With the latest numbers, such as an NBC/SurveyMonkey poll, showing Trump’s support riding between 9-14 points below that of Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, Trump discussed his inflammatory rhetoric with CNBC Thursday, saying, “At the end, it’s either going to work or I’m going to, you know, I’m going to have a very, very nice long vacation”.
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“As we’ve seen from Crooked Hillary’s willingness to use – and outright lie about – government institutions for personal and political enrichment, there’s a lot of cheating going on”, Miller said. “And that’s the way we can lose the state”.
“We have to call up law enforcement, and we have to have the sheriffs and the police chiefs and everybody watching”, Trump said.
“I hope you people can sort of not just vote on the 8th, go around and look and watch other polling places, and make sure that it’s 100 percent fine”, Trump said.
He also added that poll watchers are “standard for professional campaigns” and pointed out poll watcher guides from around the country, including NY and Texas. The only way we can lose, in my opinion – I really mean this, Pennsylvania – is if cheating goes on.
His efforts to say the election would be rigged, they pointed out, was pushing Trump supporters to take extreme action. The state’s voter ID law was struck down in 2014.
“Maybe that’s lucky”, Trump said.
Trump noted that his appearances Friday in Erie and Altoona represented outreach to Pennsylvania’s so-called “T’ region – between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh and across the northern half of the state”. It’s also worth pointing out that actual instances of voter fraud are incredibly rare.
As a reminder, Mitt Romney did not win Pennsylvania in 2012. And his team is struggling to transform his winning primary campaign model into an unbeatable national election machine. But as the Philadelphia Inquirer reported at the time, “the unanimous support for [President] Obama in these Philadelphia neighborhoods – clustered in nearly exclusively black sections of West and North Philadelphia – fertilizes fears of fraud, despite little hard evidence”. In 2008, Mr. Obama triumphed over John McCain 54.5 percent to 44.2 percent.
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Pennsylvania does not require voters in the state to show photo identification – which Trump said he finds “shocking”.
