Trump wraps up campaign rallies touting his achievements involving South Korea; Democrats sweat to contain infighting

[Financial News] With the U.S. midterm elections just two days away, both parties stepped up their final campaign efforts. Republican President Donald Trump once again mentioned South Korea’s investment in Alaska and touted his record, while the Democrats brought former President Barack Obama into battleground states in an effort to deflect attention from an intraparty feud.
According to the Associated Press and other foreign media outlets, Trump visited Dubuque, Iowa, on the 1st (local time), urging support for Republican candidates and highlighting his accomplishments. Referring to Alaska, he claimed, “It was completely dead until I got involved.” He went on to stress, of the local liquefied natural gas (LNG) development project, “We have a pipeline for ships carrying LNG to countries such as Japan, South Korea and China.” In an announcement on September 30, he had unilaterally claimed that South Korea was investing in the project. On the 1st, Trump did not repeat his claim about South Korean investment in LNG, but said that his tariff policies had led to increased investment in the United States by foreign companies. He added, “Companies from Canada, Mexico, Germany, Japan and South Korea are coming back.”
Trump, who spoke for about two hours in Dubuque that day, discussed trade negotiations with Canada with reporters shortly before his speech. Trump waged a trade war with Canada, exchanging retaliatory tariffs from March last year through August this year, but the two countries have been moving toward reconciliation since last month. Trump said the two sides were “very close to a deal” on trade, adding that an agreement “would be a great thing for the United States and would be fine for Canada, too.”
After the rally in Dubuque that day, Trump traveled to Salina, Kansas, where he held a midterm campaign rally lasting about an hour and a half. A video touting Trump’s achievements shown in Salina briefly included footage of him meeting North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Panmunjom in June 2019 and stepping onto North Korean soil.
Trump concluded his 28-stop tour of local campaign rallies with the event in Salina that day. He had begun the tour early last month and had previously canceled rallies in Iowa and Kansas, but reinstated them after media reports raised concerns about his stamina due to his age. On the day before voting, he is scheduled to speak at the Reflecting Pool, an artificial pond in front of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.

On the 1st, Trump commented on the Michigan Senate race on the social media platform Truth Social. That day in Michigan, Representative Haley Stevens, who had lost the Democratic primary, announced that she would support the Republican candidate instead of Abdul El-Sayed, who had been selected as the Senate nominee, fueling controversy over divisions within the Democratic Party. Trump welcomed the news, posting on Truth Social, “I hope Stevens joins the Republican Party.”
The incident set off alarm bells for the Democrats, who had been leading in the polls. Earlier, the local election forecaster Decision Desk HQ put the Democrats’ chances of retaking the House at 83% and the Senate at 63%. Another local forecaster, the Cook Political Report, projected that Democrats could win as many as 240 House seats, their largest total since 2009. The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) estimated that Democrats would win 224 House seats, more than the 218 needed for a majority. In the Senate races, Democratic candidates were leading in six of the seven battleground states. According to a poll released by The New York Times (NYT) on the 1st, the candidates from the two parties were tied in the remaining state, Alaska. An NBC poll released on the 1st found that 52% preferred the Democrats to hold the congressional majority, 7 percentage points ahead of the Republicans at 45%. Early voting in this election reached 53 million people, setting an all-time record.
With the political landscape in their favor, the Democrats made a concerted effort to put Obama in the spotlight to defuse the infighting controversy and rally voters in the final stretch. Obama campaigned for the Democrats in Ohio on the 24th and Georgia on the 28th of last month, then visited Michigan on the 1st. Upon arriving in Detroit, Michigan, Obama defended El-Sayed, saying, “He disagreed with some of my policies even when I was president. The only person who agrees with everything I do is my wife, Michelle Obama.” The same day, the British newspaper The Guardian said that although Obama had been out of office for a long time, he played a major role in rallying the opposition as a political rival of Trump.

[email protected] Park Jong-won Reporter