Trump, Biden clash in final debate on COVID-19 response, health care, race

Highlights from the final presidential debate before Election Day.

President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic nominee, faced off in the final presidential debate of the 2020 election cycle from Belmont University in Nashville on Thursday night, marking the candidates’ last chance to pitch themselves to tens of millions of voters in primetime before Nov. 3.

The stakes were high: Trump needed to make his case as polls show him trailing nationally and in several battleground states key to his reelection hopes. At the same time, Biden had a platform to solidify his lead and avoid any major mistakes with Election Day just 12 days away.

Biden spent the week hunkered down in Wilmington, Delaware, to prepare -- what he's done before other debates -- while Trump had seemingly done less to prepare, telling reporters on Wednesday, "I do prep, I do prep," without elaborating. Earlier this week Trump said that answering journalists' questions is the best kind of preparation.

Thursday's debate was supposed to be the candidates' third matchup but is instead the second of only two presidential debates this election. Trump refused to participate in the second debate when it was moved to a virtual format following his COVID-19 diagnosis. The candidates ultimately participated in dueling town halls instead.


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Trump to early vote in Florida on Saturday

The White House announced Trump will vote early in Florida on Saturday.

"President Trump plans to early vote on Saturday in West Palm Beach, Florida," spokesman Judd Deere said.

It had been expected that the president would vote absentee, because even as he has railed against mail-in voting, he has also justified his own practice of voting absentee in the past.

-ABC News' Jordyn Phelps


Trump vs. Biden: On the issues

ABC News has broken down where each candidate stands on some of the key issues:

Election security and integrity

Racial justice

Health

Economy

Climate change and the environment

Foreign policy


Early voting hits record numbers across the country 

With early voting having kicked off in all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., at least 47 million votes have already been cast in the 2020 general election as early voting data continues to break records across the country.

In 2016, there was a total of 47 million early votes cast, meaning the country has narrowly passed its 2016 early voting data with 12 days still left.

According to the United States Elections Project, spearheaded by University of Florida's political expert Michael McDonald, as of Thursday at 5 p.m. ET an unprecedented 47,095,528 voters have already cast their ballots and at least 85,133,505 ballots have been requested in early voting states.

TargetSmart, a Democratic firm that collects political data including early voting statistics, reports that 10 million voters who have already voted in the 2020 election did not participate in the 2016 election. Many of these early votes are coming from young voters as well as first time voters with individuals under 30 years old having cast 9.1% of early votes.

During an earlier press conference, TargetSmart predicted that there will still be an additional 40 million early votes as well as between 60-70 million votes on Election Day. Their prediction allots for at least 150 million ballots cast. In comparison, in the 2016 election, there were 138 million total votes.

-ABC News' Kelsey Walsh


Candidates to face off at a social distance between plexiglass partitions

Plexiglas partitions were placed on the debate stage next to each candidates' lectern -- already set up at least 12 feet apart -- as a coronavirus precaution for the second and final presidential debate in Nashville.

According to a source familiar with the debates, the partitions were added under the direction of the Cleveland Clinic as part of its responsibility to keep debate participants safe.

Plexiglass became an issue prior to the vice-presidential debate when the two campaigns squabbled over whether to have physical barriers separate the two candidates.

The insistence on barriers was initially met with resistance by Vice President Mike Pence's team, but they were ultimately used.


Fact check: Trump's uses false facts to defend family separations

TRUMP'S CLAIM: "The children are brought here by coyotes and lots of bad people, cartels, and they're brought here and they used to use them to get into our country." // "They built cages. You know, they used to say I built the cages." // "They are so well taken care of. They are in facilities that are so clean."

FACT CHECK: Trump was defending his now-defunct policy known as "zero tolerance" that required every adult who crossed the border illegally -- even those traveling with their children -- be detained in a bid to deter border crossings.

The result was that thousands of children were separated from their parents in a matter of weeks. It was a major departure from past U.S. policy. In the Barack Obama and George W. Bush administrations, families were separated in rare instances, such as cases of serious crimes like drug trafficking. 


Critics of Trump's policy questioned the conditions the kids were kept in initially at border stations after several died of the flu.

An internal investigation later found that the administration struggled to keep track of the parents, many of whom had been deported. The White House says the parents were contacted and abandoned the children, who were placed with U.S. sponsors, usually family members. The American Civil Liberties Union countered that parents have not been found and contacted and therefore could not give up rights to their children.

Homeland security officials have said that "coyotes" are often used to transport the families for a fee. But there has not been widespread evidence of cases of people falsely presenting themselves as related, with border patrol documenting them as "family units."


Trump's suggestion that "cages" were built by the Obama administration is correct. Obama had faced an influx of children both traveling alone and with families as a result of violence in Central America. And at one point, the Obama administration tried housing the families in special detention centers.

But after a federal judge in California ruled that the arrangement violated a long-standing agreement barring kids from jail-like settings for extended periods, even with their parents, the government began releasing families into the U.S. pending notification of their next court date.

In 2018, photos taken by The Associated Press and posted online by liberal activists suggested the children in steel fencing was Trump's doing. The photos were actually from 2014 when immigration detentions became flooded with families.

-ABC News' Anne Flaherty