Joe Biden’s campaign is preparing for Election Day returns that point to the Democratic presidential nominee being on the way to a win despite expected delays in the full reporting of results.
In an optimistic Election Day briefing, Biden campaign manager Jen O’Malley Dillon hinted that the campaign may assert some form of victory on Tuesday night even without full, final results from battleground states still counting mail-in and absentee ballots.
“We’re going to know tonight where the race is, and we’re going to be very clear from the data and the work that we’ve put together,” she said. “While not all of these states will be reported out tonight, we will have a very firm and clear sense of what our path is, our exact numbers, and expectations of that.”
The former vice president is scheduled to address the nation from his campaign headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, on Tuesday night.
According to the Biden campaign’s projections, with the early voting advantage that Democrats have going into Election Day, President Trump needs large majorities of the Election Day vote in battleground states to secure an Electoral College victory: 62% in North Carolina and Michigan, 61% in Wisconsin, 60% in Arizona, and 57% in Georgia.
Trump’s campaign is confident that a majority of voters will choose the president.
“In a lot of places across the country, Election Day is going to look like a Trump rally,” Nick Trainer, the Trump campaign’s director of battleground strategy, said in a press call on Monday.
While O’Malley Dillon acknowledged that Florida is a “coin toss,” she said that Biden has many more paths to winning 270 Electoral College votes than Trump does — including paths that do not include Biden winning Florida or Pennsylvania.
Asked whether Biden will declare victory on Tuesday night and under what circumstances he could do so, O’Malley Dillon did not directly answer, but she said that partial returns may show Biden on the way to winning key states.
“In those places where we have a larger advantage, and we are not within the margin of error in the numbers we’re looking at that, that gives us the ability to make some projections earlier, even if we don’t have the full vote out,” she said.
She also declined to say whether arrangements had been made between the Trump and Biden teams for a concession call, should one be necessary.
On Monday, O’Malley Dillon slammed Trump for a reported plan, according to unnamed sources, to declare victory on election night. “Under no scenario will Donald Trump be declared a victor on election night,” she said.
She reiterated that sentiment on Tuesday: “We are unfazed by Trump’s desperate attempts to hang on this election.”
Trump on Sunday denied that he plans to declare victory on election night. “No, no, that was a false report,” he said, but he added that it “wasn’t fair” if results are not known that night.
