President Donald Trump and Joe Biden are heading into the final stretch of the 2020 presidential campaign.
With two weeks to go until Election Day and millions of people already casting their ballots at early voting sites or by mail, the candidates are facing enormous pressure to solidify their bases and win over undecided voters.
On Thursday, the two candidates will face off in the last presidential debate.
This live coverage has ended. Continue reading election news from October 21, 2020.
Read the latest updates from the trail:
Melania Trump to skip Pennsylvania rally due to cough
Melania Trump will no longer travel to Erie, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday with the president due to a "lingering cough" from her bout with coronavirus," the first lady's spokeswoman Stephanie Grisham said.
"Mrs. Trump continues to feel better every day following her recovery from COVID-19, but with a lingering cough, and out of an abundance of caution, she will not be traveling today," Grisham told NBC News in a statement.
The first lady was expected to join her husband at a Tuesday night rally, her first in over a year.
Photos: In-person voting begins in Wisconsin
Committee on Presidential Debates says final debate was not dedicated to foreign policy
The Committee on Presidential Debates said Tuesday that the final presidential debate was not previously "devoted to foreign or domestic policy."
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien criticized the topics selected by moderator, NBC's Kristen Welker, in a letter. He claimed that both camps agreed the final debate should focus on foreign policy, suggesting that the committee changed the topics to favor Joe Biden.
"The choice of topics is left entirely to the journalistic judgment of the moderators," the committee said on Twitter.
Both candidates will answer questions on fighting COVID-19, American families, race, climate change, national security and leadership.
The view from one of Pennsylvania's most important swing counties
Few counties across the political landscape are of more importance than Pennsylvania's Erie County — and the county executive says it's going to be a tight race there through the finish.
In 2016, Trump, who won Pennsylvania, prevailed in Erie by about 2,000 votes, a swing from 2012 when former President Barack Obama won by 20,000 votes. This year, both candidates are targeting Erie. Biden having recently visited there, and Trump is set to hold a gathering there Tuesday evening.
"One thing that happened in 2016 from the Democratic side; I think they kind of forgot about Erie County," Kathy Dahlkemper, the county executive and a former Democratic congresswoman, told NBC News. "We had no visits. Of course now it's different, but we had no visits from Hillary Clinton."
Trump has tried to woo the region with promises of coal and steel jobs, and insisted but that Biden would eliminate fracking, but Dahlkemper says that message doesn't fly in Erie County.
"I believe we're going to take Pennsylvania, but it's going to be a fight and not going to be a blowout," she said. "I just use my visual clues of driving around the county and the signs — people love their signs in Western Pennsylvania."
Utah gubernatorial opponents appear in joint unity video
The Democratic and Republican candidates for governor in Utah have produced a joint video calling for unity in the face of political disagreement.
Two weeks till Election Day, Democrats have a big lead in early voting
Two weeks before Election Day, early votes have come in from almost every state and Democrats have a clear edge in ballots already cast, according to NBC News’ Early Voting tracker.
More than 29 million people from 45 states have voted as of Tuesday morning, either by mail or in-person. Nearly half of those votes — almost 14.2 million ballots — have come from Democrat-affiliated voters. Republican-affiliated voters have returned almost 10.1 million ballots. And while not every Democrat will vote for former Vice President Joe Biden and not every Republican will vote for President Donald Trump, Democrats currently have a 14-point edge in returned ballots.
After botching past elections, Detroit aims to avoid a 'black eye' in November
Two months ago during Michigan’s primary, a record number of absentee ballots overwhelmed city election workers, who were short-staffed and ill-prepared because of Covid-19. Exhausted workers, processing ballots all day and into the following morning in this massive, concrete basement, had made so many errors that 72 percent of the city's absentee-ballot counting boards were out of balance, meaning the number of votes recorded did not align with the number of ballots cast.
Donald Trump won Michigan four years ago by just 10,704 votes. If the election doesn’t go his way this time, he and his supporters — already on high alert from the president’s repeated unfounded assertions that Democrats will try to rig the election — are sure to scrutinize how the ballots were tallied in Detroit. The state’s largest city is overwhelmingly Democratic, and Joe Biden is likely to get more votes in Detroit than in any other city in the state.
So when city and state election officials announced last month that they needed thousands of energetic election workers to help address the problems that undermined the August primary, they were flooded with applications.
Demonstrations planned for outside Thursday night debate
Protesters are planning to gather outside Nashville's Belmont University on Thursday night as the school plays host to the final debate between Trump and Biden.
The protest is being organized by a group called "Be Better Belmont," which is trying to draw attention to systemic racism both at the school and in the city of Nashville.
“We’re demanding transparency in governing the finances of the institution. We’re asking for accountability,” Safara Parrott, an organizer of the protest, told News 4 Nashville.
Lindsey Graham's challenger, Jaime Harrison, has put S.C. back in play for Democrats
Kenyatta Grimmage likes to talk politics with his customers during the 20 or so minutes it takes to give each of them a haircut at Howard’s Barber Shop, which is Black-owned and also a school for apprentice barbers that takes up two small ranch homes along a busy roadway near the Charleston Naval Weapons Station.
In recent years, the conversations have been pessimistic about the state of politics in Washington, but Grimmage, 39, said there's been a noticeable shift in tone in recent weeks. It’s something he’s never seen before — an excitement to vote, particularly in the tight race for South Carolina’s U.S. Senate seat between the Republican incumbent, Lindsey Graham, and his Democratic challenger, Jaime Harrison.
The Harrison-Graham race has gained national attention for the tight polling numbers between a well-known GOP stalwart seeking his fourth term who has aligned himself closely with President Donald Trump, after losing the party's presidential nomination to him in 2016 and denigrating Trump as the party's standard bearer, and an insurgent Democrat whose message of resetting the political conversation has helped him raise an eye-popping $57 million in the final weeks of the race.
Trump says Biden has 'gone into hiding' as the former VP preps for debate
Talking for more than 45 minutes on Fox News' "Fox and Friends" on Tuesday, Trump said that Biden is "imploding" and has "gone into hiding."
Biden's campaign says he has not held campaign events this week because he's preparing for the final debate against Trump on Thursday night.
"We’re gonna win the election, we're doing very well. If you look at all of what's happening and all of the people that come in and don't come in, you take a look all around the country," Trump said.
He added that the 2020 race is about “the great American Dream versus being a socialist hellhole because they're going to turn us into a socialist nation. We're going to be no different than Venezuela.”
Sen. Loeffler under fire in free-for-all Georgia Senate special election debate
Georgia Sen. Kelly Loeffler and Rep. Doug Collins both accused the other of lying and touted their own conservative credentials in their first debate, while Democrat Raphael Warnock assailed Loeffler for associating herself with a congressional candidate who has embraced baseless QAnon conspiracy theories and made racist remarks.
Tense exchanges flew in all directions Monday afternoon, as six top candidates in the crowded special election for the U.S. Senate seat Loeffler was appointed to 10 months ago sparred over President Trump’s coronavirus response, the Black Lives Matter movement, support for police and economic recovery.
Loeffler, a wealthy businesswoman, was appointed in part by Gov. Brian Kemp last year to help Republicans in Georgia appeal to moderate suburban voters. But since then she has been running to the far right while trying to fend off the challenge from Collins, one of Trump’s most visible defenders in the U.S. House.