Trump will likely declare victory whether he wins or not, Harris camp warns • Nevada Current

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.

A senior Democratic presidential campaign official said Trump, the Republican nominee, is likely to repeat his move in the 2020 election, declaring that he won the election even as results in key states remain unknown.

“This should not be surprising because he lies all the time and wants to sow doubt about the expected losses,” 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 pro-democracy groups.

Anti-Trump lawyers and strategists have said they are prepared to fight a slew of “illegitimate” lawsuits from Trump allies if he loses the presidential election.

“The tsunami of election denial litigation has begun,” said Norm Eisen, an election lawyer who served as co-counsel for House Judiciary Committee Democrats during Trump’s first impeachment.

Eisen was one of several lawyers and election strategists who spoke at Friday’s panel for Defend Democracy, a super PAC created by Democratic strategists that focuses on supporting the party’s legal efforts to protect the election and any legal challenges that may arise after Election Day.

“A lot of the litigation that I think the Republican Party and the Trump campaign are going to start is really just for show,” said George Conway, a Republican anti-Trump lawyer who was previously married to former senior Trump adviser Kellyanne. Conway.

A senior Harris spokesman added that the campaign has hundreds of lawyers across the country and in battleground states ready to fight legal challenges brought by the GOP.

“We have literally thousands of pages of appeals, tailored to specific states, ready to respond to literally anything the Trump campaign throws at us,” the senior official said.

Intervention, investigation ongoing

Election experts during Friday’s discussion said they were concerned about disinformation, violence and attempts to interfere with voting. The panel was organized by the Democracy Communications Collaborative, a democracy think tank, and Issue One, a bipartisan policy reform group.

In Colorado criminal investigation underway after a dozen fraudulent ballots were cast in the county. Ballot boxes in Oregon And Washington the state were damaged and set on fire. And in FloridaAn 18-year-old waving a machete near an early voting site was arrested for being hostile to potential Democratic voters, local law enforcement said.

Claire Woodall, former executive director of the Milwaukee Board of Elections, said at the meeting that Wisconsin has not seen any vandalism at mailboxes, but she is still concerned about misinformation.

“Instead, we are now seeing a proliferation of conspiracy theories around mail-in voting and the U.S. Postal Service,” she said.

There are also concerns about foreign interference. The FBI said Friday that Russian actors fabricated a video that falsely showed people claiming to be from Haiti voting illegally in Georgia.

“Russian influencers also fabricated a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of accepting a bribe from an American entertainer,” the FBI said.

The agency said it “expects Russia to create and release additional media content that will be aimed at undermining confidence in the integrity of the election and dividing Americans.”

Nina Yankovic, 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 because we are in our society.” there was already a lot of disagreement and grievances.”

Overall, she said “defenses against misinformation have weakened” on social media platforms such as X, YouTube, Facebook and Meta’s Instagram.

“(Elon) Musk’s purchase of X has turned the platform into a veritable hose of election disinformation,” Yankovic said.

Camp Harris cites strong internal polls

Even though public polls showed the race essentially a toss-up, senior Harris campaign officials said they were confident the vice president would do well with undecided voters based on internal polling.

“Our internal data tells us and shows us that we are winning the battleground voters who made their decision last week, and we are winning them by double-digit margins,” a senior campaign official said.

Both campaigns were equally confident on Thursday.

A senior Harris campaign official said that in a focus group of undecided voters, comments from speakers during Trump weekend rally at Madison Square Garden “For them, it’s really sort of crystallized the choice between a vice president who they see is talking about being a president for everyone, someone who’s focused on them and solving their problems, and Trump and (that’s) really his own kind of a dark, divisive person. language.”

At the rally, the comedian made racist comments about blacks and Latinos and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” among other vulgar remarks.

Final 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 running mate, Ohio Sen. J.D. Vance, will speak in Las Vegas in the morning and then head to Scottsdale, Arizona, for another campaign rally in the afternoon.

Harris’ ally, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will also be in Arizona on Saturday to give a speech in Flagstaff. In the evening he will head to Tucson for another campaign rally.

Harris will travel to Atlanta on Saturday and then to Charlotte, North Carolina.

On Sunday, Harris will hold a campaign rally in East Lansing, Michigan, where she will encourage Michigan State University students to go to the polls.

Trump will give a speech in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday morning and travel to Macon, Georgia, for a campaign rally in the evening.

Harris will end the campaign with a stop in Pennsylvania on Monday.