“Trump’s Ominous ‘We Don’t Need Votes’ Rant Is Back—And It’s a Dangerous Warning We Can’t Afford to Ignore!”

I wonder what is up with this, because this is now a feature and not a bug, of the Trump 2024 campaign. He keeps saying, “We have all the votes we need,” or some variance on that basic theme. Plus, he’s not campaigning much and he’s basically taking next week off except for one brief appearance on Monday in Indiana, Pennsylvania. There are only two possibilities here: 1.

This is Trump blustering, doing a Roy Cohn number, “even if you’re losing say that you’re winning.” Or, 2. He really believes that he’s got this one in the bag somehow. And then that thought leads to speculation: 1. Is it that Chris and Susie are saying he’s going to win because if they tell him the truth about how he’s really doing, he won’t even get out of bed in the morning? Or, 2. Do they believe they’ve got it in the bag as well? And if the answer to this last question is “yes” then oh my God, could we be in trouble.

Trump: “We don’t need votes. What we need is honestly in the election. If we have honesty, we have all the votes we need.” pic.twitter.com/QAwsGGEQeI

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 21, 2024

So what’s up with this? Is “the system” so rigged to favor the tyranny of the minority that no matter what happens, the Electoral College will tweak the result so that the rightful winner isn’t going to be the actual winner? Here are a few thoughts from Heather Cox Richardson’s newsletter of September 20.

On September 16, CNN senior data reporter Harry Enten wrote that while it’s “[p]retty clear that [Democratic candidate Vice President Kamala] Harris is ahead nationally right now… [h]er advantage in the battlegrounds is basically nil. Average it all, Harris’[s] chance of winning the popular vote is 70%. Her chance of winning the electoral college is 50%.” Two days later, on September 18, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) skipped votes in the Senate to travel to Nebraska, where he tried to convince state legislators to switch the state’s system of allotting electoral votes by district to a winner-take-all system. That effort so far appears unsuccessful.

In a country of 50 states and Washington, D.C.—a country of more than 330 million people—presidential elections are decided in just a handful of states, and it is possible for someone who loses the popular vote to become president. We got to this place thanks to the Electoral College, and to two major changes made to it since the ratification of the Constitution.

We certainly have seen enough popular vote winners lose in the Electoral College. That is the norm nowadays. And we saw Lindsey Graham toddle off to Georgia in 2020 to see if he could affect the outcome and now this year it’s Nebraska. So there is a definite emphasis on focusing not so much on the election and working hard to get out the vote (I’m speaking of Trump’s part of the equation) as there is an emphasis on vote counting.

You saw the story this week about how the State of Georgia, against legal advice, has decided to hand count ballots. This is asking for catastrophe and chaos. Last time the ballots in Georgia were counted three times and Trump still lost.

In our history, four presidents—all Republicans—have lost the popular vote and won the White House through the Electoral College. Trump’s 2024 campaign strategy appears to be to do it again (or to create such chaos that the election goes to the House of Representatives, where there will likely be more Republican-dominated delegations than Democratic ones).

In the 2024 election, Trump has shown little interest in courting voters. Instead, the campaign has thrown its efforts into legal challenges to voting and, apparently, into eking out a win in the Electoral College. The number of electoral votes equals the number of senators and representatives to which each state is entitled (100 + 435) plus three electoral votes for Washington, D.C., for a total of 538. A winning candidate must get a majority of those votes: 270.

Winner-take-all means that presidential elections are won in so-called swing or battleground states. Those are states with election margins of less than 3 points, so close they could be won by either party. The patterns of 2020 suggest that the states most likely to be in contention in 2024 are Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, although the Harris-Walz campaign has opened up the map, suggesting its internal numbers show that states like Florida might also be in contention. Candidates and their political action committees focus on those few swing states—touring, giving speeches and rallies, and pouring money into advertising and ground operations.

But in 2024 there is a new wrinkle. The Constitution’s framers agreed on a census every ten years so that representation in Congress could be reapportioned according to demographic changes. As usual, the 2020 census shifted representation, and so the pathway to 270 electoral votes shifted slightly. Those shifts mean that it is possible the election will come down to one electoral vote. Awarding Trump the one electoral vote Nebraska is expected to deliver to Harris could be enough to keep her from becoming president.

Rather than trying to win a majority of voters, just 49 days before the presidential election, Trump supporters—including Senator Graham—are making a desperate effort to use the Electoral College to keep Harris from reaching the requisite 270 electoral votes to win. It is unusual for a senator from one state to interfere in the election processes in another state, but Graham similarly pressured officials in Georgia to swing the vote there toward Trump in 2020.

And we see what Georgia is doing this election. Now if Georgia is the only state to go bonkers, much like Arizona went bonkers in 2020, Harris could be alright. If she wins Pennsylvania and North Carolina, she’ll be more than alright with whatever Georgia does.

I don’t want to sound like a MAGA conspiracy theorist, but it is bothersome to me that Trump keeps saying he has more than enough votes like he’s just going to cruise to victory. It is possible, in fact very likely, that that’s the fantasy he has to tell himself in order to be able to function at all. Or, heaven help us, he’s got enough people on the inside in various states and they’re going to throw a monkey wrench in the works.

I guess we’re just going to have to live it. It’s hard to predict what can happen from this vantage point. In Georgia in 2020, the governor and the secretary of state and the elections officers were honorable people who didn’t fold to Trump’s insane demands for 11,780 votes. I don’t know what we’re dealing with this time.

I do know that Stephen Richer, who was the Maricopa County Recorder got primaried and I don’t know who has taken his place. Maybe a MAGA crazy. Maybe Arizona is also set up to be a battleground of MAGA forces endeavoring to overthrow the voting machinery and the will of the people.