President Donald Trump and former President Barack Obama headlined dueling rallies Sunday, sparring in unusually personal terms about health care and who deserves credit for the country's recent economic gains.
Obama and Trump offered competing visions for the country in a split screen of campaigning, seeking to galvanize voter turnout in the fight to control Congress and governors' mansions.
In Macon, Ga., Trump declared that Obama "did not tell the truth" when he told Americans "You can keep your doctor, you can keep your plan" under his signature health care legislation.
"He said it 28 times, and it wasn't true," Trump told the crowd.
Obama delivered his own critique of Trump, accusing the president and Republicans of "just making stuff up" and mocking them for claiming ownership of economic gains that began on his watch.
"The economy created more jobs in my last 21 months than it has in the 21 months since I left office," Obama said in Gary, Ind. "So, when you hear these Republicans bragging about, 'Look how good the economy is,' where do you think that started? Somebody had to clean it up. That's what a progressive agenda did."
Obama has taken on a more public role this fall after refraining from offering a full-blown counterpoint to Trump's policies, which have sought to dismantle Obama's legacy.
Democrats are counting on wresting control of the House from Republicans and hoping for a longshot series of wins to take back the Senate as well. But Republicans are optimistic they can gain seats in a Senate map heavy on red states.
On the Sunday morning news shows, leaders of both parties voiced cautious optimism about their chances Tuesday. Democrats need to gain 23 seats to retake the House and two seats to reclaim a Senate majority.
In an appearance on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos, Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said he wouldn't make predictions about how the election will go, but he called it a "sea change" that there is still a "narrow path to the majority" in the Senate for the Democratic Party.
Van Hollen, chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, credited individual candidates with focusing on the issues that matter in their home states.
Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., said that Republicans would not only "hold the majority -- I believe we're going to add to it."
In remarks before leaving the White House for Sunday's rallies, Trump predicted that his campaign-trail efforts had made a difference in "five or six or seven" of this year's Senate races.
On Sunday, Obama took aim at Trump, telling the crowd that "the character of our country is on the ballot" and accusing Republicans of "shamelessly" lying.
"Unlike some people, I don't just make stuff up when I'm talking," Obama said at a rally to support Sen. Joe Donnelly, D-Ind. "I've got facts to back me up. I believe in fact-based campaigning. I believe in reality-based governance."
Hammering on a theme that Democratic candidates have made a centerpiece of their efforts to retake control of Congress, he contended that if Republicans "want to stand up and defend the fact that they tried to take away your health care, they should do so" rather than "pretend they didn't do it."
Later, at a rally for Illinois gubernatorial nominee J.B. Pritzker and other candidates in Chicago, he suggested that Republicans were supporting efforts to make it more difficult for people to vote.
"Why is it that we kind of take for granted, like, one party that specifically institutes programs to prevent people from voting? It's a very undemocratic idea," he said.
Trump mentioned Obama by name several times during his rally for Georgia Republican gubernatorial nominee Brian Kemp in Macon, Ga., the first of two such gatherings the president attended Sunday. At one point, Trump suggested that his own crowds were bigger than those at Obama's recent events and appeared to voice dissatisfaction with news coverage of the rallies.
"They'll say, 'President Trump and former President Obama had wonderful crowds,'" Trump said of the media.
Neither side wanted to leave anything on the field in the final weekend leading up to Tuesday's elections. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee spent $650,000 in the final stretch on advertising on black radio stations to mobilize black voters.
Voters in both parties said they were paying attention.
"I've never been so sleepless, so restless as I have been" since Trump was elected, Sudi Farokhnia, a risk manager in Orange County, Calif., said before leaving a rally to volunteer for Democratic congressional candidate Katie Porter, who is challenging Republican Rep. Mimi Walters.
Elsewhere in Orange County, Kellie Hachten, a 53-year old director of hospitality, drove to a special mobile polling station so she could cast a ballot for her embattled congressman, Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, and other Republicans.
Hachten is registered with neither party and voted for Obama before siding with Trump in 2016. The Democrats' opposition to Trump infuriates her. "They just hate him as a person so much they can't see what he's done for the country," Hachten said.
Sisters Denise Tucker and Mary Raybon brought a half-dozen relatives to the rally in Gary, Ind. Raybon, 65, said she's tried to explain to young people the importance of this election. "They'll be around a lot longer than I will."
ECONOMY, IMMIGRATION
A monthly jobs report Friday showed that hiring and wages grew more than they have in nearly a decade, a boon for Trump and Republicans on the verge of the election. But to the chagrin of some leading members of his party, Trump has responded by de-emphasizing the economy and stoking fears about illegal immigration in an attempt to increase Republican turnout.
Late last week, Trump's campaign announced that it was spending $1.5 million on a TV ad featuring footage of Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant who was convicted of killing two sheriff's deputies in California in 2014.
"They all say, 'Speak about the economy. Speak about the economy,' " Trump told a crowd in Huntington, W.Va., on Friday night. "Well, we have the greatest economy in the history of our country, but sometimes it's not as exciting to talk about the economy, right?"
Trump took a particularly harsh line on the issue Sunday as he vowed to cut foreign aid to Central American nations he said had done nothing to stop a group of migrants traveling toward the United States.
"How about that caravan? Do you want to let that caravan just pour in?" Trump asked in Macon, as the crowd answered with a chant of, "Build that wall."
The group of migrants now numbers about 4,000 and is in Mexico, hundreds of miles from the U.S. border. Trump, who has ordered more than 7,000 active-duty troops to deploy along the Mexican border, described the approaching caravan as "an invasion."
Republican National Committee Chairman Ronna McDaniel defended the president's ramped-up rhetoric on immigration and race, arguing that it's possible to focus on several issues at once.
"Well, I'm with him," she said in an interview on CNN's State of the Union when asked about Trump's comments on the economy. "He's talking about both... . He can talk about multiple things at once."
Separately, the White House pushed back against claims that Trump's recent steps to secure the U.S. southern border were motivated by the upcoming election.
Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said in an interview with CBS' Face the Nation that the president's moves had nothing to do with electoral politics.
"I've been involved in scores of conversations about stopping illegal immigration from Mexico and never once has there been a discussion of the political impact in U.S. domestic politics," Pompeo said. "It has always been about securing the safety of the American people and securing our southern border."
Information for this article was contributed by by Felicia Sonmez, Anne Gearan, Dan Lamothe and Vanessa Williams of The Washington Post; and by Ken Thomas, Jill Colvin, Zeke Miller, Sara Burnett, Nicholas Riccardi, Robert Baum, Tom Beaumont, Michael Blood, Bob Christie, John D. Hanna, Benjamin Nadler, Juana Summers, Terry Spencer, Amy Taxin and Lyndsay Whitehurst of The Associated Press.
A Section on 11/05/2018