Republicans are already laying the ground for rejecting the result of next week’s US presidential election in the event Donald Trump loses, with early lawsuits baselessly alleging fraud and polls from right-leaning groups that analysts say may be exaggerating his popularity and could be used by Trump to claim only cheating prevented him from returning to the White House.
The warnings – from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans – come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential contest in generations. Most polls show Trump running neck and neck with Kamala Harris, the vice-president and Democratic nominee, with the two candidates seemingly evenly matched in seven key swing states.
But suspicions have been voiced over a spate of recent polls, mostly commissioned in battleground states from groups with Republican links, that mainly show Trump leading. The projection of surging Trump support as election day nears has drawn confident predictions from him and his supporters.
“We’re leading big in the polls, all of the polls,” Trump told a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he told a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show he and Harris are in a virtual dead heat.
An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster is confirming that story to him, with Tony Fabrizio declaring the ex-president’s “position nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago”.
Pro-Trump influencers, too, have strengthened the impression of inevitable victory with social media posts citing anonymous White House officials predicting Harris’s defeat. “Biden is telling advisers the election is ‘dead and buried’ and called Harris an innate sucker,” the conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.
GOP-aligned polling groups have released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, according to a study by the New York Times, during a period when longstanding pollsters have been curtailing their voter surveys. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to the findings of long-established non-partisan pollsters, which have shown a more mixed picture – often with Harris leading, albeit within error margins.
In one illustration, a poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organisation founded by a former Republican consultant – gave Trump a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state put the vice-president ahead by a single point.
The polling expert Nate Silver – who has said his “gut” favours a Trump win, while simultaneously arguing that people should not trust their gut – cast doubt on the ex-president’s apparent surge in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion you should discount,” he said.
“There’s been certainly some momentum towards Trump in the last couple of weeks. [But] these small changes are swamped by the uncertainty. Any indicator you want to point to, I could point to counter-examples.”
Democrats and some polling experts believe the conservative-commissioned polls are aiming to create a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.
“Republicans are clearly strategically putting polling into the information environment to try to create perceptions that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to get the answer right,” Joshua Dyck, of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell, told the New York Times.
Simon Rosenberg, a Democrat strategist and blogger, said it followed a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a succession of surveys favourable to Republicans created an expectation of a pro-GOP “red wave” that never materialised on polling day.
“These polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were being done and they ended up having the effect of pushing the polling averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.
“We cannot be bamboozled by this again. It is vital to Donald Trump’s effort if he tries to cheat and overturn the election results, he needs to have data showing that somehow he was winning the election.
“The reason we have to call this out is that Donald Trump needs to go into election day with some set of data showing him winning, so if he loses, he can say we cheated.”
Trump, who falsely claims that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, is also paving the way for repeating the accusation via legal means.
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He told a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats were “cheating” in the state, and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had expired. A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread cheating in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has encouraged early voting.
Suing to allege – without evidence – that there has been voting fraud is part of a well-worn pattern of Trump disputing election results that do not go his way. In the aftermath of the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits disputing the results, all of which were forcefully thrown out in court.
Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump’s actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican national committee chair and Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were gamed to favour Trump.
“You find different ways to weight the participants, and that changes the results you’re going to get,” he said. “They’re gamed on the back end so Maga can make the claim that the election was stolen.”
Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican candidate, and a founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same outlet: “Their gameplan is to make it impossible for states to certify. And these fake polls are a great tool in that, because that’s how you lead people to think the race was stolen.”
Trump-leaning surveys have influenced the polling averages published by sites such as Real Clear Politics, which has incorporated the results into its projected electoral map on election night, forecasting a win for the former president.
Elon Musk, Trump’s wealthiest backer and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform, proclaiming: “The trend will continue.”
Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms, which have bolstered the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate stemming from hefty bets on him winning.
A small number of high-value wagers from four accounts linked to a French national appeared to be responsible for $28m gambled on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform, the New York Times reported.
Trump referenced the Polymarket activity in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell it means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.
