Posted on 11/04/2020 8:29:10 AM PST by RandFan
Top Trump campaign officials on Wednesday projected confidence about President Trump's path to 270 electoral votes as ongoing ballot counts put him in perilous territory, with aides signaling they are prepared to challenge certain votes in court.
Officials predicted Trump would carry Pennsylvania by 40,000 votes and Arizona by 30,000 votes when all is said and done. The two states would give Trump the electoral votes needed for reelection, even if he loses Michigan and Wisconsin.
That scenario would require Trump to also hold onto Georgia, a once reliably red state Democrats have targeted this year. Trump led by less than 2 percentage points with 92 percent of estimated votes reported, according to The New York Times.
But The Associated Press and Fox News have projected Biden will win Arizona, and more than a million ballots still have to be counted in Pennsylvania, which are expected to shrink Trump's advantage there and potentially put Biden into the lead.
"We feel like the president is in very, very, very good position this morning," campaign manager Bill Stepien told reporters.
"If all legally cast ballots are counted, the president will win," he added.
Stepien and senior campaign adviser Jason Miller argued that Trump is likely to over-perform among minority groups in Pennsylvania and have a strong enough showing in certain GOP-leaning counties that he will retain a lead even after Democratic strongholds around Philadelphia and Pittsburgh report a flood of uncounted votes.
In Arizona, the campaign dismissed projections that Biden will win the state, arguing that Election Day votes will break heavily enough for Trump that he will erase the former vice president's roughly 100,000 vote lead.
Miller indicated the campaign still believes Nevada is in play as the state prepares to count mail ballots and Biden holds a lead of 8,000 votes.
But the campaign made clear that its case for Trump winning hinged at least partly on certain ballots being ruled invalid. Stepien and Miller repeatedly referred to counting "legally cast ballots," but they did not specify what would constitute an illegally cast ballot, and they did not take questions.
States are still counting ballots that were cast on Election Day or via mail prior to or on Election Day. The GOP has filed numerous lawsuits challenging certain types of votes in Nevada and Pennsylvania in particular, and Miller signaled they were likely to continue the court battle in the days to come.
"As we’ve seen, Nevada is a state that’s very ripe with corruption," Miller said. "We’re concerned about the efforts, some of the moves that were made there. So we feel good about our prospects in Nevada."
"We are obviously leading a full court press to make sure that we have all of our legal teams that are in place," he added. "We want to make sure that all legally cast ballots are counted. We also want to make sure that illegally cast ballots are not counted."
In addition to Arizona, Trump is trailing Biden in Nevada, Michigan and Wisconsin. Meanwhile, he holds a lead in Pennsylvania and Georgia. All six states, which are likely to determine who wins the presidency, were still counting votes Wednesday.
Biden pulled ahead in Michigan and Wisconsin overnight on the strength of absentee and mail ballots in urban and suburban areas, and the former vice president's campaign projected confidence a similar scenario would play out in Pennsylvania as the state continued counting votes.
Trump has worked to sow doubt about the validity of the results, claiming during an address at the White House in the early morning hours of Wednesday that he had already won those states. He tweeted later in frustration that his lead would "magically disappear" when mail ballots were counted.
Biden officials also dismissed threats of a court battle.
“We’re fully prepared for it because it’s almost as if they handed their strategic playbook to us and read it to us out loud," Biden adviser Bob Bauer said on a call with reporters.
Experts have repeatedly cautioned that final results would likely not be known for a few days after Election Day, particularly given the crush of mail ballots cast amid the coronavirus pandemic
Pathetically weak response. They just let WI and MI be stolen overnight. We probably lost John James in the same process.
Oh, and Jason Miller, along with being scummy in his personal life, was on Bannon’s radio show as a cohost until Trump inexplicably pulled him in to run his campaign.
.... Question .... Does anybody know how many of the votes that still have to be counted in the remaining states are Mail In Ballots that typically lean toward Biden????
yup- the opening salvo
I wonder if Trump has been preparing for this since 2017.
Dispute them all! Fight back & hard
Bring in the lawyers now
He’s got Pennsylvania. I don’t know why they won’t call it already.
ROTFLOL.......my God, are the Bidenettes THAT stupid?
They actually think Trump would give THEM his strategic playbook?
The Trump Team must have gotten a good belly-laugh when they heard the dopey Bidenette adviser Bob Bauer say that.
That is so, so funny.
Legitimate paper ballots are going to have fingerprints.
I keep thinking there must have been a way to prevent the illegitimi from a successful coup. We all knew it was coming and how.
Let the Dems sweat. They'll probably shoot themselves in the foot, like the sudden 100,000+ votes going to Biden with no change for anyone else.
> Let’s start with the 600,000 ballots that appeared magically in Michigan for Biden while everyone was asleep, with zero going to Trump.
Every single one of them ballots should be revanvassed.
No kidding. The “pause” was clearly a timeout to assess the situation and coordinate with their counterparts in other states to figure out how many votes to dump.
They’re not even trying to cover it up because they know the media won’t report on it.
John Roberts supreme kangaroo court will would never throw out the election.
- 2 forms of ID to vote
- Fingerprinting
- No same-day registration
- No more early voting
- Absentee ballots to active-duty military personnel or disabled people only
- 10 year prison sentence for vote fraud
- Ban the media from calling any state until 100% of all votes have been cast.
- Ban exit polling
- Ban polls and campaigning 48 hours prior to election.
They need to get on this asap. The fraud in Michigan and Wisconsin. This is legitimately going to count and they will swipe both states. unreal!
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