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US President Donald Trump in the Cabinet Room at the White House in Washington, July 9, 2020.
Kevin Lamarque | Reuters
President Donald Trump met with his top electoral advisers on Wednesday as his chances of overturning an apparent victory for President-elect Joe Biden in the White House race looked increasingly daunting.
NBC News reported that Trump met with his son-in-law and senior White House adviser Jared Kushner, campaign manager Bill Stepien and senior campaign adviser Jason Miller to discuss the way forward for the incumbent Republican president.
Trump held a similar meeting on Tuesday, more focused on the status of the multiple legal challenges his campaign has launched to invalidate President-elect Biden’s ballots in six battlefield states.
Wednesday’s meeting came as NBC News reported that Trump’s advisers increasingly expect to never admit he lost to Biden, even when the ballots are certified in the coming weeks. in all the countries.
“Don’t expect him to concede,” a senior official told NBC. It is more likely, said the assistant, “that he will say something like: ‘We cannot trust the results, but I do not dispute them.'”
Biden, a former Democratic vice president, has 77.4 million votes in the popular vote tally, compared to 72.26 million votes cast for Trump, a margin of 50.8% to 47.4%, with 96% of the expected national vote counted so far.
But the electoral college vote, not the popular vote, determines who wins the White House. All states except Maine and Nebraska allocate all of their electoral votes, which are equal to their number of congressional districts plus two, to the winner of their popular electoral votes.
NBC News predicted that Biden would win at least 279 Electoral College votes, nine more than the minimum a candidate needs to win the presidency.
Trump is now expected to win 217 electoral votes.
Three states have not yet been projected by NBC News: Arizona, Georgia and North Carolina, which have 47 electoral votes.
Trump currently leads the popular vote count for one of those states, North Carolina, but trails Biden in the other two states by 0.4 percentage point or less.
Georgia’s secretary of state on Wednesday announced a manual recount of all ballots.
To retain the presidency, Trump would have to undo at least one of Biden’s projected victories in Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, even if he manages to win the remaining three states whose results have yet to be seen. projected.
Election analysts and legal observers say his chances of winning a recount or invalidating enough ballots by proving fraud or other impropriety to deny Biden a victory in even one state, let alone multiple states , are thin at best.
Biden’s legal advisor Bob Bauer called the Trump campaign legal challenges “theatrical.”
A White House official told NBC News, “It’s not wrong for Biden’s team to call it theater.”
Arizona Attorney General Mark Brnovich, a Republican, said Wednesday it was “very, very unlikely” that Trump would win enough of the less than 45,000 outstanding Arizona ballots to overcome Biden’s lead over there.
Brnovich, whose wife was appointed to the federal bench by Trump, also said in an interview with Fox Business that his office found no evidence of voter fraud.
In Georgia, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told Fox 5 Atlanta on Tuesday that “we have not found any widespread voter fraud.”
“I understand that half of the people will be happy, half of the people will be sad, but I want 100% of the people to understand that the process was fair and accurately counted,” Raffensperger said.
Pennsylvania Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman, a Democrat, said Wednesday in an interview with CNN that the only known case of voter fraud “in Pennsylvania in this cycle, is a Republican registered in Luzerne County, [who] tried to vote for Trump with his late mother’s ballot. “
“And at some point we all have to collectively accept that yelling ‘voter fraud’ when there is no evidence that it is screaming ‘fire’ in a crowded theater,” said Fetterman. “It is damaging our country’s democratic frankness and the peaceful transition of power and we cannot accept this.”
In Michigan, State Attorney General Dana Nessel also disputed the Trump campaign’s fraud allegations.
“Michigan’s November election went as smoothly as ever,” Democrat Nessel said Wednesday.
“Irregularities happen in every election, but there are several levels of protection to ensure that these irregularities are detected and rectified.”
“Most of them are simple human errors, not crimes,” she said.
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