan and other states since the coronavirus took hold of the country in March. The president regularly tweets glowingly about the flotillas, and his son Donald Trump Jr. even invited boaters to join him in a parade off the Hamptons on Long Island in August.

It’s a way for the president’s fans to rally for re-election without having to worry about social distancing.

“We’re all ready to get out and bust out, and we can do whatever we want in our cars, right?” said Debra Ell, 64, of Frankenmuth, an organizer of the rally who also helped sign people up to work the polls on Election Day.

Not everyone was a fan, Krystie Linton, 44, a special-education teacher from Ann Arbor who supports Joseph R. Biden Jr., looked on with a mix of horror and curiosity at a Trump group at a rest stop who had arrived in cars and trucks covered in pro-Trump symbols and set up tables with Trump merchandise.

“I just don’t get it,” Ms. Linton said on her way home from a fall weekend up north. “Trump has brought out the worst in America. It’s a scary place for our country to be.”

The rally, called “The Cannonball Run,” also served as an opportunity to recruit Republican poll workers to help count absentee ballots and watch polling places in Flint, a predominantly Black city and Democratic stronghold.

“We thought about where we can have the biggest impact,” Ms. Ell said. “You have to have an equal number of Republicans and Democrats, and we think the city of Flint needs the help most.”

Both Republicans and Democrats have recruited workers to watch polling places and the sites where absentee votes are counted. Under state law, paid workers at the polls must be evenly split between Republicans and Democrats. But there have been complaints over the years from elections officials in urban areas, who have said that volunteers at the polls have tried to intimidate voters as they wait in line to vote.

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