WASHINGTON - The election and the pandemic are colliding in the United States, with the country registering on Friday its highest daily number of cases since the pandemic began.

Johns Hopkins University reported 83,757 new cases.

This comes as President Donald Trump increases the frequency of his rallies in critical states, including Florida where on Friday a large crowd of his supporters assembled at the retirement community, The Villages, out in the open but with many not wearing masks.

Mr Trump cast an early ballot on Saturday (Oct 24), ahead of the Nov 3 vote, at a library serving as a polling centre in West Palm Beach, Florida. "I voted for a guy named Trump," he said with a smile as he emerged.

Separately, on Friday, his rival Joe Biden, who has been holding campaign events with smaller and more socially distanced audiences, made a speech on his strategy to control the pandemic, if he were elected President.

Mr Biden's strategy includes a mandate to use face masks at least on federal property and interstate transport throughout the country; ramping up testing and raising a national corps of contact tracers; and using the Defense Production Act to scale up production of personal protective equipment.

A Biden administration would "provide consistent, reliable, trusted, detailed nationwide guidance and technical support for reopening safely and the resources to make it happen," he added.

But polls show the pandemic is not a priority issue for Trump supporters, in particular, who care more about the economy.

Nationally, polls indicate the economy, the makeup of the Supreme Court bench, and health care, are top issues.

A Pew research survey released on Oct 21, showed the gap between supporters of the two rival camps over the importance of the pandemic has in fact widened since August.

The survey was conducted over Oct 6-12. About 74 per cent of 8,972 registered voters polled said the economy is a very important issue to their vote.

But there was a sharp decline in the share of Trump backers who rate the coronavirus as "very important" Pew said.

"About eight-in-ten Biden supporters (82 per cent) say the coronavirus will be very important to their vote, compared with just 24 per cent of Trump supporters," the report said.

"Since August, the share of Trump supporters who view the coronavirus as very important has declined 15 percentage points. There has been no change among Biden supporters."

A separate Gallup poll released on Oct 5, found that nearly nine in 10 registered voters consider the presidential candidates' positions on the economy very or extremely important to their vote.

At least three-quarters of voters consider six other issues to be important. In descending order of importance they are terrorism and national security, education, health care, crime, the response to the coronavirus, and race relations.

The proportion of voters saying the economy is extremely important rose from 30 per cent to 45 per cent between December and September, Gallup reported. The survey also noted a large gap of 32 points between Democrats and Republicans, on the importance of the Covid-19 pandemic, with Democrats far more concerned than Republicans.

Anecdotally, based on multiple interviews across three states, Trump supporters interviewed by The Sunday Times generally believe the President has done the best he could to manage the pandemic.

Asked about the spiking case numbers across the country, Dr Anthony Fauci, Director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, told MSNBC on Friday said the country was in a "precarious place."

The US needs to double down on fundamental public health measures like the universal wearing of masks, physical distancing, and avoiding crowds, particularly indoors, he said.

"They seem rather simple… but they really do work," he said. "You don't want the extreme. You don't want to say, either shut down, which we don't want to do, versus just don't worry about it, just do whatever you want to do."

But with President Trump increasingly dismissive of him, the top expert now carries less weight. The White House is touting the Great Barrington Declaration, a controversial October 16 statement by three public health experts from Harvard, Stanford, and Oxford, advocating for the authorities to lift lockdown restrictions on the young and healthy while focusing protection on the elderly.

In an Oct 19 email, Ian Bremmer, president of The Eurasia Group, wrote: "The… Great Barrington Declaration (is) a statement from a libertarian think tank meant to oppose lockdowns and essentially endorsing a herd immunity approach."

It "further clarifies the dividing line, with one side of the political spectrum advocating to stop worrying about the pandemic, and get the economy back in order; the other arguing the top priority is to reduce the number of cases, hospitalisations and deaths - and if that costs more economically in the short term, so be it."