A couple of weeks ago the gang down in Mar-a-Lago was popping the champagne and gleefully drawing up plans to further destroy the White House gardens once the Trumps are in residence again. They were looking at the early voting in the swing states and they figured they had it in the bag, according to Puck's Tara Palmieri:
It hit Trump "in the last couple of weeks that early voting is a good way to win,” a person with knowledge of his thinking said. The campaign has been papering Pennsylvania with signs like, “Swamp them with votes,” “Make it too big to rig,” and “Vote early today!”
They've actually been strutting around for a while, but that's to be expected. Republicans always go with the bandwagon effect, and no one is more natural at it than Trump. He just told an audience in Arizona Thursday night that "if Ronald Reagan came back from the dead at the height of Ronald Reagan, if he went to California to have a rally, he'd have 250–300 people in a ballroom. We have fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty, a hundred thousand people." (At the same event with Tucker Carlson he fantasized about putting Liz Cheney in front of a firing squad in lurid detail, so he was really on a roll.)
However, Palmieri wrote an update to her piece late Thursday reporting that the mood down in Florida has dampened a bit in recent days. She writes that the campaign is now starting to believe that the surge they were all celebrating was premature. Apparently. the campaign still feels confident that they can win the sunbelt states (North Carolina, Georgia, Arizona and Nevada) but since Michigan is looking less and less doable, Pennsylvania is the must-win state. And suddenly things have started to look very dicey there "where women have outpaced men by 13 points in the early vote which has sent the campaign into a tailspin during the past two days."
This has led to the most predictable reaction in American politics today:
Not unlike 2020, Trump and his allies are preemptively making outlandish and extreme assertions to lay the groundwork for a claim, if they don’t prevail, that the election was stolen. They’re also engaging in the early stages of election lawfare.
“They’re going so crazy here,” said a campaign source. “Anyone who hears how rabid they are about this issue can’t walk away from this and think they feel comfortable about where they’re at in PA. They’re talking about criminal referrals. They want to find poll watchers who they feel are engaged in voter suppression so that they can refer criminal prosecutions.
They've already started with the lawsuits. They complained that in Bucks County people standing in line to apply for a mail-in ballot past the deadline should have been allowed to get them anyway. A judge agreed and actually extended the deadline there and in another county until Friday. If you are rolling your eyes at the irony of Republicans demanding that deadlines be extended in the voting process, you aren't alone.
But of course, the point of the whole thing is to help spread the idea that the election system is rigged against him, even when he is being accommodated.
Here's the Trumps' reactions:
Fortunately, we have eyes everywhere. These individuals will be prosecuted. https://t.co/xPHL8rGYTT
— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) October 31, 2024
He's claiming that they've "found votes," which is blubbering nonsense:
And it begins. Trump spreading claims that the election is being stolen in Pennsylvania.
— Kelsie Taggart (@kelsientaggart) November 1, 2024
"We found a lot of votes in a certain county in York county... Lancaster county... We found a lot of stuff." pic.twitter.com/CoczZVkRwY
We've already been through two presidential elections with Donald Trump, and in both cases, he said that he would only accept the results of the election if he wins. And even when he won he insisted that he actually won the popular vote and established a commission to investigate it (which went nowhere.) Contesting the elections is now par for the course in presidential elections. We have no idea what will come after if he loses but nobody in this country thinks for a minute that he will concede gracefully. This is how we do it now.
A big part of the strategy (and at this point, I don't think we can see it as anything else) is the touting of phony polling numbers that will convince his followers that he was leading so much before the election that it makes no sense that he possibly could have lost. In fact, one of his staunchest supporters and top surrogates, Tucker Carlson, laid it out with his patented snotty delivery at the Madison Square Garden hate rally last weekend:
It’s gonna be pretty tough for them, ten days from now, to look in the eye to America with a straight face —- it’s gonna be pretty hard to look at us and say, “You know what? Kamala Harris, she’s just, she got 85 million votes because she’s just so impressive. As the first Samoan, Malaysian, Low-IQ former California prosecutor ever to be elected president. It was just a groundswell of popular support.
Trump MSG rally, Tucker drawing a line in the sand right now: nobody is going to believe that Kamala got 85 million votes pic.twitter.com/9oJ7O5XNFW
— Buck Sexton (@BuckSexton) October 27, 2024
This week the campaign "leaked" an internal polling document to Axios that showed Trump leading everywhere based upon the Real Clear Politics averages (which includes all the right-wing polls that have been flood the zone without being weighted.) Author Mike Allen writes, "the memo reflects the exuberance that Trump staffers and allies exude in interviews and behind-the-scenes conversations."
It's not uncommon for campaigns to slip reporters positive internal memos during the campaign for any number of reasons. In this case, it's just the usual Trump spin that he's winning more than anyone's ever won and nobody's ever seen anything like it. But it's done to reinforce the new Republican doctrine that Donald Trump cannot lose unless the other side cheats because he is so obviously superior to his opposition whether it's Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris. In fact, Trump said the same against fellow Republicans who ran against him and his followers believed him when he said that too.
There are many plans to contest the vote, file lawsuits, intimidate voters, whatever it takes to make sure that Donald Trump will never, ever be seen as a loser among his cult followers. Nothing is more important than the belief that any loss is the result of a corrupt conspiracy to deny them their rightful victory and the leader they truly believe is the preference of the vast majority of the American people. As their Dear Leader told them just today:
Trump: "They only thing that can stop us is the cheating. It's the only thing that can stop us." pic.twitter.com/O1Xp9c87Ru
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 1, 2024
His campaign knows he's lying. They're still trying to win legitimately. But they go to sleep at night secure in the knowledge that even if they lose they can just claim they really won but the other side stole it. And it's not just campaign operatives. Tens of millions of people in this country will believe for the rest of their lives that our elections are all rigged unless their candidate wins. How long will it take before we have a majority of Americans who believe in democracy again?
