Republican presidential nominee former President Donald Trump walks off stage at the end of a campaign rally at Lee’s Family Forum in Henderson, Nevada, on Oct. 31, 2024 . (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)
WASHINGTON — Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign is expecting former President Donald Trump to declare victory on election night no matter the actual results, a senior official told reporters on a Friday call.
The senior official for the Democrat’s presidential campaign said Trump, the Republican candidate, would likely repeat his move in the 2020 election to claim he won the election even as results in key states remain unknown.
“This should be no surprise, because he lies all the time and he wants to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming,” the senior official said. “He did this before. It failed.”
The warning from the Harris campaign was one of several that Democrats and democracy groups issued Friday.
Anti-Trump election lawyers and strategists said they are prepared to combat a slew of “illegitimate” lawsuits from allies of Trump if he loses the presidential election.
“The pre-election election-denial litigation tsunami 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 election lawyers and strategists who spoke during a Friday panel by Defend Democracy, a super PAC established by Democratic strategists that focuses on supporting the party’s legal efforts around election protection and any legal challenges that could come after Election Day.
“A lot of the litigation that I think the GOP and the Trump campaign are going to bring are really for show,” said George Conway, an anti-Trump Republican attorney who was previously married to former senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.
The senior Harris official added that the campaign had hundreds of lawyers around the country and in battleground states ready to fight those GOP-led legal challenges.
“We have literally thousands of pages of pleadings customized to particular states ready, ready to address literally anything and everything that the Trump campaign throws at us,” the senior official said.
Interference, investigations underway
Election experts during a Friday panel said they are concerned with misinformation, violence and attempts to interfere with voting. The panel was put together by the Democracy Communications Collaborative, a democracy think tank and Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.
In Colorado, there’s a criminal investigation underway after a dozen fraudulent ballots were submitted in the county. Ballot drop boxes in Oregon and Washington state were damaged and set on fire. And in Florida, an 18-year-old wielding a machete near an early voting site was arrested for antagonizing potential Democratic voters, local law enforcement said.
Claire Woodall, former City of Milwaukee Election Commission executive director, said on the panel that Wisconsin has not seen any vandalism at drop boxes, but that she’s still concerned about misinformation.
“What we are instead seeing right now is the spread of a conspiracy theory around by-mail voting and the United States Postal Service,” she said.
There are also concerns about foreign interference. The FBI said Friday that Russian actors manufactured a video that falsely shows individuals claiming to be from Haiti voting illegally in Georgia.
“Russian influence actors also manufactured a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential ticket of taking a bribe from a U.S. entertainer,” the FBI said.
The agency said it “expects Russia to create and release additional media content that seeks to undermine trust in the integrity of the election and divide Americans.”
Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert and co-founder and CEO of 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 have a lot of pre-existing fissures and grievances in our society.”
She said in general, the “safeguards have fallen off when it comes to disinformation,” on social media platforms like X, YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.
“(Elon) Musk’s purchase of X has made the platform a veritable firehose of election disinformation,” Jankowicz said.
Harris camp cites strong internal polls
Despite public polls showing the race essentially a toss up, senior officials with the Harris campaign said they were confident that the vice president is doing well with undecided voters, based on internal polling.
“Our internal data is telling us and showing us that we are winning battleground voters who have made up their minds in the last week, and we’re winning them by double-digit margins,” a senior campaign official said.
Both campaigns were similarly confident Thursday.
The senior Harris campaign official said that in a focus group of undecided voters, the comments from speakers during Trump’s weekend rally at Madison Square Garden “really kind of crystallized for them the choice in their minds between the vice president, who they are seeing talk about being a president for everyone, someone focused on them and solving their problems, and Trump and (this) really kind of dark, divisive language.”
At the rally, a comedian made racist comments about Black people and Latinos and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage,” among other vulgar language.
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