President Donald Trump raises his fist while departing Air Force One prior to his campaign rally in Johnstown, Pa. on Oct. 13, 2020.
Credit: Chase SuttonPresident and 1968 Wharton graduate Donald Trump will return to Pennsylvania for three campaign rallies on Saturday, rounding out a busy week of campaigning including three events in the state on Monday.
Trump will visit Bucks County — which is located about 35 miles from Penn's campus — Reading in Berks County, and Butler, which is about 30 miles from Pittsburgh.
The president made three stops in Lehigh County, Lancaster County, and Blair County on Monday, where he attacked former Penn professor and 2020 Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden's plans for energy and criticized Gov. Tom Wolf’s COVID-19 safety restrictions.
Trump has visited Pennsylvania — a key swing state in the election — a number of times in the past weeks, including holding a rally in Johnstown, Pa. less than two weeks after testing positive for COVID-19.
Trump won Pennsylvania by less than one percent — by 44,000 votes — in 2016. FiveThirtyEight's average of recent polls shows Biden leading Trump by more than five points in the key battleground state.
"An important component of President Trump’s 2016 victory in Pennsylvania came from a massive vote advantage in the counties he won, but Mr. Biden currently holds a larger vote share in the counties Hillary Clinton won in 2016 than President Trump holds in the counties he won that year," G. Terry Madonna, a political analyst and director of the Franklin & Marshall College Poll, told The Courier Times.
In a statement on Monday, Biden criticized Trump’s handling of the pandemic, stating that it has cost lives and severely damaged Pennsylvania’s economy.
“While working families in Pennsylvania continue to struggle, President Trump has given tax breaks to big corporations that ship jobs overseas and started a reckless tariff war with China that has cost Pennsylvania jobs,” Biden said in the statement. “Working families in Lehigh, Lancaster, and Blair Counties deserve a president who will fight every day for their families, their health care, and their jobs."
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