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 in a phone call Friday.
A senior Democratic presidential campaign official said Trump, the Republican nominee, is likely to repeat his move in the 2020 election, claiming he won it even as results in key states remain unknown.
“This shouldn’t come as a surprise because he lies all the time and wants to create doubt about the loss he expects to come,” a senior official said. “He’s done this before. It didn’t work out.”
The warning issued by the Harris campaign was one of several that Democrats and Democratic groups issued on Friday.
Anti-Trump lawyers and election strategists have said they are prepared to fight a slew of “illegal” lawsuits from Trump allies if he loses the presidential election.
“The pre-election tsunami of election denial has begun,” said Norm Eisen, an election lawyer who served as co-counsel to Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee during Trump’s first impeachment.
Eisen was one of several lawyers and election strategists who spoke on a Friday panel organized by Defend Democracy, a super PAC formed by Democratic strategists that is focused on supporting the party’s legal efforts to protect elections and any legal challenges that may arise after the day elections.
“A lot of the lawsuits that I think the GOP and the Trump campaign will bring are really for show,” said George Conway, an anti-Trump Republican lawyer who was previously married to former Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway.
The senior Harris official added that as part of the campaign, hundreds of lawyers across the country and in battleground states were ready to take on GOP-led legal challenges.
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“We have literally thousands of pages of state-specific pleadings ready to deal with literally anything the Trump campaign throws at us,” the senior official said.
Interference, investigation ongoing
Election experts during Friday’s panel expressed concern about disinformation, violence and attempts to disrupt voting. The panel was organized by Democracy Communications Collaborative, a democracy think tank, and Issue One, a nonpartisan political reform group.
in Colorado, A criminal investigation is underway after several forged ballots were submitted to the district. Voting drop boxes Oregon AND Washington the state was damaged and set on fire. and Floridalocal law enforcement said an 18-year-old wielding a machete near an early voting site was arrested for antagonizing potential Democratic voters.
Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Board of Elections, said during the panel that she hasn’t seen any mailbox vandalism in Wisconsin, but she remains concerned about misinformation.
“Instead, we are now seeing the spread of conspiracy theories around mail-in voting and the United States Postal Service,” she said.
There are also concerns about foreign interference. The FBI said Friday that Russian actors shot a video that falsely depicts people claiming to be Haitian voting illegally in Georgia.
“Russian influential actors also produced a video in which they falsely accuse an individual associated with the Democratic Party’s presidential ticket of accepting a bribe from an American artist,” the FBI said.
The agency said it “expects Russia to create and publish additional media content that will seek to undermine confidence in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert and co-founder and CEO of the American Sunlight Project, a group that aims to protect American democracy from disinformation, said during the panel that she was not surprised that “foreign actors are extremely vigorous right now because we have so many pre-existing divisions and grievances in our society.”
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She said that overall, social media platforms such as X, YouTube, and Facebook and Instagram Meta “lacked safeguards against disinformation.”
“(Elon) Musk’s purchase of X has turned the platform into a real firehose of election disinformation,” Jankowicz said.
Harris’ camp cites mighty internal polling
Even though public polls showed the race was essentially a tie, senior Harris campaign officials expressed confidence that the vice president was doing well with undecided voters, based on internal polling.
“Our internal data tells us and shows us that we are winning over voters who made up their mind last week in the battleground by double-digit margins,” a senior campaign official said.
Both campaigns were equally confident on Thursday.
A senior Harris campaign official said the focus group of undecided voters took into account comments from speakers during Trump’s weekend rally at Madison Square Garden “It kind of crystallized for them a choice in their minds between a vice president who they say is a president for everyone, someone who focuses on them and solves their problems, and Trump and (that) really gloomy, divisive language. “
During the rally, the comedian made racist remarks about Blacks and Latinos and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” among other vulgar words.
Latest weekend events
Both campaigns will spend the last days before the elections in swing states.
On Sunday, Harris will hold a campaign rally in East Lansing, Michigan, where she will encourage Michigan State University students to get to the polls.
Trump will deliver remarks in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday morning, then travel to Macon, Georgia, for a campaign rally in the evening. He is scheduled to appear in Reading and Pittsburgh on Monday.
Harris will end her campaign on Monday in Allentown, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia.
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