Republicans are already laying the groundwork to reject the result of next week's US presidential election should Donald Trump lose, with initial lawsuits alleging baseless fraud and partisan polls exaggerating his popularity to make it harder for his supporters. accept that he didn't win. say veteran strategists.
The warnings – from anti-Trump Democrats and Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote Tuesday in the most important presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, and the two candidates are apparently tied in seven key states.
But suspicions have been raised about a series of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican ties, that mostly show Trump in the lead. The projection of growing support for Trump as Election Day approaches has led to confident predictions from him and his supporters.
“We are leading widely in the polls, in all the polls,” Trump said at a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can't believe it's a close race,” he said at another rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show him and Harris in a aparente tie.
An internal memo sent to Trump by his top pollster confirms that story, with Tony Fabrizio declaring that the former president's “standing nationally and in each of the battleground states is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago.”
Pro-Trump influencers have also reinforced the impression of an obligatorio victory with social media posts quoting anonymous White House officials predicting Harris' defeat. “Biden is telling his advisers that the election is 'dead and buried' and called Harris a natural fool,” the conspiracy theorist. Jack Posobiec posted this week.
Voting groups aligned with the Republican Party have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a New York Times study, during a period in which long-term pollsters have been restricting their surveys to voters. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established nonpartisan pollsters, who have shown a more mixed picture, often with Harris in the lead, although within margins of error.
As an example, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organization founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice president ahead by a single point.
Polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut instinct” favors a Trump victory while arguing that people shouldn't trust their instincts – cast doubt on the former president's apparent rise in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who has confidence in this election is someone whose opinion should be discounted,” he said.
“There has certainly been some momentum toward Trump in recent weeks. [But] These small changes are swamped by uncertainty. “Any indicator you want to point out, you could point out counterexamples.”
Democrats and some polling experts believe the polls commissioned by conservatives are aimed at creating a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump, which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.
“Republicans are clearly strategically placing polls in the news environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to give the right answer,” Joshua Dyck of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell told the New York Times.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and blogger, said he followed a trend established in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of pro-Republican polls created expectations of a professional Republican “red wave” that never materialized on election day. elections.
“These polls were generally two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being conducted and ended up having the effect of pushing the electoral averages to the right.” he told MeidasTouch News.
“We cannot be fooled by this again. It is important to Donald Trump's effort that if he attempts to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that he was somehow winning the election.
“The reason we have to call this out is because Donald Trump needs to come into Election Day with some set of data showing that he won, so that if he loses, he can say we cheated.”
Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way to repeat the allegation through procesal means.
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He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took procesal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to mail in their early ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and voting by mail is in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.
Filing a lawsuit to allege – without evidence – that there has been electoral fraud is part of a well-worn pattern in which Trump challenges electoral results that do not atención him. After the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits challenging the results, all of which were vigorously dismissed in court.
Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump's actions. Michael Steele, former Republican National Committee chairman and Trump critic, told the New Republic that polls commissioned by the Republican Party were rigged to atención Trump.
“You find different ways to weight the participants and that changes the results you will get.” he said. “They are playing behind the scenes so Maga can claim the election was stolen.”
Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their plan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that's how you make people think the race was stolen.”
Pro-Trump polls have influenced polling averages published by sites such as Contemporáneo Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected election night electoral map, predicting a victory for the former president.
Elon Musk, Trump's richest endorser and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”
Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, reinforcing the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from heavy bets on his victory.
A small number of high-value bets from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28 million wagered on Trump's victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.
Trump referenced Polymarket's activity in a recent speech. “I don't know what the hell it means, but it means we're doing pretty well,” he said.
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