Can Donald Trump snatch another win from jaws of defeat?

US President Donald Trump is hitting the campaign trail hard this week, hoping to turn his fortunes in the final days of a presidential election that most forecasts suggest he will lose. His Democratic challenger, Joe Biden, has a wide 8-10 percentage point lead in national opinion polls. Mr Biden is staging fewer and smaller rallies, aiming to win toss-up states and promoting a plan to tackle Covid-19 for when he runs the White House. But a cloud hangs over the Biden campaign. Four years ago, Mr Trump was trailing badly behind Hillary Clinton, yet he managed an upset victory on election night with relatively small majorities in key battleground states. "A few days out, the picture of this race is pretty clear," tweeted Dave Wasserman, a forecaster at The Cook Political Report . "Biden’s lead is larger and more stable than Clinton’s in '16. I’ve seen … almost enough.” Other top analysts read the data in a similar way. Mr Biden’s lead in polls has been large and steady. Mr Trump has had consistently poor approval ratings for his presidency and his Covid-19 response has been panned, they say. This election is not a rerun of 2016. "The polls could still be wrong. But unlike in 2016, where you could see the warning signs, I don't see much cause for concern at the moment," tweeted Nate Jones, a polling analyst with The New York Times . But The Guardian's US data editor, Mona Chalabi, urged caution. Pollsters missed many Trump voters in 2016 and those same people may be unwilling to share their true voting intentions in telephone surveys this time around, Ms Chalabi says. Messages from the candidates on Monday fed into the same narrative. “We’re going to take our democracy back,” Mr Biden bullishly declared. He urged voters to mark ballots in the “most important election of our lifetimes”. Meanwhile, Mr Trump blasted the "corrupt media" for deliberately overstating the threat from coronavirus, which has claimed More than 225,000 lives and infected almost 8.7 million people in the US, to hurt his chances on November 3. "The fake news media is riding Covid, Covid, Covid all the way to the election," Mr Trump tweeted on Monday. "Cases [are] up because we test, test, test." The president held three rallies in Pennsylvania on Monday and was booked for others on Tuesday in Michigan and Wyoming. Mr Trump clawed out victories in the three traditional Democratic strongholds in 2016 and hopes to win them again to keep the White House. On Tuesday he was also set to address crowds in Nebraska, a reliably conservative state, but also an outlier that does not automatically give all its electoral votes to one candidate, leaving Mr Biden with a chance to add to his tally there. The president's children, Ivanka, Eric and Donald Trump Jr, fanned out across Florida, Arizona and other battlegrounds. Vice President Mike Pence was also on the trail rather than self-isolating after one of his staffers tested positive for Covid-19. The Biden campaign was less frenetic. On Monday, Mr Biden stayed close to home for a campaign stop in Wilmington, Delaware, where his 26-point lead over Mr Trump required little buttressing. On Tuesday, he was headed to Georgia, where the two are neck and neck. Mr Trump calls his rival “basement Joe” for his stay-at-home campaign. Mr Biden appears to be comfortable sitting on his lead, buoyed by two passable TV debate performances and perhaps mitigating against any last-minute gaffes. Greenbacks tell another part of the story. Mr Biden raised $130 million during the first half of October and spent more than $145m. In that time, Mr Trump raised nearly $43.6m and spent $63.1m, according to filings with the Federal Election Commission. That gives Mr Biden a $107m cash advantage over Mr Trump. But the figures do not include fundraising by other political committees, and Mr Trump managed to win in 2016 despite Ms Clinton’s bigger war chest. Early voting may be a decisive factor. By Monday, 58.6 million ballots had been cast by mail and at early voting sites, already more than 2016's totals. Many Americans are keen to avoid crowds on November 3 because of Covid-19. Nothing either candidate says, does or tweets at this stage can change those votes. Early-voting turnout appears to favour Democrats but such data is not a good indicator of election outcomes. At this stage, the Trump campaign strategy appears to involve turning out the same blue-collar voters in swing states who pushed him above the 270 electoral college votes to secure him the White House in 2016. To accomplish this, Mr Trump needs to win the Republican-leaning and battleground states of Florida, Arizona, Georgia, Iowa, North Carolina and Texas, which he won last time, and beat the odds in Pennsylvania and either Wisconsin or Michigan. For Nate Silver, another acclaimed election analyst, this is a long shot. Mr Trump could surprise the pundits in 2020 just as he did in 2016, but the clock is ticking, many votes are already cast and the polls are bleaker. “There are several theories for why Mr Trump could win that very probably aren’t true,” Mr Silver tweeted. “But if you add up a lot of longshot possibilities, it’s not that hard to get to a 10-15 per cent chance, which is something worth taking seriously.”

Can Donald Trump snatch another win from jaws of defeat?

Forecasters predict a win for Joe Biden