Obama to campaign for Biden in Florida

Former President Barack Obama will travel to Miami on Saturday to campaign for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, one day after President Trump is slated to rally in the Sunshine state.

Obama will seek to boost Biden’s prospects in Florida, where polls show a close race between the former vice president and Trump. The president won Florida and its 29 electoral votes in 2016 by 113,000 votes, and the state is considered a must-win if Trump is to secure re-election.

It will mark Obama’s second appearance on the trail for Biden after he held events in Pennsylvania on Wednesday.

A CNBC poll and a CNN poll released earlier Wednesday showed Biden leading in Florida by 5 percentage points and 4 percentage points, respectively. But there are signs the former vice president is underperforming with Latino voters compared to Hillary Clinton in 2016, a critical bloc in Florida.

Trump is slated to travel to Florida on Friday for a pair of rallies. It marks his third trip to the state in roughly 10 days. He recently held events in Ocala and Sanford.

The Biden campaign announced Obama’s Florida trip on Wednesday night, hours after he made his first appearance on behalf of Biden and vice presidential nominee Kamala Harris.

Obama eviscerated Trump at a drive-in rally from the parking lot of Lincoln Financial Field in Philadelphia, depicting the president as unwilling and unable to meet the demands of the job.

Obama delivered a blistering rebuke of Trump and urged Americans to go out and vote, warning that “the next 13 days will matter for decades to come.”

“Our democracy is not gonna work if the people who are supposed to be our leaders lie every day and just make things up,” Obama said. “This notion of truthfulness and democracy and citizenship and being responsible — these aren’t Republican or Democratic principles. They’re American principles. … We need to reclaim them.”