On election eve, Trump needs disruptions to pull off win: ANALYSIS
The ultimate disruptor needs one last shocker.
That can happen in one of two ways for Trump -- one in a scenario that would play out in the hours before Tuesday night, the other immediately after.
The bottom line that both parties acknowledge: The Trump campaign needs the polls -- virtually all of them -- to be wrong. They need the images of massive crowds to translate into an Election Day army at the polls, to wipe out the advantage that Biden has almost certainly built up as early voting smashes new records.
As for the other way, Trump senior adviser Jason Miller offered a hint on ABC's "This Week" on Sunday. Miller said -- without evidence, and quite implausibly -- that the president would be "over 290 electoral votes on election night."
"So no matter what they tried to do, what kind of hijinks or lawsuits or whatever kind of nonsense they try to pull off, we're still going to have enough electoral votes to get President Trump reelected," Miller said.
Given the president's repeated assertions that a winner needs to be determined on Nov. 3 -- "that's the way it's been and the way it should be," Trump said Sunday -- Miller is strongly suggesting that the campaign would rely on incomplete voting results to suggest that the race is over. A legal strategy of seeking to disqualify uncounted votes could follow.
Several states -- Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Michigan among them -- are unlikely to tabulate early votes promptly on election night, meaning initial results may favor Trump, perhaps misleadingly. Media organizations, including ABC News, will not make projections without far more data than is likely to be released before midnight.
A premature declaration of victory has no force of law, of course. But it may mark the ultimate test of a political system that Trump has sought to disrupt, time and again.
-ABC News’ Political Director Rick Klein
