Donald Trump had been down in Gettysburg, in southern Pennsylvania, declining  his own speech about his first 100 days as president with a blustery tried to sue women who lodged complaints against him of sexual misconducts.

Senator Patrick J. Toomey had been far away as a top of the ticket mate, physically and psychologically. The incumbent Republican from Pennsylvania spent a part of Saturday in the state’s coal country to the north. He gave a warm welcome to a handful of supporters and a few local reporters in a restaurant that was closed for the event, and held a baby named Reagan, after the president.

Toomey and Democrat Katie McGinty were engaged in one of the toughest Senate races in the country, over a seat that Democrats think they will  win to achieve control of the Senate.

Alone among the major Republican Senate candidates, Toomey was publicly still on the fence about Trump, refusing to say whether he will back his party’s nominee.

The posture had been meant to keep him in the healthy graces of two warring constituencies, both of which he needed blue-collar Trump voters in rural Pennsylvania and Hillary Clinton supporters in the suburbs of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. But it risked in making him look as though he has been dodging a call that much of America has made, one way or the other.

By Prakriti Neogi