Washington: Donald Trump embarked Monday on a whirlwind final push across three states to stop Democ<\/b>
\nWashington: Donald Trump embarked Monday on a whirlwind final push across three states to stop Democrats from breaking his Republicans\u2019 stranglehold on the US Congress in midterm elections amounting to a battle for the soul of the turbulent country.
Cleveland, Ohio; Fort Wayne, Indiana; then Cape Girardeau, Missouri: it will be well after midnight before the real estate billionaire and populist showman gets back to the White House \u2014 and only a few hours more before polls open Tuesday across the world\u2019s largest economy.
\u201cEverything we have created and achieved is at stake on election day,\u201d Trump told a cheering crowd in Cleveland, as he kicked off his furious last round of campaigning.
\u201cIf the radical Democrats take power, they will take a wrecking ball to our economy and to our future.\u201d
Trump is not on the ballot in the midterms, in which the entire House of Representatives and a third of the Senate are up for grabs.
But in a hard-driving series of rallies around the country the most polarizing US president for decades has put himself at the center of every issue.
With a characteristic mix of folksiness, bombast and sometimes cruel humor, he says voters must choose between his stewardship of a booming economy and what he claims would be the Democrats\u2019 extreme-left policies.
The bid to make it all about Trump is a gamble, as is his growing shift from touting economic successes to bitter \u2014 critics say racist \u2014 claims that the country is under attack from illegal immigration.
In the run-up to Tuesday\u2019s vote Trump has sent thousands of soldiers to the Mexican border, suggested that illegal immigrants who throw stones should be shot, and told Americans that the Democrats would turn the country into a crime-and-drugs black hole.
\u201cThey want to impose socialism on our country. And they want to erase America\u2019s borders,\u201d Trump told a raucous rally in Chattanooga, Tennessee late Sunday.
That worked for Trump in his own shock 2016 election victory.
But the angry tone has turned off swaths of Americans, giving Democrats confidence that they could capture at least the lower house of Congress, even if the Republicans are forecast to hold on to the Senate.
\u2013 Fight for US soul \u2013
The Democrats rolled out their biggest gun in the final days of the campaign: former president Barack Obama, who on Sunday made a last-ditch appeal for an endangered Senate Democrat in Indiana.
Laying into the tangled legal scandals enveloping the Trump administration \u2014 especially the possible collusion between his presidential campaign and Russian operatives \u2014 Obama scoffed: \u201cThey\u2019ve racked up enough indictments to fill a football team.\u201d
And describing the election as even more consequential than his own historic 2008 victory as the first non-white president, Obama said more than politics is at stake.
\u201cThe character of our country\u2019s on the ballot,\u201d he said.
The party of a first-term president tends to lose congressional seats in his first midterm. But a healthy economy favors the incumbent, so Trump may yet defy the historical pattern.
Although polls generally agree on Democrats winning the House and Republicans retaining the Senate, the margins are fine and a few key races will determine whether a real upset is on the cards.
One of those is Democrat Beto O\u2019Rourke\u2019s challenge to Senator Ted Cruz in traditionally deep-Republican Texas.
On Monday O\u2019Rourke depicted the contest as an epic event, saying that Texans \u201cwill decide the election of our lifetimes. They will define the future, not just of Texas, but of this country, not just this generation but every generation that follows.\u201d
Other races to watch include Republican Pete Stauber\u2019s bid to flip a House Democratic stronghold in Minnesota, while Democrats in Florida and Georgia are aiming to become the states\u2019 first African American governors.
In the end, though, polls mean nothing if people don\u2019t actually vote, so even stormy weather forecast for Tuesday in much of the east of the country could end up having an impact.
\u201cIt\u2019s all about turnout,\u201d Democratic Senator Chris Van Hollen told Fox News Sunday.
\u2013 Violence and rhetoric \u2013
Perhaps the biggest wild card is how voters will react to the increasingly extreme rhetoric and politically inspired violence in the last two weeks of the campaign.
Trump has repeatedly ratcheted up his warnings about Democrats wanting to encourage the immigration of violent criminals and rapists. In speeches, he has transformed a dwindling group of a few thousand impoverished Central Americans trying to walk to the United States \u2014 though still hundreds of miles away \u2014 into a ferocious threat.
This may work with Trump\u2019s ultra-loyal base. However, misgivings rose over the president\u2019s rhetoric after a Florida man and ardent Trump supporter was charged with sending homemade bombs to more than a dozen senior Democrats and other high profile opponents.
Just after, a gunman walked into a Pittsburgh synagogue and shot 11 worshippers dead. He had allegedly lashed out online against Jews he accused of transporting Central American \u201cinvaders\u201d into the United States \u2014 in language that echoed Trump\u2019s own attacks on the impoverished migrants as \u201can invasion.\u201d<\/p>\n

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