‘They are going to cheat’: Trump campaign manager says Democrats will try to steal the election

President Trump’s campaign manager thinks that Democrats will fight dirty in the race to the White House this year.

“They are going to cheat,” Brad Parscale told an audience at the Conservative Political Action Conference in National Harbor, Maryland, on Friday. “Trust me, I saw what they did in 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. They are not going to wake up in 2020 and say, ‘Let’s play fair now.'”

Some Democratic voters are concerned that Trump will refuse to accept the results of the election.

The campaign expects to have an email list that is 50 million contacts deep by November, and 2 million trained volunteers — a massive jump from the 16,000 trained volunteers it had in 2016. Already, Parscale said, the campaign has recruited 500,000, he added, “and we don’t have anyone to run against yet.”

The campaign is using the president’s vast network of supporters to build out a strategy it says will grow the electoral map for conservatives. The campaign has turned the president’s Palm Beach estate, Mar-a-Lago, into a muscular fundraising tool. And Trump officials and prominent supporters have been dispatched on bus tours through states the campaign needs to win, and other states that are “nice-to-haves.”

Parscale said the Trump campaign is ready “to compete against any of them,” referring to the surviving contenders for the Democratic nomination. He pointed to efforts in Minnesota and New Mexico, states the campaign has said are in play for November. “There’s some, where the map could expand well past the 30 states we won last time,” he said. “You can cheer to that.”

The campaign spent $35,000 in New Mexico and Minnesota in 2016 and had just one staffer. “This time, we have tens of millions of dollars and more staff than the entire 2016 ground game. We only lost Minnesota by a small amount. If you look at what is happening, Latinos are coming in huge numbers, in huge waves, to the president, and now New Mexico is in play.”

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