WASHINGTON – Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign expects former President Donald Trump to declare victory on election night, regardless of the actual results, a senior official told reporters on a call Friday.
The top Democratic presidential campaign official said Trump, the Republican nominee, is likely to repeat his move in the 2020 election and claim he won the election even as results in key states are still unknown.
“This shouldn’t be a surprise because he lies constantly and wants to sow doubt about a loss he expects,” the senior official said. “He’s done this before. It failed.”
The Harris campaign’s warning was one of several issued Friday by Democrats and democracy groups.
Anti-Trump election lawyers and strategists said they are prepared to fight a series of “illegitimate” lawsuits from Trump allies if he loses the presidential election.
“The tsunami of pre-election voter impeachment lawsuits has begun,” said Norm Eisen, an election lawyer who served as co-counsel for Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment trial.
Eisen was one of several election lawyers and strategists who spoke during a Friday panel by Defend Democracy, a super PAC founded by Democratic strategists focused on supporting the party’s legal efforts around election protections and any legal challenges that follow could occur on election day.
“A lot of the litigation that I think the GOP and the Trump campaign are going to create is really just for show,” said George Conway, an anti-Trump Republican lawyer who was previously married to former senior Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway .
The senior Harris official added that the campaign had hundreds of lawyers across the country and in battleground states ready to fight these Republican Party-led legal challenges.
“We have literally thousands of pages of briefs tailored to specific states, ready to address literally anything and everything that the Trump campaign throws at us,” the senior official said.
Interference, investigations ongoing
Election experts said during a panel Friday that they were concerned about misinformation, violence and attempts to interfere with the election. The panel was put together by the Democracy Communications Collaborative, a democracy think tank, and Issue One, a nonpartisan political reform group.
In Colorado, Criminal investigations are ongoing after a dozen fraudulent ballots were submitted in the county. Ballot boxes in Oregon And Washington State were damaged and set on fire. And spotless FloridaAn 18-year-old brandishing a machete near an early voting site was arrested for angering potential Democratic voters, local law enforcement officials said.
Claire Woodall, former executive director of the City of Milwaukee Election Commission, said at the panel that there has been no vandalism of mailboxes in Wisconsin but that she is still concerned about misinformation.
“What we are seeing instead is the spread of a conspiracy theory surrounding mail-in voting and the United States Postal Service,” she said.
There are also concerns about foreign interference. The FBI announced this on Friday that Russian actors made a video that falsely showed people purporting to be from Haiti voting illegally in Georgia.
“Russian influencers also produced a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential nomination of accepting bribes from a U.S. entertainer,” the FBI said.
The agency said it “expects Russia to create and publish additional media content aimed at undermining confidence in the integrity of the election and dividing Americans.”
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert and co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a group that aims to protect U.S. democracy from disinformation, said during the panel that she was not surprised that “foreign actors are extremely active right now are because we did it.” There are many pre-existing cracks and grievances in our society.”
She said generally that “protections regarding disinformation on social media platforms such as X, YouTube and Metas Facebook and Instagram have weakened.”
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Harris camp cites mighty internal polling
Although public polls showed the race is essentially a gerrymander, senior Harris campaign officials said they were confident based on internal polls that the vice president was doing well with undecided voters.
“Our internal data tells us and shows us that we are winning battleground voters who made up their minds last week by double-digit majorities,” a senior campaign official said.
Both campaigns appeared similarly confident on Thursday.
The senior Harris campaign official said a focus group of undecided voters would take into account comments from speakers during the campaign Trump’s weekend rally at Madison Square Garden “For them, it really crystallized in their minds the choice between the vice president, who they talk about is a president for everyone, someone who will focus on them and solve their problems, and Trump and (that) is really murky and divisive.” Language.”
At the rally, a comedian made racist comments about blacks and Latinos, including calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash.”
Last weekend events
Both campaigns will spend the final days before Election Day in swing states.
Trump will hold a rally in Greensboro, North Carolina on Saturday. His vice presidential candidate, Ohio Senator JD Vance, will speak in Las Vegas this morning and travel to Scottsdale, Arizona, for another campaign rally in the afternoon.
Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will also be in Arizona on Saturday to give his speech in Flagstaff. In the evening he travels to Tucson for another campaign event.
Harris will travel to Atlanta on Saturday and then to Charlotte, North Carolina.
Harris will hold a campaign rally on Sunday in East Lansing, Michigan, where she will encourage Michigan State University students to vote.
Trump will deliver his speech in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday morning before heading to Macon, Georgia, for a campaign event in the evening.
Harris will wrap up the campaign on Monday with stops in Pennsylvania.
