Republicans are already setting the stage to reject the results of next week’s U.S. presidential election if Donald Trump loses, with initial lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and a poll run by right-wing groups, analysts say. They say they may be exaggerating his popularity and could be exploited by Trump. He claimed that the only thing that kept him from returning to the White House was misconduct.
The warnings from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans come as Americans prepare to vote Tuesday in the most consequential presidential election in a generation. Most polls show Mr. Trump in a neck-and-neck race with his vice president, Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, and the two candidates appear to be tied in seven key battleground states.
But a series of recent polls commissioned by Republican-linked groups, mostly in battleground states, have largely shown Trump in the lead, raising doubts. Predictions that Trump’s support will surge as Election Day approaches has drawn confident predictions from Trump and his supporters.
“We have a huge lead in every poll,” President Trump said Thursday at a rally in New Mexico. “I can’t believe it’s so close,” he said at another rally in North Carolina, a battleground state where polls show him and Harris in a virtual dead heat.
An internal memo sent to President Trump by the chief pollster corroborates that story, with Tony Fabrizio saying the former president’s “position in the country and in all battleground states is worse today than it was four years ago. “It’s been vastly improved,” he said.
Influential Trump supporters also posted on social media that anonymous White House officials predicted Harris would lose, reinforcing the impression that victory was inevitable. “Biden tells advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and calls Harris a natural scumbag,” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.
According to a New York Times investigation, Republican polling organizations released 37 polls in the final stages of the campaign, even as long-standing polling companies have scaled back their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established nonpartisan pollsters, which often show Harris in the lead, albeit within the margin of error, and are more complex. I showed you the situation.
As an example, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group, an organization founded by a former Republican consultant, showed Mr. Trump leading Ms. Harris by 3 points in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll in the state two days later showed the vice president leading by 1 point.
Pollster Nate Silver says his “gut feeling” supports Trump’s victory, but argues that people shouldn’t trust their gut, and said in an interview with CNBC that the former president’s He questioned the apparent spike. “Those who are confident in this election should ignore that opinion,” he said.
“There has certainly been momentum toward President Trump in recent weeks.[But]these small changes are masked by uncertainty. If you have metrics that you want to point to, you can point to counterexamples. Masu.”
Democrats and some pollsters say the conservative-commissioned poll is aimed at creating a false narrative that Trump is on the rise, and that they will dispute the results if Harris wins. We believe that it may be used to chant.
“Republicans are clearly strategically incorporating polls into their information environment to create a perception that Trump is stronger. Their motivation is not necessarily to get the right answer,” says the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts Lowell. Joshua Dyke told the New York Times.
Democratic strategist and blogger Simon Rosenberg said this election follows the trend set in the 2022 Congressional elections. At the time, a flurry of polls favorable to Republicans raised hopes of a pro-Republican “red wave,” but that did not materialize on Election Day.
“These polls typically had Republican support 2, 3, 4 points higher than the independent polls that were being conducted, so they ended up moving the polling average to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News. It had a boosting effect,” he said.
“We cannot afford to be fooled again by this. If Donald Trump were to cheat and try to overturn the election results, he would need data to show that he somehow won the election.
“The reason we have to point this out is because Donald Trump needs to go into Election Day with some data showing he won, so if he loses, we Because he can say that he did something wrong.”
President Trump, who has falsely claimed that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for another accusation through legal means.
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He said at a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign filed legal action against Bucks County election officials. In the county, voters who were waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were being denied 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 other states, and demand for mail-in voting is increasing, in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.
Filing lawsuits alleging voter fraud without evidence is part of President Trump’s familiar pattern of challenging election results that don’t go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits challenging the results, all of which were forcibly thrown out in court.
Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about President Trump’s actions. Former Republican National Committee chairman and Trump critic Michael Steele told The New Republic that the Republican-commissioned poll was rigged in Trump’s favor.
“Finding different ways to weight participants will change the results you get,” he said. “They are being gamed on the back end so MAGA can claim the election was stolen.”
Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to 2012 Republican candidate Mitt Romney and founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the outlet: And fake polls like this are a great tool in that regard because they’re a way to make people think the race is stolen. ”
The pro-Trump polls influence the polling averages published by sites like Real Clear Politics, which incorporate the results into election maps expected on election night and I predict a presidential victory.
Elon Musk, President Trump’s wealthiest supporter and surrogate, posted a map to his 202 million followers on his X platform, declaring that “this trend will continue.”
Mr. Trump and Mr. Musk are also promoting online betting platforms, reinforcing the impression that their supporters are surging from big bets on the Republican candidate’s victory.
The New York Times reports that the $28 million bet on Trump’s victory on the Polymarket platform appears to involve a small number of high-value bets from four accounts linked to French individuals.
President Trump mentioned polymarket activities in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell that means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.
