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Donald Trump embarked on an overwhelming final campaign race on Sunday, hosting 10 rallies in seven decisive states over two days in an effort to defy polls and replicate his stunning 2016 election victory. In doing so, he reportedly is planning to declare the victory on Tuesday, before the result is called.
Citing three anonymous sources “familiar with his private comments,” the Axios news site said Trump “has told his confidants that he will declare victory Tuesday night if it appears he is” ahead. “
“That’s even if the electoral college outcome still depends on a large number of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania,” the site said, adding: “Trump has spoken privately about this scenario in some detail in recent weeks. , outlining plans to walk up to the podium on election night and declare that he has won.
“For this to happen, his allies hope that he needs to win or have dominant leaders in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.”
According to FiveThirtyEight.com, Trump leads in Ohio, Texas and Iowa, while Biden is in Florida, North Carolina, Georgia and Arizona. The races are all exceptionally tight: The biggest lead in the FiveThirtyEight.com poll average is Biden by three points in Arizona, the smallest Trump by 0.2 in Ohio.
Under the coronavirus pandemic, early and mail voting has reached unprecedented levels, fueling expectations for record turnout, but it also fears that many states will take longer than usual to count their ballots.
Trump’s tactics, Axios said, will hinge on continuing to claim without evidence that ballots counted after Election Day are illegitimate and evidence of voter fraud. The counting of votes after Election Day is a common feature of American elections.
Many of Trump’s claims have focused on Pennsylvania, where the race is closed but where votes counted after Nov. 3 are expected to favor Joe Biden, the Democratic candidate who leads most of the country’s national and field polls. battle. Both candidates campaigned heavily in the state this weekend.
Democrats have long been concerned that Trump will declare victory early, with the goal of sowing uncertainty and legal battles over the ballots and results. Some observers have called the tactic the “red mirage”, which former Housing Secretary Julián Castro said this week “he sounds like a supervillain, and he’s just as insidious.”
“On election night, there is a real chance that the data will show Republicans leading early, before all the votes are counted,” Castro said. “Then they can pretend that something sinister is happening when the counts change in favor of the Democrats.”
On Sunday on CNN’s State of the Union, Biden’s aide, Anita Dunn, said she thought the victor would be known sometime on Nov. 4, the day after Election Day.
“Many of the first states that are battle states, especially Sunbelt, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, are states that tend to count their votes on election night,” Dunn said. “I think we will get some kind of indicator of what kind of night it will be in those three states. We will see. Obviously Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin can be slower. “
Pennsylvania’s election official, Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar, a Democrat, told NBC’s Meet the Press that there could be 10 times as many mail-in ballots as in 2016, adding: “I expect the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that is, absentee and mail ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted in a matter of days. “
Axios said the Trump campaign was bullish on key states like Texas, Nevada, North Carolina, Arizona and Wisconsin. On ABC’s This Week, Trump adviser Jason Miller stated: “If you talk to a lot of smart Democrats, they think President Trump will be ahead on Election Night, probably getting 280 [votes], somewhere in that range. And then they will try to get it back after the elections.
“We believe that we will exceed 290 electoral votes on election night. So no matter what they try to do, what kind of shenanigans or trials or any kind of nonsense they try to carry out, we will still have enough electoral votes for President Trump to be re-elected. “
Miller’s claim was based on the idea that all ballots should be counted on Election Day, legal and political nonsense. However, Trump’s campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh told Axios: “When he wins, he will say so.”
Trump’s latest 2020 tour, which began Sunday in Michigan, aims to maintain the states he won four years ago and shore up support in traditional Republican strongholds such as North Carolina and Georgia. Biden was scheduled to hold two drive-ins in Pennsylvania, one of a series of former Democratic strongholds in the Northeast that Trump beat Hillary Clinton by less than one point.
New polls show that Biden maintains an advantage in Pennsylvania. The New York Times and Siena College gave the Democrat a six-point lead, while the Washington Post and ABC showed a seven-point margin.
In Michigan, Trump repeated some of the messages that worked in 2016, highlighting the impact of globalization on the auto industry.
“I gave them a lot of car plants, so I think we’re tied,” he told a crowd at a windswept and rainy rally in Washington City.
A new auto plant has been announced since Trump took office, while automotive jobs in Michigan had been cut by 2,400 even before the Covid-19 pandemic. Employment in the sector is down more than 18,000 in the state, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Trump’s other main line of attack was warning voters that Biden would implement a drastic lockdown that would end jobs. The president has insisted the nation has “turned the corner” despite a record number of new cases across the country and warnings of an increase in deaths during the winter.
Trump has insisted on holding mass demonstrations without social distancing, in which few wear masks. A study by economists at Stanford University estimated at least 30,000 coronavirus infections and 700 deaths caused by 18 Trump rallies between June and September.
“We are very hurt,” Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading expert on infectious diseases, told the Washington Post. “It is not a good situation. All the stars are lined up in the wrong place as the fall and winter season progresses, with people gathering indoors at home. He couldn’t be in a worse position. “
An NBC and Wall Street Journal poll on Sunday put Biden up 10 points, with a majority of voters saying they were unhappy with the president’s handling of the pandemic and the direction of the country. The same poll from four years ago brought Clinton up, but only four. In 2016 there were many more undecided and third-party voters.
The Trump camp has intensified signals that they will seek Republican-leaning courts to challenge the integrity of the huge volume of postal ballots. In Texas, a federal court will hear a lawsuit Monday seeking to have 117,000 votes removed in Houston because they were cast at curbside ballot boxes set up to facilitate voting during the pandemic, which Republican plaintiffs argue was illegal.
The Texas Supreme Court has twice rejected a similar argument, but a federal court in Houston agreed to hear the case, presided over by an ultra-conservative judge.
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