Short answer: We really don’t know. But there are three directions I could go. We break them down, and why the future of the world’s largest economy is practically in the hands of Congress.
“I have no doubt where he is going,” said Pete Giangreco, a Democratic strategist who has worked in nine presidential campaigns, about Trump’s efforts to discredit the elections. “He wants to delay the elections because if they had the election today, they would lose. The further away from today, the better it will be … So he wants more time to manipulate the system to somehow spit it out as the winner. “
Even before being elected president, Trump used to make unsubstantiated claims about widespread electoral fraud. He called for a recidivism after losing the Iowa committees to Ted Cruz in 2016, and made claims about “serious electoral fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire, and California” after failing to bring those states into that year’s general election.
But given that Trump lags behind Biden in national and state polls, and with the elections less than 100 days away, the Republican president’s rhetoric has fueled the idea that Trump might not accept the election results of the swamps. from partisan fever to the center. stage in the campaign debate.
Earlier this month, in an interview with Fox News, Trump declined to say whether he will accept the election results and said, “I have to see.” And in raising the possibility of a delay on Thursday, Trump suggested that what he was seeing so far was not promising.
“With universal voting by mail (not absentee voting, which is good), 2020 will be the most INACCURATE AND FRAUDULENT election in history,” Trump wrote on Twitter. “It will be a great shame for the United States. Delay the election until people can vote properly, safely and securely ??? “
Later in the day, Trump insisted that he did not want to see the elections delayed, but refused to exclude the possibility.
“Do I want to see a change of day? No. But I don’t want to see a corrupt election, “he told reporters.
Democrats launched Trump’s tweet in an effort to distract himself from that day’s publication of bad second-quarter economic news, given his lack of power to move the election. A spokeswoman for the Democratic National Committee, Lily Adams, called it “nothing more than a desperate attempt to distract from today’s devastating economic numbers,” and the Biden campaign answered questions about the tweet only with a prepared statement about the economic figures.
“President Trump is obviously scared and reacting in a way that … is indicative of how he deals with everything else: looking for the most extreme and illegal way of reflectively addressing an issue, in this case being sadly behind in the polls,” said Wayne Goodwin, chairman of the Democratic Party in North Carolina, where mail ballot requests have exploded ahead of the November election. “But the choice is going to happen, period.”
But Democrats are wary of Trump’s efforts to limit access to voting by mail, and legal battles continue for the voting by mail that has spread amid the coronavirus pandemic. Democrats also fear that in states where the result is close, Trump may appeal to the courts to intervene, clouding the result. Biden and the Democratic National Committee, in coordination with state parties and advocacy groups, have attorneys and political agents working across the map of the battlefield and have hired directors of voter protection in 20 states.
“I don’t think you can underestimate how serious it is,” said Les Francis, a Democratic strategist and former White House deputy chief of staff in the Carter administration. “I don’t want it to be just a campaign issue. It is bigger than that. This is a constitutional issue. This is a problem about the future of the republic and the sanctity of our civic institutions. “
A veteran of the Clinton administration who has ties to the Trump administration said, “I think we are dealing with a person who doesn’t know there are limits.”
And this is just the beginning. The question of the legitimacy of the elections promises to become even more prominent once voters start receiving ballots by mail, in some states as early as September. And it will probably take into account the presidential debates this fall.
Biden already showed his willingness to participate, predicting on Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show with Trevor Noah” last month that Trump “would try to steal” the election by depressing participation.
“This is the guy who said that all mail ballots are fraudulent, voting by mail, as he sits behind a desk in the Oval Office and writes his mail ballot to vote in a primary,” Biden said.
What the Biden campaign stance on Thursday implicitly acknowledged was that, for Trump, changing coverage of the election to something other than the coronavirus and the economy is likely to be beneficial.
Due to the coronavirus and the downturn in the economy, “conducting a narrative for him is really difficult right now,” said Amanda Renteria, who was Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign national political director.
By raising the possibility of a delay, he said, Trump is seizing an opportunity to attack.
“He’s nervous, he’s crazy, he makes us all talk,” said Renteria. “Now the question is whether or not it is strong or convincing enough to keep it in the headlines by talking about it, given the coronavirus and everything that is happening … We will learn in the days to come.”
But there are also political risks for Trump. On Thursday, Republicans flatly rejected the idea of moving the election, marking an unusually clear and rare split between the president and his party officials. Against the backdrop of a presidency In which Republicans who voted negatively have paid high prices for crossing the president, senior GOP officials, however, seemed to draw a line.
“You can suggest whatever you want,” Senator Marco Rubio (R-Fla.), Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told reporters. “The law is what it is. We will have a choice that is legitimate, it will be credible, it will be the same as we have always done. ”
House of Representatives minority leader Kevin McCarthy (Republican of California) also said he is opposed to delaying the election. “In no way should we not hold an election the day we have it,” McCarthy told reporters.
By Thursday night, Trump was framing his tweet more as a provocation than anything else, writing on Twitter: “I’m glad I was able to get the very dishonest LameStream media outlets to finally start talking about the RISKS to our Democracy of the dangerous Universal Mail-In-Vote (don’t vote absentee, which I totally support!) “.
He promised to win the election “GREAT!” and such election results must be known on election night, “not days, months, or even years later!” a reference to the possibility that a deluge of ballot papers by mail would prevent a contest from being called on election night.
When asked about following up on Trump’s tweet, Hogan Gidley, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, suggested the president was making one point more than outlining a course of action.
“The president only raises a question about the chaos Democrats have created with his insistence on all mail ballots,” Gidley said in a prepared statement. “Universal postal voting invites chaos and severe delays in results, as evidenced by the New York Congressional primaries, where we still don’t know who won after more than a month.”
