The Texas Supreme Court denied an effort by Republicans to throw out more than 120,000 votes that had already been cast at drive-through locations in Harris County, leaving Republicans’ only remaining option at the federal level.
The ruling from the court came without comment.
The effort to get rid of the votes from largely Democratic Harris County now hinges on a nearly identical effort at the federal level, where a judge has called an election-eve hearing for Monday.
The lawsuit contends that the 10 drive-through voting sites in Houston, the nation’s fourth-largest city, are operating illegally and are arranged in locations that favor Democrats.
The system was put in place for the first time this year by Chris Hollins, the Harris County clerk, with unanimous approval by county commissioners, after being tested in a pilot program over the summer.
More than 127,000 voters have cast ballots at the sites and the number could grow to more than 135,000 through Election Day on Tuesday, said Susan Hays, a lawyer for Harris County. She said county officials planned to vigorously challenge the suit, which she described as an act of “voter suppression.”
“It’s nuts,” she said. “Votes should count.”
Democrats were hopeful on Sunday that the decision from the Texas Supreme Court, which leans conservative, would bode well for their battle at the federal level.
The case will be heard Monday morning by Judge Andrew S. Hanen of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas who was appointed by President George W. Bush.
In a motion on Friday asking to intervene in the case, Democrats said it threatened to “throw Texas’ election into chaos by invalidating the votes of more than 100,000 eligible Texas voters who cast their ballots” at the drive-through sites. The motion was filed by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and the campaign of M.J. Hegar, who is running for the U.S. Senate.
The plaintiffs, who include State Representative Steve Toth and the conservative activist Steve Hotze, argue that drive-through voting “is a violation of state and federal law and must be stopped.”
In a telephone interview on Saturday, Mr. Toth said that only the legislature had the authority to implement a drive-though voting system. He also said the arrangement of the sites was tilted toward Democratic voters, noting that Mr. Hollins is vice chairman of finance for the Texas Democratic Party.
“If Hollins is really concerned that everybody is accurately represented, why is it that nine of the 10 are set up in predominantly Democratic areas?” said Mr. Toth, who represents part of neighboring Montgomery County.
He denied that the lawsuit was aimed at blunting Democratic momentum amid record rates of early voting in Houston and other strongly Democratic areas in the last days before the election.
“We’re not the ones who are disenfranchising anybody,” he said. “This is Hollins who did this.”
In a statement on Twitter on Saturday, Mr. Hollins said drive-through voting “is a safe, secure and convenient way to vote. Texas Election Code allows it, the Secretary of State approved it, and 127,000 voters from all walks of life have used it.”
He said his office was “committed to counting every vote cast by registered voters in this election,” and that voters would be notified if court proceedings required them to take any additional steps.
Caravans of President Trump’s supporters blockaded the Mario M. Cuomo Bridge and the Garden State Parkway on Sunday, snarling traffic on two of the busiest highways in the New York metropolitan area just two days before Election Day.
Videos taken by motorists showed the president’s backers parked in the middle of the westbound lanes of the bridge, which carries Interstate 287 across the Hudson River and is named for the father of the current governor, Andrew M. Cuomo.
A number of them exited their vehicles in the rain and waved Trump banners and American flags as motorists honked their horns.
The episode happened around midafternoon, with the caravan lining up on the interstate’s shoulder in Tarrytown before driving onto the span, which connects Rockland and Westchester counties.
State Senator David Carlucci, a Democrat who represents Rockland County, called the blockade on the bridge “aggressive, dangerous, and reckless” with individuals “causing danger to themselves and others.”
“The New York State Police should be working to identify these individuals and charging them,” Mr. Carlucci said. “We all have the right to show support for a presidential candidate, but we do not have the right to endanger others and break the law.”
In New Jersey, a caravan of Trump supporters snarled traffic on the northbound lanes of the Garden State Parkway near the Cheesequake Service Area in South Amboy, according to videos and local media reports.
New York State Police and New Jersey State Police did not immediately respond to requests for comment, and it was not immediately clear if there were any arrests.
Jason Miller, the Trump campaign’s chief strategist, said in response to the blockades that he was more concerned with “downtown Washington businesses having to board up their windows in anticipation of lawless, violent Biden supporters rioting and looting on Tuesday night.”
In the final days of the election, Mr. Trump’s backers have flocked to major roadways to show their fealty to the president, sometimes with aggressive tactics. In Texas, multiple vehicles bearing Trump flags and signs surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus heading from San Antonio to Austin on Friday, forcing the Biden campaign officials to scrap two events, according to reports by Democratic officials.
“Folks, this is not who we are,” Mr. Biden said during a campaign stop in Philadelphia on Sunday. He said the Trump supporters “tried to run it off the road,” referring to his own campaign bus.
“We are so much better than this,” he said. “It’s not who we are. And we gotta change it.”
PHILADELPHIA — Joseph R. Biden Jr. began a major push in Pennsylvania on Sunday with two events in Philadelphia, in a final effort to shore up his strength in a state that could determine the outcome of the election.
“My message is simple: Pennsylvania is critical in this election,” Mr. Biden said at a “Souls to the Polls” event at Sharon Baptist Church on Sunday afternoon and again at a drive-in rally that evening.
“Every single vote matters,” he added, noting that President Trump had only won the state in 2016 by roughly 44,000 votes. “The power to change this country is literally in your hands.”
During his drive-in rally, Mr. Biden attacked Mr. Trump along familiar lines, criticizing his botched response to the coronavirus pandemic, his threat to overturn the Affordable Care Act, his denial of climate change and his standing in the world.
“He’s Putin’s puppy, that’s who he is,” he said. “Donald Trump’s not strong, he’s weak. He commands virtually no respect on the international stage.”
And in an especially biting broadside that drew honks and applause from the crowd, he said the way to combat the pandemic was to oust Mr. Trump from office. “The truth is, to beat the virus, we’ve first got to beat Donald Trump. He’s the virus,” he said.
“We need to get every soul in Philadelphia to the polls,” he said, urging voters to get their absentee ballots to a drop box “as soon as you can” if they still had one or to vote in person on Election Day. Mr. Biden will also hold a drive-in rally in Philadelphia on Sunday evening.
Shortly before the “Souls to the Polls” event, the Biden campaign announced that it was launching a full-court press across five media markets in Pennsylvania in the final hours of the presidential election. .
Mr. Biden and his wife, Dr. Jill Biden, and Senator Kamala Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, will fan out across the state on Monday, with Mr. Biden heading west while Ms. Harris concentrates her efforts in the eastern part of the state. Mr. Biden and Dr. Biden will conclude the day with a drive-in rally with Lady Gaga in Pittsburgh; Ms. Harris and Mr. Emhoff will hold a drive-in rally with John Legend in Philadelphia on Monday night.
Mr. Biden’s campaign said that the four will be seeking to engage the range of constituencies that comprise the Biden coalition, including Black voters living in big cities, younger voters and white moderates in the suburbs, while seeking to cut into Mr. Trump’s base of white working-class voters.
“This campaign isn’t just about turning out the base or growing support with persuadable voters — it’s always been about both, and then some,” the campaign said in a statement.
RAY, Mich. — Business has picked up at Irwin Patterson’s makeshift roadside Trump store with the election drawing closer, his Trump-branded hoodies, lawn signs and flags emblazoned with “Blue Lives Matter” selling at a good clip. As of noon on Sunday, he guessed he’d seen about 100 customers.
All of this, Mr. Patterson said, pointed to a “landslide” for President Trump on Tuesday, even if the polls are saying something quite different.
“In Michigan here, just our little part of Michigan, the support that we see here is just insane,” he said, as windblown snow pelted his customers. “I mean, for the last month and a half, it’s just been off the hook.”
He was certainly not embellishing about his corner of Macomb County in the southern part of the region known as Michigan’s “thumb,” where every other house and business seemed to be displaying a show of support for Mr. Trump. Whether that support can help the president overcome renewed enthusiasm for Democrats and former Vice President Joseph R. Biden in other, larger communities nearby is another issue entirely.
One customer, Lisa Bradley, a figure skating instructor from nearby Shelby Township, said she was still surprised at how many neighbors reveal themselves as Trump supporters when asked. “I find that when they say ‘the silent majority,’ I totally believe that,” Ms. Bradley said.
Ms. Bradley and others who flocked to Mr. Patterson’s store on Sunday morning had hoped to share something of a communal experience at a rally Mr. Trump was holding about a mile away. But they were forced instead to settle for presidential merchandise rather than laying eyes on the president himself because snarled traffic and road closures kept them from reaching the venue.
“It’s like a bonding,” she said. “It’s kind of cool to have that, you know, that’s why I wanted to go to his rally so bad. It’s like, isn’t it nice to feel like you’d be excited again to be American?”
She and the other customers turned a trampled lawn into the site of an impromptu Trump rally of their own after spotting the flapping Trump flags and racks of Trump gear from the road. Ms. Bradley also was unequivocal in her confidence that Mr. Trump would win re-election. “There’s a lot of people,” she said, who have mostly kept quiet about their vote “because we don’t want to jeopardize our jobs.”
But Macomb County, whose independent-minded, white working class voters helped define the term Reagan Democrat, voted for President Barack Obama twice before swinging hard back into the Republican column in 2016. Mr. Trump won it with 54 percent of the vote.
Then, in a sign of renewed strength for the Democrats, Gov. Gretchen Whitmer, won the county in 2018. But few seemed to be willing to accept that Mr. Trump could lose Michigan or the presidential election. They said they just aren’t seeing the same excitement about Mr. Biden.
And they suspect that fraud will be to blame if somehow the president loses. Alex Kuhn, an information technology analyst who drove in from neighboring Oakland County, cited reports he had seen in conservative media outlets about ballots being thrown in a river and “waste bins full of Trump votes.”
“There’s so much with mail-in fraud happening right now,” he said. “The best possible thing for anyone to do is just to vote in person, with a mask on.”
Mr. Patterson, who estimated that about 80 percent of his neighbors in Macomb were supporting Mr. Trump, said he would also be suspicious of a Biden victory.
“I’ll think that they tampered,” he said. “I honestly will.”
Joseph R. Biden Jr. released a list of 817 campaign bundlers on Saturday night — his top fund-raisers who gathered at least $100,000 for his presidential campaign and for joint party operations, in addition to their own giving — revealing a swell of support from major financiers that has helped him surpass President Trump’s fund-raising.
The list included big names in Hollywood (Jeffrey Katzenberg, the film producer), influential figures in the legal world (Brad Karp, the chairman of the Paul Weiss firm), Wall Street leaders (Hamilton E. James of Blackstone) and associates of Mr. Biden (Mark Angelson, the vice chair of the Biden Foundation before it suspended operation).
The biggest two states for bundlers, by far, were California, which had 195, and New York, which had 112. The Washington area was also heavily represented, with 83 bundlers in the District of Columbia, 38 in Maryland and 32 in Virginia.
Mr. Biden released his list on Saturday evening, after more than 90 million Americans had cast their ballots. Mr. Trump has never released a list of bundlers, which is not legally required but which every Democratic presidential candidate dating back to 2004 has done.
The Biden campaign, which has collected checks worth more than $700,000 in its joint committee with the Democratic National Committee and state parties, did not include donors who made $100,000-plus contributions themselves, but only those who raised at least that much from others.
As of the end of September, $100,000-plus donors had contributed nearly $200 million to Mr. Biden and his joint operations with the Democratic Party.
Saturday’s disclosure was Mr. Biden’s first in the general election. The last time Mr. Biden released a list of his bundlers was in December 2019, when he announced 235 people who had collected at least $25,000 for his campaign.
Mr. Biden’s campaign also tracks higher levels of bundlers. The $100,000 threshold is the second-lowest to qualify to be on the campaign’s national finance committee. The top level, a “Biden Victory Partner” is reserved for donors who raise at least $2.5 million, followed by “Delaware League” ($1 million, “Philly Founder” ($500,000), “Scranton Circle” ($250,000), “Unifier” ($100,000) and “Protector” ($50,000).
For weeks, President Trump and his allies have been laying groundwork to challenge the results of the election if he loses. Now, they have settled on a closing argument with no basis in history or fact: that ballots should not be counted past election night.
“We should know the result of the election on Nov. 3, the evening of Nov. 3,” Mr. Trump said on Sunday, during a wind-raked rally in Dubuque, Iowa, in which he repeated a flurry of falsehoods. “That’s the way it’s been, and that’s the way it should be.”
That is not true, it is not possible, and it never has been so. No state ever reports final results on election night, and no state is legally expected to.
Earlier on Sunday, Jason Miller, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, made a remarkably blunt version of the same argument.
“If you speak with many smart Democrats, they believe that President Trump will be ahead on election night, probably getting 280 electoral, somewhere in that range,” Mr. Miller said on ABC. “And then they’re going to try to steal it back after the election.”
Mr. Trump’s statement is part of an end-of-campaign effort to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, that includes encouraging his supporters to engage in voter intimidation.
Democrats — and many nonpartisan observers — believe that Mr. Trump will appear to be ahead on election night in swing states that report in-person votes before mail-in votes, because Democrats are disproportionately voting by mail.
Comments like Mr. Miller’s insinuate that fully counting mail-in votes will constitute an attempt to “steal” the election. But if states were to stop counting after Nov. 3, it would be an extraordinary subversion of the electoral process and would disenfranchise millions of voters who cast valid, on-time ballots.
In Pennsylvania, election officials are expecting 10 times as many mail-in votes as in 2016, Kathy Boockvar, the head of the Pennsylvania State Department, said on NBC on Sunday. That makes a longer count inevitable.
“But having said that, I want to be clear that elections have never been called on election night,” Ms. Boockvar said. “This is a process, and we want to make sure that every single vote of every valid voter is securely and accurately counted.”
When asked for comment, Thea McDonald, a spokeswoman for Mr. Trump’s campaign, pointed to states that intend to count ballots received after Election Day if the postmark is not clear and said this was “exactly the kind of late ballot counting President Trump has been fighting to prevent.”
But Mr. Trump has explicitly criticized the counting and tabulating of votes past Election Day, something that will happen no matter when the ballot receipt deadline is. Ms. McDonald declined to explain or clarify those statements on the record.
Asked about Mr. Trump’s comments during a stop in Philadelphia, Joseph R. Biden Jr. replied, “My response is, the president is not going to steal this election”
BENSALEM, Pa. — Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign is making Pennsylvania a top priority for volunteer efforts in the final full weekend of the election, directing supporters from out of state to flood into the critical battleground — including for the door-to-door canvassing that for months the campaign had avoided.
The Biden campaign said that volunteers had knocked on more than 350,000 doors on Saturday and made 2 million calls and sent 1.5 million text messages to voters in the state.
Polls have shown Pennsylvania is the closest of the three Rust Belt states that President Trump flipped four years ago. And fewer early ballots have been cast in Pennsylvania, compared to other swing states, meaning far more votes are still up for grabs.
According to the U.S. Elections Project, there were still nearly 400,000 absentee ballots that had been requested by Democrats but remained unreturned as of Sunday.
A Biden campaign adviser said the state was a particular late focus — Mr. Biden himself was making multiple stops in the state on Sunday and both he and Senator Kamala Harris planned to visit the state on Monday — because such a large share of the electorate here is expected to vote on Election Day.
The Trump campaign has touted its ground operations and door-to-door canvassing as providing a critical edge this fall.
The Biden campaign had avoided door-to-door canvassing in Pennsylvania, or elsewhere around the country, for most of the year, seeking to slow the spread of the coronavirus . This weekend, as canvassers grabbed materials at a kickoff site in Bucks County, a suburban area outside Philadelphia that narrowly went for Hillary Clinton four years ago, they were subject to a temperature check by volunteers wearing ponchos in the rain.
Across the state, the Biden campaign had more than 50 such staging locations for canvassers, including 10 in Philadelphia and 15 in the four suburban counties that surround the city.
Among the surrogates who came to the state on Sunday to get out the pro-Biden vote was Andrew Yang, a former 2020 Democratic presidential candidate, who was making three stops around the Philadelphia area.
“I would have gone anywhere in the continental U.S.,” Mr. Yang said, but for the Biden campaign “Pennsylvania very quickly was at the top of their priority list.”
Among his stops was in the Koreatown neighborhood of Cheltenham to rally support for Mr. Biden among Asian-Americans, who are about 4 percent of the electorate in Pennsylvania. “Historically they’ve voted at lower levels than other communities,” Mr. Yang said, adding, “Asian-Americans could very well be the swing vote in Pennsylvania.”
Chris Murray, a lawyer who lives in Stony Brook, New York, made the two and a half hour drive to Pennsylvania to canvass in the rain with his 13-year-old daughter, Grace. “He doesn’t believe in climate change,” she said disbelievingly. “I can’t even.”
President Trump made a closing pitch to Michigan voters on Sunday morning by making false claims that he saved the auto industry and complaining repeatedly about the freezing temperatures and the wind blowing “directly” into his face.
Taking the stage in the city of Washington while dramatically bracing himself against the wind, Mr. Trump thanked Michigan for voting for him four years ago, and told the crowd: “I gave you a lot of auto plants, I think we’re even.”
His remarks marked a continuation of the same false claims he has made about bringing back the auto industry every time he has campaigned in the state.
“I stopped the moves and now many plants are being built,” Mr. Trump said. “The automobile business is coming back.” He also claimed, inaccurately, that Michigan “didn’t have any auto plants four years ago.”
In fact, the number of manufacturing jobs in Michigan related to motor vehicles and the manufacturing of auto parts has gone down during Mr. Trump’s tenure in office. Mr. Trump, according to PolitiFact, can truthfully only claim credit for bringing one new car plant, set to open in 2021, to the state. In 2019, auto industry employment in Michigan dropped by about 3,000, according to PolitiFact.
Mr. Trump also embraced the actions of some of his supporters in Texas who surrounded a Biden campaign bus on Saturday, in an apparent attempt to slow it down and run it off the road. Mr. Trump claimed the vehicles bearing Trump flags and signs that surrounded a Biden-Harris campaign bus were “protecting his bus, yesterday, because they are nice.”
The rally in Michigan kicked off a five-state tour on Sunday that was set to take Mr. Trump also to Iowa, North Carolina, Georgia and Florida.
In Michigan, a state Mr. Trump won four years ago by less than 1 percent, a recent A New York Times/Sienna poll showed Mr. Trump trailing Mr. Biden by a eight points.
Now, the state is part of the principal battleground region of the county. On Sunday, Mr. Trump also made fun of former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for campaigning with his signature aviation sunglasses on. “Got the little shades on, doesn’t have to work on the eyes,” he said, adding: “They’re too small, they should be bigger.” He also called the former vice president a “dummy and a half.”
And he floated baseless claims that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, had stolen $2 million from her campaign. “Why aren’t they looking at her, Justice Department?” he said.
Throughout the rally, he made little mention of the coronavirus, which is surging in Michigan. Over the past week, there have been an average of 3,111 cases per day there, an increase of 121 percent from the average two weeks earlier.
“Today you should wear them anyway, probably,” he said of face masks, referring, once again, to the freezing cold.
He maintained that he had more enthusiasm behind his campaign than Mr. Biden did. “They went as a twosome and they had less people,” he said of a joint appearance Mr. Biden made on Saturday with President Barack Obama in Michigan.
DULUTH, Ga. — The multicultural makeover of the Atlanta suburbs that has eroded so much Republican advantage in Georgia was evident Sunday in the signs on display at Senator Kamala Harris’s rally in a Gwinnett County parking lot. They declared, “Vietnamese Americans for Biden.” And “Latinx for Biden” and “Todos Con Biden” and “Desis for Biden Harris,” a reference to people with origins in the Indian subcontinent. They were in Spanish, and Chinese.
Gwinnett County is at the heart of an emerging Georgia that speaks different languages, cooks different barbecue (sometimes), and represents a big advantage for the Biden-Harris ticket this year. Though Mr. Trump won Georgia by five percentage points in 2016, current polls show the race in a dead heat.
Some Republicans in the state have acknowledged that the party’s problems could extend beyond 2020 if they do not find a way to speak to the state’s minority contingent, who may eclipse whites as a majority by 2028.
Standing outside of Infinite Energy Center, an arena about a half-hour’s drive from downtown Atlanta, Ms. Harris leaned hard into the idea that the Trump administration did not have the best interest of minorities at heart. She noted that Mr. Trump had questioned President Barack Obama’s citizenship, maligned Mexican immigrants, entertained the idea of banning Muslims from entering the United States, and called white nationalist protesters “fine people.”
“Georgia, we are better than this,” Ms. Harris said. “We deserve better than this!”
Enrique Reyna, 42, a construction worker who moved to Georgia from San Diego a couple of years ago, said that Hispanic groups have been canvassing the suburbs intensely, and finding an eager audience, particularly given the Trump administration’s controversial efforts to stem illegal immigration. “Kids in cages, man,” he said. “That pissed off a whole lot of people.”
After Ms. Harris’s speech, a few dozen supporters stood alongside a busy thoroughfare waving signs and eliciting honks of support from passersby. Among the sidewalk crowd was Rosemary Gabriel, 51, a hairstylist from Nigeria. Sometimes, she said, she feels the kind of “tribalism” in the United States that she was accustomed to, and dismayed by, in Nigerian politics. “I’m tired,” she said, “of all the noise.”
In the final weekend before Election Day, the Biden campaign is making a last push to drive turnout among Asian-American voters, a fast growing demographic group who could play a role in deciding contests in crucial swing states.
More than 11 million Asian-Americans are able to vote this year, making up roughly 5 percent of the nation’s eligible voters. A third of registered Asian-American voters, more than 2 million in total, live in 10 key states, including Florida, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Texas and Wisconsin.
About 44 percent of Asian-American voters identify as Democrats, compared with 23 percent who identify as Republicans, according to a survey conducted by AAPI Data, which publishes demographic data and policy research on Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders. And Mr. Biden’s selection of Senator Kamala Harris — who is Black and South Asian — as his running mate earlier this fall has energized many in the Asian-American and Indian-American communities.
Aware that the Asian-American vote could matter on the margins, particularly if any of those swing state contests prove to be tight, the Biden campaign on Saturday released a 60-second video featuring Asian-American celebrities, as well as an updated list of more than 1,100 Asian-American and Pacific Islander leaders who have endorsed him.
“We’re extremely proud of our micro-targeted messaging and individualized outreach to the A.A.P.I. community, so that we not only feel represented in the campaign, but also empowered and inspired to be a part of it,” said Dennis Cheng, a senior adviser for the Biden campaign.
But while a majority of Indian Americans and Japanese Americans identify as Democrat, 48 percent of Vietnamese Americans identify as Republican or Leaning Republican, according to the Asian-American Voter Survey. And their votes could be critical in some House races, like in California’s 39th district where Young Kim, a Korean-American and a Republican, is challenging the Democratic incumbent, Gil Cisneros.
The Trump campaign has also done a number of virtual and in-person events, as well as voter registration drives, targeting Asian-Americans in various languages. “Asian-Americans, myself included, have consistently supported candidates who advocate for a safe and strong America," said Ken Farnaso, the campaign's deputy national press secretary.
Some Asian-Americans have chosen to focus on turnout, engagement and outreach. Ismailis Rise Up, a group of Ismaili Muslims in the United States, has trained more than 150 organizers across the country to run advocacy teams in key battleground states and swing districts that have sizable Ismaili populations.
“On a fundamental level, we understand we have to be our own advocates,” said Senya Merchant, one of the co-founders of the group. “When it has come to this point where democracy is at stake, we actually are not afforded the opportunity to stand by and just sort of wait to see what happens.”
MIAMI — President Trump’s fifth and final rally on Sunday in Opa-locka, Fla., was moved to 9:30 p.m. after being scheduled to kick off at 11:30 p.m., a late hour for attendees and viewers — and a potential problem for local officials. To try to slow the spread of the coronavirus, Miami-Dade County has a nightly curfew that begins at midnight.
The county owns the venue for the rally at the Opa-locka airport near Miami. Public records show that when the Republican National Committee emailed the county about the rally on Thursday, it listed the event as starting at 10 p.m. The county issued a permit until 2 a.m. so that “essential workers” could dismantle and clean the hangar after the rally.
On Saturday, a spokeswoman for Mayor Carlos A. Gimenez of Miami-Dade County said the administration did not know where the time change had come from.
By Sunday, the mayor’s office said it had gotten assurances from the R.N.C. that the outdoor rally would “begin at 9:30 p.m. Sunday and is expected to end before midnight.”
Mr. Trump, however, was already running late in his schedule by the middle of the afternoon.
The county will hand out fliers listing public-health rules that mandate face coverings and social distancing. The R.N.C. will distribute masks and hand sanitizer, according to the county.
“As with any other events, the county will continue to enforce the curfew,” Mr. Gimenez said in a statement. “We will be flexible, as we have been with recent late-ending sporting events, so that people get home safely.”
Mr. Gimenez, a Republican, is running for Congress in Miami and has been endorsed by Mr. Trump. Miami-Dade was hard-hit by the virus.
The curfew has vexed Miami-Dade ever since a circuit court judge ruled in favor of Tootsies, a Miami Gardens strip club, which sued to overturn the restriction. County lawyers have been trying to make the case on appeal that the curfew is crucial to public health.
The R.N.C. told the county it expected 6,000 to 10,000 attendees, which would make it one of the largest events to be held in Miami-Dade since the pandemic began in the United States in March.
In three key states, early voters, campaign volunteers and 2020 candidates readied on Sunday for the culmination of an extraordinary election season:
Georgia
Hundreds of people on Sunday morning tuned in to an online worship service streamed by the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta, where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once helmed the pulpit and whose current senior pastor, the Rev. Raphael G. Warnock, is a leading Democratic candidate for the Senate in Georgia.
“Make sure, this Tuesday, that you go to vote,” Dr. Warnock said. “If you’ve already voted, I want you to reach out today to your friends and your family and ask, ‘Have you voted? Can I help you? Do you need a ride to the polls?’ Let’s make sure that everybody gets to the polls.”
Dr. Warnock then handed off his digital lectern to the Rev. Robert Michael Franklin Jr., a president emeritus at Dr. Warnock’s alma mater, Morehouse College.
“If there is a Trump-Pence victory, we will comport ourselves with dignity and determination, even if the weight of disappointment may seem heavy,” he said. “We will patiently challenge every apparent wrongdoing in all elections. We may be loyal opposition, but we will ultimately accept legitimate outcomes.”
Pennsylvania
Residents of Philadelphia, where the police killing of a Black man prompted street protests and confrontations less than a week ago, said Sunday that they feared a new round of demonstrations after Nov. 3, regardless of which presidential candidate appears to have won.
“I think there will be unrest regardless of whichever candidate is in the lead,” said Caitlin Foley, 36, a physician who voted for Joseph R. Biden Jr. “There is still a lot of anger and unhappiness related to the recent shooting. People are upset and scared and frustrated.”
Regardless of the outcome, the city’s election machinery will work as it should, said David Thornburgh, chief executive of the Committee of Seventy, a nonpartisan nonprofit group that works to ensure the integrity of elections. “I continue to be confident that we’ll be OK,” he said.
Ohio
Lake County, Ohio, has long been a bellwether county in a bellwether state. A middle-class, mostly white suburban area just east of Cleveland, the county has voted for the winner in all but two presidential elections since 1960.
Races in Lake County have been close in recent presidential elections, but President Trump blew that tradition away four years ago, beating Hillary Clinton there by more than 15 percentage points. The question this year is whether that result was an outlier, or if the area’s aging population is tilting steadily to the right.
The views over the weekend outside the Lake County Board of Elections in Painesville were, of course, varied.
“We haven’t changed at all,” said Lisa Hudson, a Republican county volunteer. “This county has gone red and will stay red.” She added, “The national polls are all wrong.”
About 50 yards away was Ann Reiss, passing out Democratic Party material. She said the current feeling in Lake County was “less disillusionment than there was four years ago,” a good sign for Democrats.
Wisconsin
Amira Randolph, 15, and about 25 other young people braved strong wind and near-freezing temperatures on Sunday to encourage people in Milwaukee’s Near South Side to turn out and vote. Wearing masks, the canvassers stepped back six feet after ringing doorbells.
One resident, Maribel Piña, accepted information on voting from Ms. Randolph, but then deferred to her son, Rodolfo Geron, 19, who is more fluent in English.
Mr. Geron, a student at Carroll University in Waukesha, was glad for the reminder. “I was planning to vote today, yeah,” he said, adding that he would cast a ballot for Joseph R. Biden Jr. “I watched the debates, and Biden aligns with what I believe in, too, along with the change I want in this country.”
The canvassing effort is led by Youth Empowered in the Struggle, or YES, a multicultural group that is part of Voces de la Frontera Action, a Milwaukee nonprofit that advocates immigrant, student and workers’ rights.
Many of the students who were canvassing were Hispanic, like Katherine Villanueva, 16, who said her year-round involvement in the teenage group helped her overcome the anxiety she felt growing up in a family with mixed immigration status.
Other teenagers, like Fatoumata Guisse, 15, whose parents are Muslim and immigrated to Milwaukee from Senegal, joined the effort recently. “It’s important to vote and for youth, this vote is for our future,” Ms. Guisse said. “So why not go out and encourage people to vote?”
— Sean Keenan, Jon Hurdle, Daniel McGraw and
President Trump’s election night party will be held in the East Room of the White House, and aides are discussing inviting roughly 400 people, according to two officials familiar with the discussions.
The party had been moved from the Trump Hotel on Pennsylvania Avenue, the original venue chosen by the campaign, in part because of rules in Washington prohibiting gatherings of more than 50 people indoors to try to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
Now, what had initially been expected to be a small gathering in the East Room has ballooned into a large indoor party with several hundred people expected.
The event is certain to raise questions about safety, given that the coronavirus spreads more easily in indoor spaces. An event on Sept. 26 for Justice Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination to the Supreme Court, at which people were bunched together both indoors and outside in the Rose Garden, was widely seen by health experts as a point of spread of the virus.
A White House official and a spokeswoman for the first lady, whose office oversees the East Wing of the complex, did not respond to requests for comment. A campaign spokesman did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s campaign announced on Saturday that he would address the nation on election night from his hometown, Wilmington, Del.
Joseph R. Biden Jr. holds a clear advantage over President Trump across four of the most important presidential swing states, a new poll shows, bolstered by the support of voters who did not participate in the 2016 election and who now appear to be turning out in large numbers to cast their ballots, mainly for the Democrat.
Mr. Biden, the former vice president, is ahead of Mr. Trump in the Northern battlegrounds of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, as well as in the Sun Belt states of Florida and Arizona, according to a poll of likely voters conducted by The New York Times and Siena College. His strength is most pronounced in Wisconsin, where he has an outright majority of the vote and leads Mr. Trump by 11 points, 52 percent to 41 percent.
Mr. Biden’s performance across the electoral map appears to put him in a stronger position heading into Election Day than any presidential candidate since at least 2008, when in the midst of a global economic crisis Barack Obama captured the White House with 365 Electoral College votes and Mr. Biden at his side.
The New York Times /
Siena College poll
Joe Biden is leading Donald Trump in four key battleground states just days before the election.
Arizona Ariz. (n=1,252)
+4 Trump
+6 Biden 49-43
Florida Fla. (1,451)
+1 Trump
+3 Biden 47-44
Pennsylvania Pa. (1,862)
<1 Trump
+6 Biden 49-43
Wisconsin Wis. (1,253)
<1 Trump
+11 Biden 52-41
Based on a New York Times/Siena College poll of likely voters from Oct. 26 to Oct. 31.
Mr. Trump’s apparent weakness in many of the country’s largest electoral prizes leaves him with a narrow path to the 270 Electoral College votes required to claim victory, short of a major upset or a systemic error in opinion polling surpassing even the missteps preceding the 2016 election. Should Mr. Biden’s lead hold in three of the four states tested in the survey, it would almost certainly be enough to win, and if he were to carry Florida, he would most likely need to flip just one more large state that Mr. Trump won in 2016 to clinch the presidency.
In the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Biden has a modest advantage in Florida, where he is ahead of Mr. Trump by three points, 47 percent to 44 percent, a lead that is within the margin of error. He leads by six points in both Arizona and Pennsylvania. In no state did Mr. Trump’s support climb higher than 44 percent.
The margin of error is 3.2 percentage points in Wisconsin and Florida; 3 points in Arizona and 2.4 points in Pennsylvania.
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Live Trump vs. Biden Election Updates: Texas Court Denies G.O.P. Push to Throw Out Votes - The New York Times
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