Politico | Trump campaign adviser: conceding ‘is not even in our vocabulary right now’
- US president has continued to push baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, while his campaign keeps up election-related legal challenges in several states
- Joe Biden has won 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 and maintained his lead in the traditionally Republican stronghold of Georgia
This story is published in a content partnership with POLITICO. It was originally reported by Quint Forgey on politico.com on November 0, 2020.
Jason Miller, a senior adviser to US President Donald Trump’s re-election effort, said Monday that the campaign was not remotely considering conceding to President-elect Joe Biden after the Democratic nominee was declared the winner of the 2020 White House race.
“That word is not even in our vocabulary right now,” Miller said in an interview on Fox Business.
“We’re going to go and pursue all these legal means, all the recount methods,” he said. “We’re going to continue exposing and investigating all these instances of fraud or abuse, and make sure … [that] the American public can have full confidence in these elections.”
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Trump has refused to concede since the election was called for Biden on Saturday, after the former vice-president flipped the key swing state of Pennsylvania and secured more than the 270 electoral votes needed to claim victory.
As of Monday morning, Biden had won 290 electoral votes to Trump’s 214 and maintained his lead in the traditionally Republican stronghold of Georgia.
But the president has continued to push his baseless claims of widespread voter fraud, while Trump’s campaign has kept up its election-related legal challenges in several states.
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That litigation and other more political options aimed at reversing race’s outcome are viewed by experts as unsubstantial and extraordinarily unlikely to succeed.
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Elaborating on the Trump campaign’s strategy, Miller said on Monday that election administrators would be “heading to automatic recounts” in Arizona and Georgia, and that a recount in Wisconsin was also likely.
Although Georgia officials have announced that a recount in the state will take place, Arizona’s secretary of state has suggested a recount there will not proceed. Trump’s campaign has already requested a recount in Wisconsin.
Miller also raised the possibility of additional lawsuits in Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states that could be filed in the coming days.
“We’re talking right now about the 2020 election. We’re talking about President Trump. But this is much more even about the entire future of elections in America. This is about election integrity,” he said.
“If we can’t get this right, why would we think that we’re ever going to be able to have confidence in these elections going forward?”
In another interview Monday on Fox Business, Trump campaign communications director Tim Murtaugh refused to say whether the president will concede.
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“I think the law lays out recount provisions and also avenues for legal recourse, and the president owes it to the 70.5 million people who voted for him to pursue all those things,” Murtaugh said.
Murtaugh claimed the campaign would find evidence of “improperly harvested” ballots in Georgia during the state’s recount process, and predicted Trump would “win outright” in Arizona – a state that has already been called for Biden.
“We have high confidence that as the president pursues his lines of legal recourse – including the recounts in Georgia and Wisconsin, at least – we do feel like there is a runway for the president to win this and win re-election,” he said.
Murtaugh also disputed reports that Trump plans to headline large-scale rallies in the aftermath of the election, saying there would instead be smaller “grass-roots events” such as boat parades in protest of the election results. “People are upset,” he said.
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