Trump could claim victory regardless of results, says Harris camp • Florida Phoenix

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 Friday.

The senior Democrat presidential campaign official said Trump, the Republican nominee, would likely repeat his move in the 2020 election and claim he won the election even as results in key states remain unknown.

“This shouldn’t be a surprise because he lies all the time and he wants to cast doubt on a loss he expects to come,” the senior official said. “He did this before. It failed.”

The warning from the Harris campaign was one of several issued by Democrats and democracy groups on Friday.

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

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

Eisen was one of several election attorneys and strategists who spoke at a Friday panel for Defend Democracy, a super PAC founded by Democratic strategists that focuses on supporting the party’s legal efforts on election protections and any legal challenges that arise could occur after election day.

“A lot of the lawsuits that I think the Republican Party and the Trump campaign are going to bring are really for show,” said George Conway, a Republican anti-Trump attorney who was previously married to former senior Trump advisor Kellyanne Conway.

The senior Harris official added that the campaign has hundreds of attorneys across the country and in battleground states ready to take on the GOP-led legal challenges.

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

Interference, investigation ongoing

Election experts said during a Friday panel that they are concerned about disinformation, violence and attempts to disrupt the vote. The panel was put together by the Democracy Communications Collaborative, a democracy think tank, and Issue One, a bipartisan political reform group.

In Colorado, A criminal investigation is underway after a dozen fraudulent ballots were submitted in the county. Ballot boxes inside Oregon And Washington condition were damaged and set on fire. And inside FloridaAn 18-year-old boy wielding a machete near an early voting site was arrested for antagonizing potential Democratic voters, local police said.

Claire Woodall, former executive director of the City of Milwaukee Board of Elections, said on the panel that Wisconsin has not seen any vandalism to mailboxes, but she remains concerned about misinformation.

“What we’re seeing now is the spread of a conspiracy theory surrounding voting by mail and the United States Postal Service,” she said.

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

“Russian influence actors also created a video falsely accusing an individual associated with the Democratic presidential campaign of taking bribes from an American entertainer,” the FBI said.

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

Nina Jankowicz, a disinformation expert and co-founder and CEO of American Sunlight Project, a group that aims to protect American democracy from disinformation, said during the panel that she was not surprised that “foreign actors are extremely active right now because we are many pre-existing rifts and grievances in our society.”

She said that overall, “safeguards have fallen away when it comes to disinformation” on social media platforms such as X, YouTube and Meta’s Facebook and Instagram.

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

Harris Camp cites strong internal polling

Despite public polls showing the race as essentially a toss-up, senior Harris campaign officials said they were confident the vice president is doing well with undecided voters, based on internal polling.

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

Both campaigns were equally confident on Thursday.

Harris’ senior campaign official said that in a focus group of undecided voters, speakers’ comments during Trump’s weekend rally at Madison Square Garden “It really crystallized for them the choice in their minds between the vice president, who they see talking about being a president for everyone, someone who focuses on them and solves their problems, and Trump and (this) really is a kind of dark, divisive language.”

During the meeting, a comedian made racist comments about black people and Latinos, including calling Puerto Rico a “floating island of trash.”

Latest 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. JD Vance, will give a speech in Las Vegas in the morning and head to Scottsdale, Arizona, for another campaign rally in the afternoon.

Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, will also be in Arizona to deliver remarks in Flagstaff on Saturday. He then heads to Tucson in the evening for another campaign rally.

Harris leaves for Atlanta on Saturday and then to Charlotte, North Carolina.

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

Trump will deliver a speech in Lititz, Pennsylvania, on Sunday morning before heading to Macon, Georgia, for a campaign rally in the evening.

Harris concludes the campaign on Monday with stops in Pennsylvania.

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