Polling hasn’t even opened in some US states, and already former Republican president Donald Trump has begun setting the stage to claim the election is rigged… but only if he doesn’t win. In other words, he’s having a bet each way, which suggests that deep down, Trump suspects he might lose again. Chris Graham explains.
After casting his ballot in Palm Beach, Florida, shortly after the polls opened, Trump spoke to reporters alongside wife Melania. True to form, most of what he said was untrue.
Trump voted by mail-in ballot in 2016 and 2020, but after losing to Biden claimed the mail-in ballots were corrupt. So this year, he’s voted in person. And he now claims that any vote not cast on election day itself is suspect. There has been zero evidence so far of widespread voter fraud, just like in 2020.
Pointedly, however, Trump’s also claimed to be very confident of winning… provided nothing ‘happens’ like it did when he lost to Biden .
“I ran a great campaign [this time]. Maybe the best of the three,” Trump said, a reference to the three campaigns he’s now contested for the US presidential elections.
Of course, Trump won in 2016 and lost in 2020, and 2024 looks to be on a knife’s edge. But according to Trump, it should be an easy win.
“We did great in the first one (2016). We did much better in the second one (2020), but something happened. And I would say this was the best campaign we’ve run.
“I feel very confident. We went in with a very big lead today, and it looks like Republicans have shown up in force.”
Trump hasn’t gone into the election with ‘a big lead today’. The polls virtually everywhere – even amongst pollsters who favour the Republican – show a very tight race, with Kamala Harris and Trump neck-and-neck in the battleground states (although Harris is expected to win the popular vote by a significant margin, just Biden did in 2020).
Of course, the former reality TV star may ultimately win the election fair and square (a relative term in a campaign built around an extraordinary series of lies by Trump, about virtually every area of public policy).
Film-maker Michael Moore, who successfully predicted a Trump victory in 2016, claimed over the weekend that the former president was “toast”. But most commentators have tipped it to be close.
Whatever happens, it will almost certainly come down to seven swing states: Pennsylvania, Georgia, North Carolina, Michigan, Arizona, Wisconsin and Nevada (with the caveat that a shock poll in Iowa, a traditionally red state, gave Harris a 3-point lead just two days out from the election).
Biden won six of the seven (all but North Carolina) in 2020, but current polling suggests Trump might be ahead in Georgia, Nevada and Arizona. Harris is favoured in Wisconsin and Michigan and Pennsylvania is considered too close to call. It’s also the biggest cache of electoral college votes (20) and if the election is tight, could end up being the state that decides the outcome.
In 2020, Biden won Pennsylvania by just over 80,000 votes, but that’s out of almost 7 million electors. The margin was just 1.16%, and it looks much together than that on paper today.
That said, the US polls have been notoriously inaccurate in recent years. They’ve under- and over-estimated support for both major parties. In particular, they predicted a ‘red wave’ for the Republicans at the 2022 mid-term elections, which never came to pass – Trump candidates were soundly defeated in virtually every contest, and Biden led an historic defense of the Senate (the party in the White House usually loses support by the mid-terms).
But for now, with the polls open for another eight hours or so in some western states,
And Trump is staying on script until the polls close: in Palm Beach he continued to focus on promoting ‘fear and loathing in the US’, telling reporters crime was “through the roof” (it’s generally down across the US), and claiming that immigration was the biggest problem facing the country.
Since the pandemic, surveys have consistently shown that Americans view the economy and the cost of living as the biggest concerns, followed by immigration and abortion rights.
We’ll find out in a few hours whether or not the surveys were correct, or whether Trump has managed to pull a fragile nation even further to the right.
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