COLUMBUS – President Donald Trump made sure Ohioans remember that he pushed the Big Ten to play football after the season had initially been canceled amid concerns about the coronavirus pandemic.
Trump held a big rally in Circleville, about 30 miles from the Ohio State campus, not long after the Buckeyes won their delayed season opener over Nebraska Saturday afternoon.
The Big Ten had initially scuttled fall sports but did an about face last month on football amid pressure from Trump as well as athletes, coaches, fans and college towns that rely on football Saturdays to fill restaurants and hotels and provide much-needed tax revenue.
Trump told supporters, “I know that life in Ohio is not complete without the glory of Ohio State football.”
The crowd watched the Nebraska-OSU game on large screens set up by the Trump campaign before the president’s arrival. Trump joked later that he worried they would have been in a foul mood had the Buckeyes lost.
The Big Ten includes schools clustered in some of the battleground states critical to his reelection effort, including Ohio, Iowa, Minnesota, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump assured supporters at weekend rallies in Ohio and elsewhere that “we’re rounding the turn” on the coronavirus at the same time cases are spiking and the news broke that the vice president’s top aide is now infected.
His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, told supporters that he understands the public health reasons for campaigning at a distance.
Biden held two drive-in rallies in Pennsylvania on Saturday and has said for months he expects to win a state that could play a critical role in deciding next month’s election.
Biden told supporters that he misses up-close campaigning, but doesn’t want his events to “superspreaders,” a barb seemingly aimed at Trump, whose rallies came at a time of rising coronavirus cases.
Trump’s events in Circleville, North Carolina and Wisconsin come as the U.S. has hit a daily record of coronavirus cases with more than 83,000 reported infections.
The U.S. death toll has grown to nearly 224,00, according to the tally published by Johns Hopkins University. The total U.S. caseload reported Friday was 83,757, topping the 77,362 cases reported on July 16.
Trump cast his ballot Saturday morning in West Palm Beach, Florida, and he tells reporters afterward: “I voted for a guy named Trump.”
A coalition of voter advocacy groups dropped a lawsuit Friday against Ohio’s strict rule limiting ballot drop boxes to one location per county, a coup for Trump’s reelection campaign in a key battleground state less than two weeks before the election.
The A. Philip Randolph Institute, the League of Women Voters of Ohio and the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio made the decision after the federal appellate court in Cincinnati set a timetable last week that pushed further activity in the case past Election Day.
The lawsuit’s end was also a win for Republican Secretary of State Frank LaRose, who issued the directive limiting drop box locations.
Six major Ohio cities, including Columbus, fought alongside the voting rights groups to expand access to off-site ballot drop-off locations, an option that has grown in popularity amid the coronavirus pandemic and concerns about the reliability of voting by mail.
Before the Trump campaign got involved, LaRose had said repeatedly that he would support allowing additional drop boxes if it was clear he had the legal authority to do so. He never followed through, though, despite courts at the county, state and federal level affirming he had the power. All criticized the order as an unreasonable impediment on voters, though only two of the three blocked it.
LaRose did issue a “clarification” to his initial one-box-per-county order, allowing counties to set up drop boxes “outside” their offices but, he said, still on site.
The two versions of his order have been blocked and unblocked numerous times as the legal dispute made its way through the courts.
Julie Carr Smyth, Associated Press, contributed to this article