Judge rejects GOP effort to throw out 127K Texas votes
More than 96 million people have cast their ballots -- an early voting record.
On the eve of Election Day, President Donald Trump and former Vice President Joe Biden had only hours left to make their closing arguments to voters in a contest both are calling the most important of their lifetime.
With more than 95 million Americans having already cast their ballots -- an early voting record -- time was running out for Trump and Biden to sway uncommitted voters.
Trump had five rallies in four states -- North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin -- as both candidates planned to barnstorm the states they deemed critical in a final full day of campaigning overshadowed by coronavirus cases rising in nearly every election battleground.
Biden went to Ohio and Pennsylvania, closing out the day at a drive-in rally with Lady Gaga in Pittsburgh. His running mate, California Sen. Kamala Harris, is also campaigning in Pennsylvania and finishedd her day at a drive-in rally with John Legend in Philadelphia. Their ticket's top surrogate, former President Barack Obama, campaigned in Georgia and Florida.
Vice President Mike Pence had a pair of rallies in Pennsylvania -- a state Trump won by one point in 2016 and one where a Democratic win this time would leave him with an exceedingly narrow path to victory -- before joining Trump on the trail in Michigan.
Top headlines:
- Federal judge rejects GOP effort to throw out 127K 'drive-thru' votes in Texas
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- Texas Republicans ask federal judge to invalidate 127K 'drive-thru' votes
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- Overview: Trump rallies in five states, Biden focus on Pennsylvania
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