There were maybe a few hundred people within earshot. It would be the largest audience she addressed during her five-hour visit here Saturday — and a sign of how carefully Joe Biden’s campaign is proceeding through coronavirus protocols. Most of the voters in line to cast ballots in this overwhelmingly Democratic county cheered Harris’s presence. And the sight of this on social media worked at least one of President Donald Trump’s allies into a competitive lather.
“When you can’t draw a crowd…” a Trump senior adviser from Ohio snarked on Twitter.
One campaign follows best pandemic practices. The other doesn’t. It’s not that Biden and Harris can’t draw a big crowd. It’s that they’re choosing not to. And scenes Saturday from both campaigns clarified the divergent and disorienting state of the presidential race 10 days from Election Day…
Biden events are small, when they happen. Trump gives the former vice president endless hell for riding out the early months of the coronavirus in his Delaware basement, even if it was the responsible thing for a 77-year-old to do. Trump is 74, and though his COVID-19 diagnosis has not been definitively traced to a source, the president, unlike Biden, kept holding large gatherings and rarely wore a mask in public. (USA Today reported this week that coronavirus cases surged in five counties after Trump held rallies there.) Biden has remained coronavirus-free, and he and Harris continue to limit the crowd size at their events. Many in that Board of Elections line that Trump’s senior adviser mocked Saturday might well have turned out inside a high school gym if Biden or Harris had gone against health recommendations and scheduled such an event…
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