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Mr. Biden has long been an intense target of Mr. Trump and his allies over the range of business ventures he pursued around the world during his father’s time as vice president and beyond

The investigation could also complicate Mr. Biden’s efforts to instill public confidence that the department can operate independent of the personal interests of the president after it became deeply politicized under President Trump. L

“It’s not my Justice Department. It’s the people’s Justice Department.”

t also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son, a case his political opponents are certain to seize on to try to damage the early days of his presidency.

Mr. Biden and a group of partners — including his uncle James Biden, the president-elect’s brother — were also involved in negotiations about a joint venture with a Chinese energy and finance company called CEFC China Energy in 2017, documents provided by a jilted former business partner show.

The Republican report, which was released weeks before Election Day in an apparent effort to damage the Biden campaign, found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president.

Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden. The Post, which obtained materials from Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani, reported that the laptop had been seized by the F.B.I.

The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.

Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.

they have also urged the president not to interrupt Mr. Biden repeatedly

The president has signaled he intends to focus on Mr. Biden’s son Hunter and his business dealings, after an unsubstantiated New York Post report on that subject

. But some advisers fear he will not be able to control himself and will attack the younger Mr. Biden in a way that engenders sympathy for the Biden family, a dynamic that unfolded in the first debate when Mr. Trump mocked Hunter Biden’s history of battling drug addiction.

“The president, in order to have a successful debate, has to go on offense without being offensive,”

Mr. Biden, for his part, is working to protect his advantage by relying on arguments that have defined his pitch for months: that he is the candidate best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic and its attendant economic fallout, and that he can restore stability and a measure of civility to the office after Mr. Trump’s turbulent tenure.

In particular, allies expect that he will face questioning on expanding the Supreme Court, a matter he has repeatedly dodged, though he has said that he will clarify his position before Election Day

Last week, Trump advisers tried gently suggesting, as they prepared him for his NBC town hall event with Savannah Guthrie, that he needed to be more controlled and less caustic than in the first debate. Aides claim he has processed that information, though he was combative and refused to disavow a conspiracy theory movement during the first part of that appearance, too.

Mr. O’Donnell, the Republican strategist, suggested that Mr. Trump’s frequent interruptions in the previous debate prevented viewers from absorbing some of Mr. Biden’s shakier responses

The president’s advisers have also gone over with him his third debate against Hillary Clinton in 2016, which they believe was his best of the three he had in that campaign, in part because he was relatively articulate while being specific in discussing policies, despite the moment when Mrs. Clinton called him a “puppet” of Russia and his response was: “No puppet, no puppet. You’re the puppet.”

“He does need to communicate to swing voters that the real stakes in this election are not the past, not even the present, but they are the future, of rebuilding the economy.”

Mr. Biden’s advisers see the race as a referendum on Mr. Trump’s leadership during the pandemic, and they view the debate as another chance to highlight differences with the president as coronavirus cases rise across the country

Mr. Biden is expected to highlight his own plans around health care and reviving the economy in a week when Mr. Trump has sharply criticized Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert. The former vice president’s team has also signaled that it will cast personal attacks as an attempted diversion from the most urgent issues facing the nation. And some close to the Biden campaign have pointed to polls that showed a backlash to Mr. Trump’s first debate performance and his sharp personal attacks.

A number of Biden allies said in interviews that there was nothing wrong with a flash of righteous anger. But they said that the wisest course was to dismiss any personal attacks by pivoting back to voters’ more tangible concerns, something Mr. Biden tried to do in the first debate by noting that many Americans have family members who struggle with addiction.

Senator Kamala Harris, suggested on Wednesday that it was unlikely he would turn to attacks on Mr. Trump’s children

Biden calls for a $15 minimum wage, increased Social Security benefits for the poorest Americans, and strengthening the power of unions to organize and bargain. He advocates a substantial program to tackle infrastructure, and a sweeping gun control plan.

He proposes to assist low-income schools by tripling the amount of federal assistance to fund universal pre-K and raise teachers’ salaries. A frequent critic, German Lopez of Vox, describes his proposal for criminal justice reform as “one of the most comprehensive among presidential campaigns, taking on various parts of the criminal justice system at once.” And he is committed to fighting voter suppression and expanding the right to vote.

When it comes to the environment, even the progressive Sunrise Movement (which supports Sanders) calls Biden’s plan to combat climate change “comprehensive.” Focused on achieving clean energy and eliminating harmful emissions, it would cost $1.7 trillion over a decade—which, while far less the cost of the Green New Deal, represents a giant leap forward.

His immigration plan is smart and balanced. While avoiding the extremes of decriminalizing the border or abolishing ICE, it protects Dreamers, provides a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants, welcomes increased immigration, and reverses our shameful and sadistic maltreatment of asylum seekers and their children.

How does Biden propose to raise revenue? By tax increases of $3.4 trillion over a decade, virtually all derived from raising rates for corporations and wealthy—including treating capital gains as ordinary income.

The relevant question is not how all this compares to Sanders’s unachievable wish list, but to the reality of America under Donald Trump. Anyone who dismisses the difference is not a progressive, but a myopic and politically-infantile purist.

Still, at its heart this election is about one man: Trump. That’s why it’s imperative that Biden daily remind voters, in style and substance, that he is Trump’s antithesis: decent, dignified, compassionate, and competent; a man they can trust.

To a great extent, Biden is less a leader than a vehicle. Which means that his campaign will need to present Biden at his best—the warm and engaging guy who looks like a “can-do” president.

As a child, Biden struggled to conquer a congenital stutter he fights against still, which may explain some of his verbal tics in debate. To control stuttering requires immense concentration and willpower: that Biden became a politician is a triumph—and something of a wonder

that’s the Biden his campaign needs voters to internalize: a leader with the resilience to conquer adversity and come out stronger and more compassionate than before. Which is a pretty fair metaphor for the America which, millions hope, will follow Donald Trump.

A Morning Consult poll in February showed that 30 percent of independent voters were less likely to support Biden because of controversy regarding his son. Republican senators are primed to use their subpoena power to “investigate” Hunter and thereby deep-dye the damage to his father, undercutting his appeal as an ordinary guy who exemplifies middle-class values.

Biden and Trump are heading into their final planned showdown of the 2020 campaign, with 12 days to go until Election Day. And their respective teams are studying the first debate, which delved into chaos as Trump continually interrupted Biden.

Kellyanne Conway, who was part of the team that helped prepare the President for the first debate inside the White House map room, says she warned him not to interrupt too much.

Conway and other Trump advisers are renewing their argument to him ahead of the last debate that the more Trump let's Biden speak, the worse it is for Biden.

"Biden gets flummoxed fairly easily when he's trying to remember a contrived or practiced phrase or soundbite and let him do that. Let him have the airtime all to himself so people can really see what happens with Joe Biden when he's left just with them, the audience at home and Joe Biden's thoughts," Conway said.

"People who don't like hearing about plans and who want to see a food fight may end up being disappointed, but that's what Joe Biden wants to talk about is the specifics related to what he's going to do for people," said former Democratic Michigan Gov. Jennifer Granholm, who helped prepare Biden for debates against Sarah Palin and Elizabeth Warren and is also a CNN contributor.

The economy is the one issue polls consistently show the President competitive with Biden in the eyes of voters.

Trump sources say they really hope he avoids hitting his new favorite target, Dr. Anthony Fauci, who is one of the most popular figures in America right now. One source told CNN this week that Trump was told in private conversations that hitting Fauci as he has been doing is "the dumbest thing in the history of politics."

"Definitely more levity, even though there's gravity right now in our country," is what Conway recommends for the President.

Ronald Reagan famously took concerns that he was too old for a second term head on, by saying "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit for political purposes my opponent's youth and inexperience," he said, speaking of Walter Mondale, who even broke into laughter.

"'You know Joe, I'll promise in my second term I'll tweet less, but you have to tax less. Are you willing to make that?'" said Conway, pretending to be the President at the debate.

Also, if Trump brings up Hunter Biden's business dealings in China, advisers are hoping that Biden pivots to a New York Times report this week that revealed the President has a Chinese bank account and may even pay taxes to the government there.

"We know that he continues to do business with China because he has a secret Chinese bank account. How is that possible?" asked the former president.

"I should have said this is a clownish undertaking instead of calling him a clown," Biden said.

Aides say they believe Biden's direct to camera approach worked well for him during the first debate, and are hoping he can do more of that, saying it helped him to not just tune out Trump, but more importantly to connect with voters.

Biden and Harris, by contrast, talked about the national interest and urged the public to support their plans for the future.

Biden said he will issue a mandate for all Americans to wear masks for a little more than 3 months -- long enough to help halt and reverse the surging infection numbers. "Just 100 days to mask, not forever," he told Tapper. "100 days. And I think we'll see a significant reduction."

That nuanced call to arms is a 180-degree reversal from Trump's steadfast refusal to order the use of masks and his plea to the public back in October

We've had a year of divisive bombast and boasting with Trump claiming the virus would vanish; that he accepted no responsibility for the failed national response; and finally threw up his hands at the over 276,000 deaths from the virus, saying "it is what it is."

"I alone can fix it." Biden and Harris, by contrast, are consistently talking about sharing responsibility with other actors -- Congress, Republicans, governors, and allied nations overseas.

Biden estimated that "we can safely open those elementary schools" -- but at an estimated price tag of $100 billion, which he called on Congress to supply.

"Our Justice Department is going to operate independently," Biden said. "I'm not gonna be telling them to prosecute A, B or C." Another sharp contrast with Trump, who fired his first attorney general and routinely urged his second to go after Trump's political opponents.

Even the relationship between Biden and Harris appears to be based on conversation and consensus rather than firm hierarchy, despite the fact that the two exchanged tough words on the campaign trail during the Democratic primaries

Harris pointed to a recent Zoom meeting at which the incoming administration brought together labor leaders and corporate CEOs. "There's a consensus on what needs to be done" to get Americans back to work, she said.

n this case, voters chose to replace the singular, disruptive ego-driven approach of Trump with an administration that understands that the most potent power of an American president is his ability to convene, coax and cajole our vast nation into moving forward together.

"You're not gonna see me making policy by tweets," Biden told Tapper.

It also means that Mr. Biden will most likely come into office as the Justice Department is actively investigating his son,

The tax issues came to the attention of F.B.I. agents after they opened the money laundering investigation into Hunter Biden’s financial affairs in late 2018, under the attorney general at the time, Jeff Sessions, according to several people familiar with the inquiry.

“We’ve got to get the attorney general to act,” Mr. Trump said

By early 2017, Mr. Biden and his first wife, Kathleen, who were then estranged, owed $313,970 in taxes, and had “maxed-out credit-card debt” and “double mortgages on both real properties they own,” according to a filing she submitted in their divorce.

Mr. Trump’s impeachment centered on allegations that he abused his powers over American foreign policy in part to damage the Biden campaign by pressuring the government of Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden’s dealings there.

Efforts by Mr. Trump and his supporters to damage Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign took on new urgency in October after The New York Post published reports based on files from a laptop that appeared to have belonged to Hunter Biden.

The next year, the I.R.S. issued a lien against the pair, who were by then divorced, for $112,805 in unpaid taxes from 2015. Those taxes appear to have been paid off by March of this year, when the lien was released.

The Biden team has rejected some of the claims made in the Post articles, but has not disputed the authenticity of the files upon which they were based.

Mr. Trump and his allies openly pressed the Justice Department to disclose negative information about Mr. Biden ahead of the election, but investigators did not make overt moves that would have exposed the investigation before the ballots were cast.

: This is false. Biden said in an August interview with ABC that he would shut down the country if scientists told him it was necessary -

Trump seems to be referencing findings from a 2015 inspector general report that examined a backlog of healthcare applications at the Department of Veterans Affairs. The report found more than 307,000 records that remained pending in a VA enrollment system were for people who had already died, according to social security records.

It's not clear Biden even knew about Trump's China travel restrictions when he called Trump xenophobic on the day the restrictions were unveiled

Trump claimed 308,000 "military people" died because Biden "couldn't provide them proper health care."

Addressing his opponent, Trump said, "I closed it, and you said, 'He's xenophobic. He's a racist and he's xenophobic,' because you didn't think I should have closed our country."

the report did not reach conclusions about whether lack of health care caused those deaths,

Huckabee's comments came after Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller said on Monday that in this week's debate the president will bring up allegations that Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden met with a Ukrainian business associate of his son, Hunter, as reported by the New York Post last week. 

Democrats, including House Intelligence Committee Chairman Rep. Adam Schiff, D-Calif., who said on CNN the emails are part of a smear campaign coming "from the Kremlin," have slammed the report. But Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe said on FOX Business on Monday that there is no intelligence to support Schiff's assertion. 

"I think Joe Biden is compromised ... Joe Biden has now dodged this multiple times. Are you the 'big guy?' Are you the 'chairman?' Is Hunter Biden handling family expenses and setting aside money for you?" Miller said on FOX Business

"If Kristen Welker, the moderator, doesn't bring it up, I think you're pretty safe to assume that the president will. Again, these are real simple questions."

The comments by Miller could indicate a renewed focus on attacks on Biden's family from the Trump campaign as the presidential election is just over two weeks away

"Who built the cages, Joe?" Trump said. 

"You have 525 kids not knowing where in God's name they're going to be and lost their parents," Biden replied, bringing up the family separation policy again.

After Welker asked Biden about whether increasing the minimum wage to $15 per hour might hurt small businesses, Biden appeared not to understand the question and advocated for small-business bailouts. 

This exchange may be considered Biden's biggest blunder of the evening, as he appeared to initially completely miss the point of Welker's question. The moment also played into Trump's larger economic message, which his allies have been practically begging him to highlight in the late stages of the campaign. 

The comments from Biden were in response to claims from Trump that he is "the least racist person in this room.""I got criminal justice reform done and prison reform, and opportunity zones," the president said, elaborating on his race record. "I took care of black colleges and universities."

"Anybody responsible for that many deaths should not remain president of the United States of America," Biden said of Trump's handling of the pandemic that's killed over 200,000 Americans. "We can’t lock ourselves in a basement like he does. ... He has this thing about living in a basement," Trump said, echoing his previous exhortations to Americans to not be afraid of the virus. 

The ad, which is now inactive, accuses the 2020 Democratic presidential candidate of "blackmailing" US allies, alleging impropriety while he was vice president and his son Hunter served on the board of a Ukrainian energy company. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by Joe or Hunter Biden. The ad ends with the narrator saying, "Send Quid Pro Joe Biden into retirement."

Warren recently ran a false ad on Facebook deliberately to draw attention to the issue. Facebook then tweeted at Warren that the "FCC doesn't want broadcast companies censoring candidates' speech." It continued, "We agree it's better to let voters -- not companies -- decide."

Under current policy, Facebook exempts ads by politicians from third-party fact-checking -- a loophole, both Biden and Warren allege, that allows Zuckerberg to continue taking money from President Donald Trump's campaign and its supporters despite Trump's ads spreading lies about Biden and his son. While it allows politicians to run ads with false information, its policy does not allow PACs to do so. Facebook does not fact check ads from PACS before they run on the platform.

Last week the Republican National Committee launched a digital advertising campaign, raising questions about whether the university is keeping documents under seal related to the Reade allegation. One of the ads alleges: “University of Delaware is complicit in sexual assault cover-up.”

Biden’s defenders argue he is merely following precedent: past senators who ran for president have not been required to disclose all their papers. But Fitton contended: “It’s not that they’re being required; the question is whether the records are available under law. If he had them at his house, maybe there’s an argument, but they’re not at his house. They’re at a university and subject to Foia [Freedom of Information Act].”

“curating the collection”, a process likely to continue well into 2021, and the papers will not be released until two years after Biden retires from public life.

Furthermore, critics on the progressive wing of the Democratic party would be eager to scrutinize Biden’s links to the financial services industry, a big player in Delaware. Conservatives might hunt for documents linking Biden’s son, Hunter, to overseas business interests. In a replay of the 2016 campaign, when he encouraged Russia to hack Clinton’s emails, Donald Trump may welcome a chance to make mischief by demanding “transparency”.

There are practical objections, Sabato added, but Republicans will seek to turn those to their advantage. “First of all, you couldn’t publish it all or even open it all. He had an incredibly long career, a 50-year political career, and there are some personal items in there as well, from what I understand. How could you even manage to make it available to researchers, much less the general public, just a few months ahead of an election? It’s not going to happen.

“His papers from the Senate were at the University of Tennessee and his opponents kept quacking about the fact that we had locked them up, literally, because we didn’t want to go through every morning having some 12-year-old take five words out of a 300-word essay and have to defend it all day.

“So we just said to hell with you, if that’s what the fight is going to be about, then the fight will be about not getting access to the papers as opposed to what’s in the papers. And it’s a little hard to make the case that Biden won’t give up the papers at the University of Delaware while Trump has been in federal court for 27 years to protect his financial records.”

Trump's campaign has suggested that length of time will provide Biden with a chance to talk himself into a corner

past performance suggests Trump lacks the self-control to stand quietly by and find out

His campaign has already attacked the commission and the President has a history of launching sexist attacks against female debate moderators.

The national surge is significant: Johns Hopkins University found the United States reported over 60,000 new cases on Tuesday and 58,000 on Monday,

The surges are dominating local news coverage, too, meaning most voters are heading to the polls with frequent reminders of the ongoing pandemic.

The candidates will have their microphones cut off while their opponents respond to the first question of each of the debate's six segments.

Thursday night's debate is effectively the last major hurdle that must be cleared by Biden, a candidate who -- despite his reputation for gaffes, and some minor stumbles along the way -- has largely stuck to the same message since launching his campaign in April 2019.

The most persistent one he's ducked: Whether he would back some progressives' push to add seats to a Supreme Court that could soon see a 6-3 conservative majority.

By turning in solid performances in debates and interviews, Biden has also avoided any moments that could look -- to an audience of millions of people -- anything like the mental decline that Trump's campaign has baselessly claimed the 77-year-old former vice president faces.

Biden is currently embroiled in scandal -- most of it focusing on unproven allegations about his son Hunter Biden.

None of it seems to have moved voters who aren't already part of Trump's base, and attacking Biden's surviving son could also backfire.

Will Biden respond aggressively, by pointing out this week's New York Times report that Trump maintains a bank account in China under a corporate name or that his own children and business have benefitted financially from his presidency? Or will he try not to be baited -- demonstrating to voters his eagerness to take the high road, though potentially leaving some of Trump's attacks unanswered?

Biden also has work to do, mainly with Black and Latino voters. They're supporting him by big margins, but not quite to the level that Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama enjoyed.

The growing appreciation for Mr. Putin was captured in recent polling from the Economist and YouGov, which showed he was viewed more favorably by Republicans than Mr. Biden. Another recent poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found that 62 percent of Republicans believed Mr. Putin was a “stronger leader” than Mr. Biden.

That sentiment was echoed in an informal poll online on Wednesday, when a QAnon influencer asked followers in the Patriot Voice group on Telegram if they trusted Mr. Putin. Nearly everyone who responded to the question said the same thing: yes.

Mr. Giuliani expressed frustration with the way the news media was keeping its distance, and said he would have preferred to have pushed out the materials earlier.“I would have loved to have had this six months ago,” he said in a recent interview. “It would have solved a lot of my problems.”

Mr. Guo and Mr. Bannon began working together after Mr. Bannon left the White House in 2017, quickly bonding over their mutual antipathy toward the Chinese Communist Party.

Mr. Guo, who is also known as Miles Kwok, left China in 2014, as the government there began leveling corruption allegations against his business associates and eventually Mr. Guo. He moved to New York, buying a $67.5 million apartment along Central Park and spending time aboard the Lady May.

Mr. Bannon asserted that the effort to limit the spread of the New York Post’s articles on social media had backfired, drawing more attention to them. “Social media overplayed this and did us a favor,” Mr. Bannon said.

At the same time Mr. Bannon and Mr. Giuliani were shopping the purported hard drive, two other efforts were afoot to disseminate related information on Hunter Biden.

More than anything, the race was defined by the pandemic that exploded into the public consciousness in March and that Mr. Trump has struggled to manage as both a health care and a political issue.

“The October surprise happened in March,”

“A pandemic, an economic downturn,” she said. “People decided a long time ago which side they were on. In the end, October was not surprising. Not this year.”

While polls in 2016 showed that many voters were choosing between two candidates they did not like, this time around, Mr. Biden is viewed favorably in many battleground states.

“The now instant availability of information to test the credibility of claims decreases the likelihood they will be launched and increases the likelihood they could backfire,” said Tim Pawlenty, the former Republican governor of Minnesota, who ran for his party’s presidential nomination in 2012.

The two biggest external shocks to the race were the death of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and the president’s hospitalization with the coronavirus in early October.

Mr. Trump’s bout with Covid-19, rather than rallying Americans around him, crystallized the dangers of his laissez-faire approach

“But the exogenous events — the bombshells of the Supreme Court vacancy and Trump’s illness — didn’t do much to alter the trajectory of the race. If anything, they marginally helped Biden. “

A Justice Department investigation he sought of the Obama administration’s role in examining his ties to Russia during the 2016 campaign will not be completed by Election Day. The federal government is not close to approving a vaccine. There was no big fall stimulus package. And a much-anticipated report ordered up by Senate Republicans into corruption allegations against Mr. Biden found no evidence of improper influence or wrongdoing by the former vice president.

But even some members of Mr. Trump’s own party have shrugged off Mr. Trump’s assertions about the accusations against Hunter Biden, which have largely been confined to Fox News and other conservative outlets. “I don’t think it moves a single voter,” Senator Ted Cruz, the Texas Republican whose own family was maligned by Mr. Trump during the 2016 primaries, told Axios.

The debate comes 12 days before Election Day, as many Americans have already cast ballots, and as polls show the president trailing nationally and confronting close races even in states he won handily four years ago.

But some advisers fear he will not be able to control himself and will attack the younger Mr. Biden in a way that engenders sympathy for the Biden family, a dynamic that unfolded in the first debate when Mr. Trump mocked Hunter Biden’s history of battling drug addiction.

Mr. Biden, for his part, is working to protect his advantage by relying on arguments that have defined his pitch for months: that he is the candidate best equipped to lead the nation out of the pandemic and its attendant economic fallout, and that he can restore stability and a measure of civility to the office after Mr. Trump’s turbulent tenure.

But his behavior in the second half of the town hall, during which he answered policy questions without attacking Ms. Guthrie, is what advisers hope to see from him on Thursday night.

“He does need to communicate to swing voters that the real stakes in this election are not the past, not even the present, but they are the future, of rebuilding the economy.”

Mr. Biden and his allies are skeptical that Mr. Trump will confine his remarks to such subjects.

Some might say reporters are "tough" on Biden when they demand more outrage about Trump. But that’s not holding him accountable. It’s demanding they sound as anti-Trump as they did.

If reporters are still begging Biden to bash Trump after two months in the White House, you'll know they don't believe any of their own rhetoric about holding people accountable.

and perhaps the hope that everything will work out for him in the end, the way it did four years ago when he surprised himself, his advisers and the world by winning the White House.

But by enclosing himself in the thin bubble of his own worldview, Mr. Trump may have further severed himself from the political realities of a country in crisis. And that, in turn, has helped enable Mr. Trump to wage a campaign offering no central message, no clear agenda for a second term and no answer to the woes of the pandemic.

Beyond the capital, though, some Republicans insist that Mr. Trump can again defy the odds, and that a devoted base will fuel a traditional G.O.P. surge in Election Day voters.

Seldom far from Mr. Trump’s thoughts, however, is the possibility of defeat — and the potential consequences of being ejected from the White House.

In unguarded moments, Mr. Trump has for weeks told advisers that he expects to face intensifying scrutiny from prosecutors if he loses. He is concerned not only about existing investigations in New York, but the potential for new federal probes as well, according to people who have spoken with him.

Mr. Trump’s advisers do continue to believe he has a realistic chance of besting Mr. Biden, but they concede it would take a last-minute breakthrough in one of the Great Lakes states where he is currently trailing.

The president himself has done little to strengthen his chances in the final days of the race.

He has frequently used his speeches to deliver long diatribes against Mr. Biden and his son, Hunter Biden, even though some Trump advisers believe the whole subject is a sideshow in the midst of a public-health disaster. But Trump associates say he simply enjoys attacking the Biden family.

What confounds some Republicans is how little Mr. Trump is discussing last month’s confirmation of Justice Amy Coney Barrett to the Supreme Court; some G.O.P. senators have made that achievement a centerpiece of their campaigns.

She says it’s the profanity that really gets to her, like the truck emblazoned with the slogan “Trump 2020 — [expletive] Your Feelings” in the pickup line at school.

Since the beginning of the election, the campaigns have lavished close to $200 million on Pennsylvania — $121.5 million from Team Biden, $74.2 million from Team Trump.

If you’ve ever felt starved for attention, ignored by the good and the great, come sit by me in Pennsylvania.

“It’s like being the most popular kid in high school,” a political ad maker, J.J. Balaban, said in an interview. “Everyone wants to talk to you.”

When I stay happily in my bubble in Center City, where the Biden posters are rivaled only by the “Black Lives Matter” signs, it’s hard not to be lulled into a sense of security, to think that the polls are right and that the Democrats have it in the bag.

Then I drive my teenager to the D.M.V. in Dublin, an hour north, and find the roads lined with cheering, honking, whooping Trump supporters, and I remember that there is another Pennsylvania.

Not all hunters vote Republican. Not all city dwellers vote Democratic. There are Biden signs on the lawns of a few brave Democrats in red neighborhoods. There are, undoubtedly, some quiet Trump voters, even in bluer-than-blue Center City.

I’ve already sent in my ballot, and per the state’s website (not that I was obsessively checking or anything), it has been received.

And he said Mr. Biden would raise people’s taxes. Mr. Biden’s tax hike plan would affect those making $400,000 and above.

More than 40 million people have already voted, according to data compiled by the U.S. Elections Project at the University of Florida.

He said the pandemic, which has killed more than 220,000 Americans, would have tested any president, “but this idea that somehow this White House has done anything but completely screw this up is just not true.”

In recent days, Mr. Trump has renewed his criticism of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert

Hunter Biden has denied any wrongdoing but said he exercised poor judgment by joining the board of an Ukrainian energy company while his father’s vice presidential duties included Ukraine. A recent investigation by Republican senators didn’t demonstrate that the former vice president sought the removal of Ukraine’s top prosecutor in 2016 to protect the company, Burisma Holdings, from investigation.