and now we here....
#Don'tCallHimDictator
https://www.axios.com/trump-claim-e...lert&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=alerts_all
Scoop: Trump's plan to declare premature victory
President Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's "ahead," according to three sources familiar with his private comments.
- That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.
- For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
Details: Many prognosticators say that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania — though the state's final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.
- Trump's team is preparing to claim baselessly that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have "stolen" the election.
- Trump's advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions.
- Trump campaign senior adviser Jason Miller predicted that Trump "will be re-elected handily and no amount of post-election Democratic thievery will be able to change the results."
- Many states won't be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night.
- In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.
- Night-of counts may be deceptive. It could be days, if not weeks, before we know who won Pennsylvania. If it's a close race this could also be true for other states, given the record numbers of Americans who voted by mail this year.
- Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC's "Meet the Press" today that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, "so, yes, it will take longer" to count.
- "I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that's mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days," Boockvar said.
- He described any prospective challenges by Democrats as "hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense."
- They said analyses of early-vote totals in battleground states indicate he's doing substantially worse in Iowa and Georgia compared with this point in 2016, but better than expected in Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin.
- Just a few weeks ago, senior Trump advisers were bearish about Wisconsin and had reduced TV advertising there to an insignificant figure. A senior campaign official told me, then, that the state didn't figure in his paths to 270 electoral votes.
- But that appears to have changed. In recent days, senior Trump advisers have privately expressed growing optimism about Wisconsin, based on their analysis of early vote data.
Last edited:
