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Well, it was a very different debate than the cacophonous and, at times, incomprehensible first one.
President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden offered sharply different visions of how to handle the surging pandemic and fought over how much Trump pays in taxes during their final debate of a tumultuous campaign.
The night in Nashville began with a battle over the president's handling of the pandemic, which has killed more than 225,000 Americans and cost millions of jobs. Trump declared that the virus will go away while Biden warned that the nation was heading toward “a dark winter.”
Trump defended his management of the nation's most deadly health crisis in a century, dismissing Biden's warning that the nation had a dire stretch ahead due to spikes in infections. And he promised that a vaccine would be ready in weeks.
“It will go away,” said Trump, staying with his optimistic assessment of the pandemic. “We’re rounding the turn. We’re rounding the corner. It’s going away.”
“We can’t keep this country closed. This is a massive country with a massive economy," Trump said. "There’s depression, alcohol, drugs at a level nobody’s ever seen before. The cure cannot be worse than the problem itself.”
The debate, moderated by NBC’s Kristen Welker, was a final chance for each man to make his case to a television audience of tens of millions of voters.
President Trump has been saying for years he wants to win Minnesota, but with just over a week to go until Election Day, it appears he is walking back that goal.
Looking at where candidates go and where they spend money is a good way to discern their strategy. The dynamics of his reelection campaign have forced Trump to play defense rather than expand his footprint into states he lost in 2016, including Minnesota.
Earlier this year, the Trump campaign reserved millions of dollars in Minnesota ad time for a full blast of commercials in the stretch run. But since September, it's been canceling planned ad buys. Public records show this week the campaign wiped out its TV ad presence entirely on major stations in Minnesota.
When you’re a public health official in the middle of a pandemic, the last word you want to hear is “record.” But it’s come up often this week as Minnesota’s COVID-19 numbers continue to head in the wrong direction.
The Health Department on Thursday reported 20 more deaths atop 35 deaths the prior day, the largest two-day rise since late May.
Minnesota’s seven-day trend of newly reported hospital admissions hit a second consecutive record high Thursday, now averaging 82 a day over the last week. State officials expected that late summer and early fall gatherings, sporting events and informal meetups among Minnesotans would deliver a surge of cases in October. They also anticipated the wave would put more people in the hospital — and lead to more deaths.
Here are Minnesota’s current COVID-19 statistics:2,281 deaths (20 new)126,591 positive cases (1,574 new), 113,158 off isolation 2,560,520 tests, 1,722,573 people tested6.5 percent seven-day positive test rateA judge’s order to drop the least serious charge against Derek Chauvin, the officer who knelt on the neck of George Floyd, is being lauded by civil liberties groups and activists against police brutality who argued from the start that the third-degree murder count did not apply to his case. The decision also drew attention from legal experts, who say the bigger takeaway from the 107-page order from Hennepin District Judge Peter Cahill is that the trial against Chauvin and the three other officers involved with Floyd's arrest will proceed. MPR News reporter Jon Collins provides a closer look at Thursday's legal order.
— Matt Mikus, MPR News |
