Former President Donald J. Trump and his allies are rolling out a late-stage campaign strategy that borrows heavily from the subversive playbook he used to challenge his loss four years ago, this time with reinforcements from outside groups built on the false notion of a stolen election.
With Election Day only three days away, Mr. Trump is already claiming the Democrats are “a bunch of cheats,” as his allies in battleground states spread distorted reports of mishaps at the polls to push a narrative of widespread fraud.
Mr. Trump and his most prominent supporters have pointed to partisan polling and betting markets to claim that he is heading for a “crushing victory,” as his top surrogate Elon Musk recently put it. The expectation helps set the stage for disbelief and outrage among his supporters should he lose.
And in a direct echo of his failed — and, prosecutors say, illegal — bid to remain in power after the 2020 election, some of his most influential advisers are suggesting he will yet again seek to claim victory before all the votes are counted, a move that ushered in his efforts to deny his defeat four years ago and helped set the stage for the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
In many respects, though, the effort that led to Jan. 6 never ended.
“It’s been four years of spreading lies about elections and recruiting volunteers to challenge the system, filing litigation,’’ said Joanna Lydgate, the chief executive of States United Democracy Center, a nonprofit group that works with state officials to bolster confidence in their elections. “What we’re seeing today is all of that coming to fruition.”
The Trump campaign did not respond to an email seeking comment.
In a statement, Dana Remus, a top lawyer for Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, said, “It isn’t surprising that he is already questioning the results of a still ongoing election” and added, “He failed when he tried this in 2020, and he will fail again.”
Polls show the race is effectively tied, leaving the possibility that Mr. Trump will win and have no reason to dispute the outcome. In that case, the question of whether to accept the results would fall to Ms. Harris, who has said she would uphold “free and fair elections” and the “peaceful transfer of power.”
For all the similarities, there are important differences between now and 2020, some of which reassure the coalition of civil rights lawyers, Democrats, Republicans and election administrators working to prevent a repeat of 2020:
Congress has passed a new law, the Electoral Count Reform Act, meant to make it harder to stop the final certification of the results by Congress on Jan. 6, as Mr. Trump tried to do four years ago.
Mr. Trump no longer has control of the federal government — which he sought to use to press his 2020 case. In the states, there are fewer like-minded Republicans in key positions of power than there were four years ago.
Some of the loudest clarions for stolen election theories have paid heavily for circulating them, including Fox News, which last year paid Dominion Voting Systems $787 million to settle a lawsuit over the network’s promotion of false theories that Dominion’s machines had switched votes.
And the experience of 2020, along with more recent clashes over voting issues, has taught election administrators lessons about fortifying themselves against a similar effort this year.
“You have the benefit of something having happened once before,” said the Pennsylvania secretary of state, Al Schmidt, a Republican. “You learn from it to guide you moving forward.”
But the threat of another chaotic post-election period remains.
While Mr. Trump no longer has control of the federal government, a movement of activists has succeeded in putting election-doubting conservatives in position across the voting system, as poll watchers, election workers and even local officials in charge of certifying local results.
The new law has loopholes that Mr. Trump could try to exploit. For instance, the law sets a new, hard deadline by which states must send their final, certified election results to Washington ahead of the Electoral College vote. But some Trump-aligned officials have called for blocking certification at the local level, raising the possibility that the process could be stalled ahead of that deadline. The law has no clear remedy for cases where it is missed.
Finally, though some news organizations like Fox and Newsmax have faced serious defamation claims for spreading conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines, the major social media platforms have dramatically scaled back efforts to curb false content.
None have gone farther than X, formerly Twitter, whose founder, Mr. Musk, has actively used the platform to promote the sense that Mr. Trump is destined to win and to spread his own false voting claims.
“There has been a lot of investment by allies of President Trump to suggest that his victory is inevitable,” said David Becker, executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan organization that advises election officials. “That’s the expectation being set among some of his supporters.”
Step 1: Claim Victory
The period leading up to Election Day has featured several scenes that seem to be ripped from court filings in the federal case charging Mr. Trump with election interference over his actions after his defeat in 2020. (Mr. Trump has pleaded not guilty.)
When Stephen K. Bannon, an influential right-wing media figure and close Trump adviser, was released from prison on Tuesday, he quickly told reporters that Mr. Trump should act preemptively on election night and simply claim victory.
As Mr. Bannon said: “He should stand up and say: ‘Hey, I’ve won this. And we have teams right now that are going to make sure that this thing is not going to be stolen.’”
In recently filed court papers naming Mr. Bannon as a co-conspirator in Mr. Trump’s federal election interference case, the special counsel, Jack Smith, noted that Mr. Bannon had said the same thing four years ago.
“What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory, right?” he said, according to the records, later adding, “That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner.”
Mr. Trump did just that, unleashing a barrage of lawsuits challenging swing-state results, nearly all of which failed as various judges found claims of fraud to be lacking.
That legal failure did not stop his efforts. He and several allies then sought to convince Republican legislators in states that President Joseph R. Biden had won that they had the power to submit their own slates of pro-Trump Electoral College delegates, effectively rejecting the popular vote. Several of those involved in that operation were later indicted.
The new law specifies that only governors or other executives can send electors to Washington, cutting state legislatures out of the process. Yet, some Trump allies have already suggested they could again turn to state lawmakers.
An architect of the 2020 strategy, John Eastman, recently told Politico that he believed the new law was unconstitutional. (Mr. Eastman is under indictment in Arizona and Georgia over his 2020 election activities and has pleaded not guilty in both states.)
Step 2: Sow Doubt
Elections always bring a range of human and technological errors, but Mr. Trump and his allies have distorted the nature of such events, painting them as evidence of Democratic wrongdoing.
“They’ve already started cheating in Lancaster,” Mr. Trump said at a rally on Tuesday night in Allentown, Pa. A day earlier, he had posted on Truth Social that Lancaster County, Pa., had discovered “Fake Ballots and Forms.”
Pennsylvania was “cheating and getting caught at large-scale levels rarely seen before,” he declared later in the week.
In reality, the episode in Lancaster was worrisome but was not evidence of widespread of malfeasance. Election officials said that a batch of suspicious registration applications — not ballots — had been turned in by a canvassing firm. Officials reported them to law enforcement agencies.
In 2020, it was a fringe of Mr. Trump’s advisers and allies that cheered him on. Now, the entire party machinery — and prominent and influential allies — are using various levers to claim publicly that the only way Mr. Trump can lose is through cheating.
The Republican National Committee, which is now under the joint leadership of the former president’s daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, and the one-time party counsel, Michael Whatley, has made “election integrity” a top priority. (The lawyer in charge of the committee’s “election integrity” team, Christina Bobb, was charged with conspiracy by the Arizona attorney general in connection with her efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power four years ago; she pleaded not guilty.)
Last week, Mr. Whatley posted online about the arrest of a woman at polling station in Delaware County, Pa., who had been urging voters to remain in line, calling the incident election interference. The local authorities later defended the arrest, saying the woman had been acting disruptively.
Using another tactic from 2020, Mr. Trump and his allies have also complained this year that states like Pennsylvania and Arizona are unlikely to finish counting votes until well after Election Day, suggesting the delays are somehow improper or nefarious.
In 2020, conspiracy theories about the pace of the vote count were some of the first to swirl in the days after Mr. Trump’s defeat.
Election officials note that mail ballots can take more time to count and that delays are not a sign of trouble. Still, they have been working to speed the process, knowing they are in a race against misinformation.
“You’ve got to decrease the amount of time,’’ said the secretary of state in Nevada, Cisco Aguilar. “Shut down the chatter.”
Step 3: Disrupt
While Mr. Trump’s 2020 effort was chiefly focused on disrupting the last step of the election — certification of the results in Congress — Mr. Trump’s allies this year have also zeroed in on vulnerabilities at the beginning of the process.
That starts with about 10,000 local jurisdictions where officials have a mandate to certify the votes before sending them up to their state capitals, which upon their own statewide certifications then send their totals and delegate slates on to Washington.
Though the task is prescribed by law as mandatory throughout the states, board or commission members in at least 20 counties across eight states have moved to block certification, in some rare cases succeeding at least temporarily.
Officials across the swing states have prepared legal papers to force any recalcitrant boards to certify results on time.
Both sides are paying close attention to the process, which Mr. Bannon seemed to hint at during his remarks this week.
“The only thing that matters,’’ he said, “is votes that can be certified from American citizens, and that’s what we’re focused on.”
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