Trump is widely expected to prematurely declare victory regardless of the vote count

Political experts and campaign officials alike are expecting Donald Trump to declare victory on Tuesday night before the final results will roll in. It’s just one tactic the former president and his allies have been working on to sow doubt in a potential election loss.

Well, the time has finally come.

Tuesday is Election Day, and voters across the country will decide who will serve as president for the next four years: Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. While we can’t be sure of who will win, there’s one thing we can likely expect: that Trump will declare victory ahead of time. 

Political experts and campaign officials alike are expecting Trump to declare victory on Tuesday night, before the final results will likely roll in. After all, this is what he did in 2020, before he subsequently lost to President Joe Biden.

Trump even told reporters last week that he hopes to be able to declare victory on Election Day, despite the fact that election experts have repeatedly said that it could take several days for the final result to be known.

A senior Harris campaign official said Friday that they “fully expect” Donald Trump to declare victory before all the votes are counted. 

But “it won’t work,” the official told reporters on a press call. 

“He did this before. It failed,” the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity in a press call, said. “If he does it again, it will fail.”

The official added that Trump “lies all the time” and is already looking “to sow doubt about a loss that he anticipates is coming” on Tuesday. 

And the official is right: Trump and his allies have been sowing seeds of doubt in the 2024 election process for years. Some of these allies are even the ones pushing the former president to declare a premature victory, like former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, who told a New York Times reporter last week that Trump should “stand up and say, ‘Hey, I’ve won this.’”

If Trump prematurely declares victory and Harris ultimately wins after all the votes are counted, he will likely use that declaration to claim that Harris only won because of voter fraud, or that somehow the election was rigged and stolen from him – just like he did in 2020.

Trump could also exploit the so-called “red mirage” when he prematurely declares victory to claim that he was the real winner on election night, and that Democrats fabricated votes to steal the election from him in the following days.

The red mirage is the phenomenon that occurs when the first votes counted, in-person votes, lean more Republican than the final vote count, which includes mail-in ballots that tend to lean Democratic. This means that Republicans often lead in the early results after polls close on election night, but those leads are often erased as mail-in ballots get counted later in the night or in the days after Election Day.

The red mirage also tends to occur because of geographic differences in counties that report vote tallies more slowly or more quickly. For example, it’s common for smaller, more rural areas to report their vote tallies sooner than larger, more urban areas because the logistics of vote counting are simpler—fewer people means there are fewer ballots to count. 

Since voters in rural areas are more likely to vote Republican, a red mirage can occur when a state’s vote count overrepresents these rural areas early on election night. 

This red mirage — which precedes the “blue shift” that occurs as more ballots are counted — is what Trump will likely try to exploit by prematurely declaring victory.

Trump and his allies have also spent recent weeks paving the path for him to contest a possible defeat by pointing to a handful of favorable polls — many of which are partisan and unreliable — and Trump’s favored position on the betting markets to claim that a Harris win would only be the result of a stolen election.

In reality, most reputable, nonpartisan polls have shown a toss-up race for months and betting markets are open to manipulation and have zero connection to the actual voting or vote-counting process, but are rather a reflection of gamblers’ beliefs or hopes about what will happen.

Far-right Republicans have also used sketchy extrapolations of early voting numbers to claim a Trump victory is inevitable unless there’s fraud and to build public support and institutional inevitability for overturning the election. 

In a statement provided to The New York Times, Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign, said, “It isn’t surprising that he is already questioning the results of a still ongoing election” and added, “he failed when he tried this in 2020, and he will fail again.”

Harris herself said that if Trump does declare victory on Tuesday night, and if her campaign knows “that he is actually manipulating the press and attempting to manipulate the consensus of the American people,” her campaign is prepared to respond. 

Six Democratic party and Harris campaign officials have said that should Trump declare a premature victory, the Harris campaign plans to flood social media and television airwaves with calls for all votes to be tallied before victory is declared on either side. 

“As soon as he (Trump) falsely declares victory, we’re ready to get up on TV and provide the truth and tap a broad network of people who can use their influence to push back,” a top official with the Democratic National Committee told Reuters.

Although a Trump campaign official told Reuters that the former president would fight for all votes until the polls close, they did not answer directly whether or not Trump plans to declare victory before the race is called.