Campaign heats up in swing states

Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden met with union workers in Pennsylvania on Labor Day while also looking to capitalize on what a magazine reported as derogatory comments made by President Donald Trump about fallen soldiers.

The swing states — mostly in the formerly heavily industrialized Rust Belt — of which Pennsylvania is one, are again expected to play a prominent role in the Nov 3 election.

Labor Day typically marks the unofficial start to the fall campaign season as candidates ramp up their activity. But Monday's events played out this year against the backdrop of a pandemic that has disrupted traditional campaigning, sending much of the candidates' pitches online.

Biden's trip on Monday began another round of travel to battleground states this week by both him and Trump as some opinion polls show the race tightening with fewer than 60 days to go until the election.

Trump has faced a new controversy after The Atlantic magazine, citing four unnamed people, reported last week that he had referred to Marines buried in an American cemetery near Paris as "losers" and "suckers" and declined to visit their graves during a 2018 trip to France. Trump has vehemently denied the report.

"A massive Disinformation Campaign is going on by the Democrats, their partner, the Fake News Media, & Big Tech," Trump tweeted Saturday. "They create false stories and then push them like has never been done before, even beyond the 2016 Campaign. It imperils our Country, and must stop now. Victory 2020!"

Biden, 77, met Monday with three union workers who also served in the US military, at a home in Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

"Do you think most of those guys and women are suckers?" Biden asked.

"For years, President Trump and Republicans have waged a war on America's labor unions," Biden tweeted Sunday. "It will end on my watch."

Trump, 74, held a news conference Monday at the White House, promoting it earlier in the day with a tweet saying: "Jobs number, and the Economic comeback, are looking GREAT. Happy Labor Day!"

Trump plans to visit North Carolina, Florida, Michigan and Pennsylvania later in the week. All four states will be crucial to the prospects of both candidates.

Biden's campaign has said that as many as 16 states could be up for grabs in November.

Polls point to the economy as a relative strength for Trump, even with the labor market still strained by the economic slowdown that materialized from the response to the novel coronavirus pandemic, which has put millions out of work.

Tim Murtaugh, Trump's reelection campaign communications director, said last week that Biden had begun traveling more frequently out of his home state of Delaware because "he knows he is bleeding in the polls".

Biden met on Monday with the leader of the largest federation of US labor unions, AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka, at the group's state headquarters in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.

Biden's campaign was expected to collect the endorsements of three unions: the Laborers' International Union of North America, the International Union of Elevator Constructors and the National Federation of Federal Employees.

Biden and Trumka, in a joint op-ed essay Monday in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, criticized Trump's labor policies while touting plans to invest in green energy jobs and support workers' right to unionize.

Early voting in Pennsylvania starts in mid-September.

Polls in the Keystone State have had Biden in the lead, but averages show that margin narrowing to roughly 4 to 5 percentage points, down from about 8 points in late June. Biden is scheduled to be back in Pennsylvania on Friday.

Trump unexpectedly won the state in 2016 by less than a percentage point over Hillary Clinton as part of an electoral sweep through the country's former manufacturing heartland, including Wisconsin and Michigan. Biden will visit Michigan midweek.

Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris on Monday met the family of a Wisconsin man shot by police last month in a visit to a swing state.

Harris met with Jacob Blake's father, two sisters and members of his legal team at the airport in Milwaukee while Blake's mother and attorney Ben Crump joined by phone. The younger Blake also joined the conversation by phone. Biden met with the family last week in Milwaukee before visiting Kenosha, the city where police shot Blake.

Trump last week toured an area in Kenosha devastated by violence after the shooting but did not meet with the Blake family.

Harris also met with International Brotherhood of Electric Workers union members and black business owners in Milwaukee, while Vice-President Mike Pence, also in Wisconsin, toured an energy facility in La Crosse before delivering a speech that touched on jobs, the economy and protests in Kenosha.

"We will have law and order in every city in this country for every American of every race and creed," Pence said.

At the White House, Trump criticized Biden as incapable of handling the coronavirus and reviving the economy and pledged his own "undying loyalty to the American worker".

The American economy has been steadily rebounding as many businesses have reopened and rehired some laid-off employees, but only about half of the 22 million jobs that vanished in the pandemic have been restored.

At his White House news conference, Trump also mentioned the notion of "decoupling" the US economy from China's.

"We will make America into the manufacturing superpower of the world and will end our reliance on China once and for all," Trump said. "Whether it's decoupling or putting in massive tariffs like I've been doing already, we will end our reliance on China, because we can't rely on China."

Trump has made getting tough on China a key part of his campaign. He also has accused Biden of being soft on Beijing.

Despite the approach in Washington, many individual US states have fared well in economic exchanges with China.

Representatives of China and Tennessee, a reliably Republican state, met in Beijing on Sunday to discuss the outlook on Chinese investment in the US state amid the decoupling talk, the South China Morning Post reported.

The discussions were part of the "North American Chinese Investment Summit", the only American-themed event at the second annual China International Fair for Trade in Services, which opened on Friday and will conclude Wednesday.

Bill Lee, the Republican governor of Tennessee, made a keynote speech to the event via video, according to the newspaper. In the first half of 2019, Tennessee ranked fourth among all US states in imports from China and 16th in exports, according to US News and World Report.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this story.