Joe Biden visited his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Tuesday morning where he left a poignant message on the wall, before being mobbed by fans in the battleground state, after starting election day attending mass and visiting his son Beau’s grave in Delaware.
The Democratic candidate scrawled the message ‘from this house to the White House with the grace of God’ alongside his signature and the date of the 59th US presidential election on the wall of the living room to his boyhood home, as he stopped in the town just hours before the polls close.
Biden was then mobbed by dozens of supporters who had gathered outside the in a show of support, as he headed for the next stop on his whistlestop tour of the state.
Biden is making appearances across two Pennsylvania cities Tuesday as he makes a final play for the battleground state where pollsters and both political parties feel the White House race could be won or lost.
The trip came after he started election day by attending morning mass and visiting Beau’s grave at St. Joseph On the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington, Delaware, with his wife Jill and teenage granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie.
Joe Biden was mobbed by fans gathered outside his childhood home Tuesday in a show of support for the candidate
Biden visited his childhood home in Scranton, Pennsylvania, Tuesday morning flanked by his grandchildren
The Democrat left a poignant message on the wall of the living room of his childhood home reading: ‘From this house to the White House with the grace of God’
Biden started election day Tuesday by attending morning mass and visiting his son Beau’s grave in Delaware (pictured)
Biden was seen walking into St. Joseph On the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington with Jill, Finnegan and Natalie soon after 7 a.m. Tuesday.
The family attended a short mass at their local church before paying a visit to the grave of Biden’s late son Beau, an Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general, who was laid to rest there following his death in 2015 from brain cancer.
Biden’s late first wife Neilia and baby daughter Naomi, who both died in a car crash in 1972, are also buried in the cemetery.
Biden and Finnegan locked arms and she put her arm around her grandfather at one point as they took a moment at his grave.
Finnegan’s message to the American people was plain for all to see as she sported a face mask and black boots with the word ‘vote’ emblazoned on them.
This marks the second time in three days that Biden has paid a visit to the church after he was spotted attending a service there Sunday.
During that visit, he was met with a small group of pro-life protesters who shouted at the presidential candidate about his stance on abortion and held up banners reading ‘No Catholic can vote for Joe Biden’ and ‘Joe Biden equals abortion, euthanasia and infanticide.’
The three demonstrators, two women and one man, held signs and heckled Biden shouting ‘Joe, you’re a disgrace to the Catholic faith.’
They also heckled Biden’s late son chanting: ‘Repent for your soul’ and ‘Repent for Beau’s soul’.
Beau died aged 46 in 2015 from brain cancer and Biden often pays tribute to his courage battling the disease and also during his deployment to Iraq as a major in the Delaware Army National Guard.
The former vice president spoke of Beau during the first presidential debate in September as he hit out at Trump over his alleged disparaging comments about American military members.
‘The way you talk about the military, the way you talk about them being ‘losers’ and ‘suckers,’ Biden said, referencing the bombshell report in The Atlantic that Trump called the US war dead ‘suckers’ and ‘losers’.
‘My son was in Iraq. He spent a year there. He spent a year there. He got the Bronze Star.
‘He got the Conspicuous Service Medal. He was not a loser. He was a patriot and the people left behind there were heroes,’ said Biden.
The Democratic presidential candidate was seen walking into St. Joseph On the Brandywine Catholic Church in Wilmington with his wife Jill and granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie soon after 7 a.m. Tuesday
The family attended mass at their local church before paying a visit to the grave of Biden’s late son Beau (pictured), an Iraq War veteran and Delaware attorney general
Biden and Finnegan locked arms and she put her arm around her grandfather at one point as they took a moment at his grave
Finnegan’s message to the American people was plain for all to see as she sported a face mask and black boots with the word ‘vote’ emblazoned on them
This marks the second time in three days that Biden has paid a visit to the church after he was spotted attending a service there Sunday
Trump cut in to bring the conversation around to Biden’s other son Hunter.
‘Really? Are you talking about Hunter?’ he asked
‘I’m talking about my son, Beau Biden,’ Biden responded to which Trump said: ‘I don’t know Beau. I know Hunter.’
Biden’s Tuesday morning visit to his son’s grave kicked off election day for the Democratic hopeful, who currently leads Trump in the polls.
Biden then left Delaware to head to his home town of Scranton in Pennsylvania before he will later head on to Philadelphia.
He gave a thumbs up to reporters as he boarded a flight in Delaware to head to the Keystone State, taking with him granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie.
‘These are the only two of my grandchildren who have never been to Scranton. So we’re going home,’ he told reporters.
On his arrival in his hometown, Biden spoke to a local carpenters’ union, grabbing a megaphone to address about 50 people who were there.
‘It’s good to be home,’ he said. Then he referenced scoring a unanimous 5-0 vote in the tiny New Hampshire town of Dixville Notch, and turned it into a dig at his rival.
‘Based on Trump’s notion, I’m going to declare victory tonight,’ he quipped.
Biden then paid a visit to his childhood home, signing the living room wall with a historic message: ‘From This House to the White House, with the Grace of God.’
The message was written on the same wall he previously wrote another message during his 2008 run for vice president alongside then-nominee Barack Obama.
Back then, Biden wrote: ‘I Am Home.’
He emerged from the home to greet a crowd of supporters gathered outside, shouting: ‘It’s good to be home!’
The crowd cheered and shouted ‘We love you, Joe!’
Local resident and the current owner of his childhood home Anne Kearns spoke to the Democrat briefly outside telling him: ‘I watch ya all the time. I’m so proud of you.’
Biden also visited local sandwich shop Hank’s Hoagies and the home of Pennsylvania Democratic Sen. Bob Casey’s mother.
A person from a nearby house was being carried by stretcher to an ambulance nearby while he was outside.
Biden will then head to Philadelphia for the second of two city stops in Pennsyvlania, before returning to Wilmington where he and vice presidential candidate Kamala Harris will watch the results come in Tuesday night and deliver their election night remarks.
Harris is spending the last day of the race visiting Detroit, a predominantly black city in battleground state Michigan.
Biden takes a moment at his son’s grave. Beau was laid to rest there following his death in 2015 from brain cancer
Biden’s Tuesday morning visit kicks off election day for the Democratic hopeful with just hours before the polls close
Biden then headed to his home town of Scranton in Pennsylvania and will later go to Philadelphia
Trump also held one of his final campaign stops at Scranton Monday.
Minutes before Biden’s arrival in Scranton, Trump repeated unsubstantiated claims that the vote in Pennsylvania will be corrupted.
‘Philadelphia will be a disaster,’ Trump said during a hoarse early morning call-in interview on Fox & Friends after attending late night rallies.
Trump, who has previously refused to say he will accept the election results, said he would declare victory ‘only when there’s victory,’ following reports he might do so Tuesday night even as votes are still coming in.
However he also claimed he would win at least 306 electoral college votes and repeated his demand to know who wins on election night.
‘So my number last time was 306,’ he said of the votes he thinks he will earn.
‘I ended up with 306, that was good numbers – 223-306,’ he incorrectly said in reference to the outcome against Hillary Clinton in 2016.
‘And that was a big number. And I think we will top it. I’ll leave it at that. I think we’ll top it.’
Clinton actually earned 232 not 223 votes in 2016.
‘I’d like to find out on November 3, the end of the evening, or late into the morning whenever, who won the election. And that doesn’t allow that to happen. Unless there’s a blowout, or unless you don’t need Pennsylvania,’ Trump went on.
Trump was referencing a Supreme Court decision allowing the state to count mail-in ballots for three days after election day.
Late Monday, Trump said the decision by the high court will ‘induce violence in the streets.’
The extraordinary tweet, which Twitter slapped a warning label on, came amid preparations at the White House and in Washington for potential blowback in the event of a contested election.
‘The Supreme Court decision on voting in Pennsylvania is a VERY dangerous one. It will allow rampant and unchecked cheating and will undermine our entire systems of laws. It will also induce violence in the streets,’ Trump tweeted.
‘Something must be done!’ he added, without explanation.
The president has threatened to send in his lawyers to halt votes being counted that arrive after election day.
Under state law, election officials cannot start counting mail-in ballots until election day.
He gave a thumbs up to reporters as he boarded a flight in Delaware to head to the Keystone State
‘We’re going home,’ Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden told reporters as he headed to Scranton, Pennsylvania on election day. Here he talks with supporters there
Both Biden and Donald Trump have been eyeing Pennsylvania as one of the key swing states
Joe Biden arrives in his hometown Scranton to make a final play for Pennsylvania votes
Biden steps off the airplane at Wilkes-Barre Scranton International Airport with granddaughters Finnegan and Natalie. He told reporters in Delaware they were ‘going home’
Biden speaks to supporters at a canvass kickoff event at Local Carpenters Union 445 in Scranton
With the state’s top election official Kathy Boockvar saying there could be as many as 10 times as many mail-in votes in 2020 as there were in 2016, they could take several days to process and count.
Both Biden and Donald Trump have been eyeing Pennsylvania as one of the key swing states in the White House race.
Pennsylvania accounts for a significant 20 electoral votes meaning both Republicans and Democrats – as well as pollsters – believe the outcome of the state could dictate the entire race.
Concerns are mounting that Trump will declare victory in the state long before votes are counted or that he will attempt to stop mail-in votes being counted after election day.
Democrats are thought to be more likely to vote by mail-in voting given Trump’s constant rhetoric that the process is ‘rigged’.
Trump won the state by less than a point over Hillary Clinton back in 2016 however the latest polls show Biden is ahead by around 5 points.
Biden has visited the state more times than any other battleground state during his campaign trail and Trump has also focused heavily on drumming up support in the state.
Nearly 100 million Americans nationwide have voted early, and now it falls to election day voters to finish the job.
Biden entered election day with multiple paths to victory while Trump, playing catch-up in a number of battleground states, had a narrower but still feasible road to clinch 270 electoral college votes.
Control of the Senate is at stake, too: Democrats needed to net three seats if Biden captures the White House to gain control of all of Washington for the first time in a decade.
If Biden loses to Trump, the Democrats can still take control of the Senate if they take four Republican seats.
Meanwhile, the House is expected to remain under Democratic control.
Biden paid a visit to his childhood home in Scranton, signing the living room wall with a historic message: ‘From This House to the White House, with the Grace of God’
The message was written on the same wall he previously wrote another message during his 2008 run for vice president alongside then-nominee Barack Obama. Back then, Biden wrote: ‘I Am Home’
He emerged from the home to greet a crowd of supporters gathered outside, shouting: ‘It’s good to be home!’
Biden makes his way through the crowd outside of his childhood home on election day in Scranton with his family
Biden gives a thumbs-up to the crowd of supporters donning face masks and cheering for the Democrat outside his childhood home
Biden gives a fist bump to a supporter as he leaves local sandwich shop Hank’s Hoagies in Scranton
Biden speaks with supporters in Scranton as he makes a final play for the battleground state where Trump is also rallying today
Voters braved long lines and the threat of the virus to cast ballots as they chose between two starkly different visions of America for the next four years.
The record-setting early vote – and legal skirmishing over how it will be counted – drew unsupported allegations of fraud from Trump, who refused to guarantee he would honor the election’s result.
Trump made a morning appearance on ‘Fox & Friends,’ where he predicted he will win by a larger electoral margin than he did in 2016.
It marked the first in a string of media interviews on the final day of the race.
He headed to his campaign headquarters in Virginia for around midday and invited hundreds of supporters to an election night party in the East Room of the White House.
On their final full day on the campaign trail, Trump and Biden broke sharply over the mechanics of the vote itself while visiting the most fiercely contested battleground, Pennsylvania.
The Republican president threatened legal action to block the counting of ballots received after Election Day. If Pennsylvania ballot counting takes several days, as is allowed, Trump claimed without evidence that ‘cheating can happen like you have never seen.’
In fact, there are roughly 20 states that allow mail-in ballots received after Election Day to be counted – up to nine days and longer in some states.
Litigation has centered on just a few where states have made changes in large part due to the coronavirus.
Biden told voters in Pennsylvania that the very fabric of the nation was at stake and offered his own election as the firmest rebuke possible to a president who he said had spent ‘four years dividing us at every turn.’
‘Tomorrow’s the beginning of a new day. Tomorrow we can put an end to a president that´s left hardworking Americans out in the cold!’ Biden said in Pittsburgh. ‘If you elect me as president, I´m gonna act to heal this country.’
Trump argued, at a stop in Wisconsin, that Biden was ‘not what our country needs.’ He added: ‘This isn’t about – yeah, it is about me, I guess, when you think about it.’
The nation braced for what was to come – and a result that might not be known for days.
A new anti-scale fence was erected around the White House. And in downtowns ranging from New York to Denver to Minneapolis, workers boarded up businesses lest the vote lead to unrest of the sort that broke out earlier this year amid protests over racial inequality.
Just a short walk from the White House, for block after block, stores had their windows and doors covered. Some kept just a front door open, hoping to attract a little business.
Both candidates voted early, but first lady Melania Trump was set to cast her ballot Tuesday near Mar-a-Lago, the couple’s estate in Palm Beach, Florida.
The candidates blitzed through the battleground states on Monday, with Biden also pushing into Ohio, a state once thought to be safe for Trump.
President Donald Trump said during a call-in interview with ‘Fox & Friends’ Tuesday that he believes he will ‘top’ the 306 Electoral College votes he won in 2016 to win again this year
Trump, who held 14 rallies in the last three days leading up to election day, dances after a campaign rally in Grand Rapids, Michigan Monday
The president, for his part, packed in five rallies, Air Force One streaking across the sky as he drew crowds in North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin and then back in Michigan again.
His finale stretched past midnight in Grand Rapids, where he had also held his last rally in 2016.
It marked the end of an era in American politics, one in part defined by the massive and exuberant gatherings that the president continued to hold despite warnings from his government’s own public health experts to avoid crowds during the pandemic.
The next president will inherit an anxious nation, reeling from a once-in-a-century heath crisis that has closed schools and businesses and that is worsening as the weather turns cold.
Trump in Grand Rapids insisted anew that the nation was ’rounding the turn’ on the virus. But Dr. Deborah Birx, the coordinator of the White House coronavirus task force, broke with the president and joined a chorus of Trump administration scientists sounding the alarm about the current spike in infections.
‘We are entering the most concerning and most deadly phase of this pandemic,’ Birx wrote in a memo distributed to top administration officials. She added that the nation was not implementing ‘balanced’ measures needed to slow the spread of the virus. One recipient confirmed the contents that were initially reported Monday by The Washington Post.
The pandemic has shadowed the campaign, which has largely been a referendum of Trump´s handling of the virus.
The challenge of counting a record-setting early vote added a layer of uncertainty to an election marked by suspicions fueled by an incumbent who has consistently trailed in the polls.
