Ahead of the final weekend before Election Day on Tuesday, US President Donald Trump and Democratic challenger Joe Biden planned to barnstorm across battleground states in the Midwest, including Wisconsin, where the coronavirus pandemic has exploded anew. Trump, a Republican, was scheduled to campaign on Friday in Michigan, Wisconsin and Minnesota, while Biden had planned stops in Wisconsin and Minnesota as well as Iowa. Michigan and Wisconsin were two of the three historically Democratic industrial states, along with Pennsylvania, that narrowly voted for Trump in 2016, delivering him an upset victory. Minnesota, which has not voted for a Republican presidential candidate since 1972, is one of the few Democratic states that Trump was trying to flip this year. Overall, the map looked ominous for Trump, who has consistently trailed Biden in national polls for months because of widespread disapproval of his handling of the coronavirus. Polls in the most competitive states, however, have shown a closer race. Why Donald Trump needs to suppress the vote to win The pandemic, as well as an extraordinary level of enthusiasm, has prompted Americans to vote early in unprecedented numbers. Already, more than 80 million votes have been cast either by mail or in person, well over half the total number of votes in the entire 2016 election, according to the US Elections Project at the University of Florida. The deluge of mail-in ballots makes it likely that the winner of several states, including major battlegrounds such as Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, will not be clear on Tuesday night, as election officials expect the vote-tallying to take days. On Thursday, a federal appeal court barred Minnesota election officials from implementing a plan to count ballots arriving up to a week after Election Day as long as they were postmarked by next Tuesday. Trump has repeatedly claimed without evidence that mail-in ballots are susceptible to fraud and has more recently argued that only the results available on election night should count. Early voting data show that far more Democrats have voted by mail, while Republicans are expected to turn out in greater numbers on Tuesday. As a result, preliminary results from states like Pennsylvania that do not begin counting mail-in ballots until Election Day could show Trump in the lead before flipping as more Democratic-heavy ballots were added, a phenomenon some have called the “red mirage” and the “blue shift”. Several Pennsylvania counties have said they would not begin counting mail-in ballots until Wednesday. The final days of the campaign have continued to be dominated by the pandemic, which has killed more than 228,000 people in the United States and decimated the economy. An American dies every 107 seconds as US tops records The White House coronavirus task force has warned that much of the country was in the grip of an “unrelenting” rise in Covid-19 cases. After overcoming his own Covid-19 infection, Trump has maintained a frenetic pace, holding up to three rallies a day with thousands of attendees despite concerns the events could spread the virus. Biden has held smaller events, including “drive-in” rallies where supporters remain in their cars for safety, and has also spent a couple of days near his home state of Delaware. As he has done through the year, Trump has played down the pandemic, telling supporters that the country was “turning the corner” even as cases surge. Biden, meanwhile, was pouring tens of millions of dollars into a torrent of online advertising that deliver his closing message of the presidential campaign, highlighting his promise to govern for all Americans while blasting Trump’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic. “Donald Trump has waved the white flag, abandoned our families and surrendered to this virus,” Biden said in Tampa, Florida, on Thursday. The former vice-president will campaign alongside former president Barack Obama in Michigan on Saturday. 10 moments that defined the 2020 US election campaign Trump’s closing sprint includes three stops in Pennsylvania on Saturday and nearly a dozen events in the final 48 hours across states he carried in 2016. Vice-President Mike Pence and Biden’s running mate Kamala Harris were also criss-crossing the nation, to battlegrounds like Nevada, Arizona, Wisconsin, Michigan and all-important Pennsylvania. The Republican National Committee, meanwhile, launched its closing message to voters Thursday, not mentioning Trump, in an apparent aim to help Republican candidates up and down the ballot with a focus on traditional Republican messages around lowering taxes and health care. Trump touted figures released on Thursday showing the US economy grew at a historic annualised pace of 33 per cent in the third quarter, although output remains below its level at the end of 2019, before the pandemic. Economists caution that the recovery was still tenuous and far from complete. Additional reporting by Associated Press and Agence France-Presse