Donald Trump’s campaign allies joined his baseless accusation of a “rigged election” on Sunday, with Rudy Giuliani speaking in racially charged terms even as the top Republican in Washington rejected the attack on the legitimacy of US elections.
Over the weekend, Trump described US democracy as “an illusion” and repeated his calls for people to watch the polls, which have raised fears of illegal voter intimidation on election day.
Allies including running mate Mike Pence and top adviser Rudy Giuliani backed up that claim. On Sunday, Pence dodged Trump’s outright accusation, telling NBC: “So many Americans feel like this election is being rigged.”
For months, Pence has tried to bridge the nominee’s extreme positions with the more conventional wing of the Republican party, but his support for the “rigged election” claim puts him well outside the mainstream.
On Saturday, House speaker Paul Ryan said he did not have any doubts about the American electoral system.
“Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity,” his spokeswoman AshLee Strong told the Guardian.
Newt Gingrich, a former House speaker and a periodic adviser to Trump, embraced Trump’s more conspiratorial tone, blaming the press for the nominee’s plummeting poll numbers. “Fourteen million people,” he told Fox News Sunday, “picked Donald Trump. Twenty TV executives decided to destroy him.”
Since early October, when a 2005 video leaked to the Washington Post showed Trump bragging about groping women without consent, the candidate’s poll numbers have collapsed and at least nine women have accused him of doing exactly what he boasted of.
On Sunday, a new NBC/WSJ poll showed Clinton ahead nationally with 48%, Trump with 37% and the Libertarian and Green party candidates with 7% and 2% respectively. In a new Washington Post/ABC poll, Clinton had only a four-point lead, but nearly 70% of voters said Trump had probably sexually harassed women.
A CBS poll showed Clinton up 46%-40% in 13 key states, with a 15-point advantage among women.
The Washington Post/ABC poll showed Barack Obama with a 53% approval rating, his highest in years.
Giuliani at first argued that the candidate was merely speaking about bias in journalism, telling CNN: “When he’s talking about a rigged election, he’s not talking about it’s going to be rigged at the polls, he’s talking about 80%-85% of the media is against him.”
But then the former New York mayor jumped from media criticism into racially charged territory, saying “there have been places where a lot of cheating going on”, citing two cities with large black populations, Philadelphia and Chicago.
Giuliani claimed, without evidence, that Pennsylvania Democrats bussed voters in from Camden, New Jersey, and that “dead people generally vote for Democrats”. To back up his claims of voter fraud, he said the Republican president of the New York Yankees had stopped bussing voters around the deeply Democratic city’s boroughs.
“To say Philadelphia and Chicago would be fair, I would have to be a moron to say that,” Giuliani said.
The claims about Philadelphia, at least, appear to be drawn from a conspiracy theory born in 2012 after Mitt Romney failed to win a single vote in 59 almost wholly black precincts of its 1,687 total. Obama won 85% of the city, 52% of Pennsylvania, and 93% of black voters nationwide.
Conversely, he could not win a single vote in whole counties in deeply conservative Utah that year. John McCain failed to win votes in Chicago and Atlanta precincts in 2008.
Philadelphia’s Republican party and an investigation by the city’s Inquirer newspaper found claims of fraud or wrongdoing were baseless, and larger studies have found cases of in-person voter fraud have been exceedingly rare over the last six years.
Giuliani and Trump, however, have continued to argue that it does exist, and blamed “inner cities”, which Giuliani said Republicans “don’t control”.
That phrase has offended many African Americans, who hear in it a outdated and hyperbolic vision of their lives that does not match with rising quality of life for many minorities.
Trump has repeatedly said, for instance, that black and Hispanic Americans are “living in hell”. When a black voter asked him in the second debate whether he would serve “all” Americans as president, he began speaking of “inner cities”, unprompted by anything in the man’s question.
Gingrich also said, without evidence, that fraud had taken place in cities such as Philadelphia, Chicago and St Louis, telling ABC that Ryan knows only “honest elections” in his midwest state of Wisconsin.
Gingrich said he thought Ryan should “go and look at the history of Philadelphia, including four years ago, the intimidation”.
Some of Trump’s own supporters have said they intend to go to polls to intimidate voters.
“Trump said to watch your precincts. I’m going to go, for sure,” Steve Webb, a 61-year-old Ohio voter told the Boston Globe this week. “I’m going to go right up behind them. I’ll do everything legally. I want to see if they are accountable. I’m not going to do anything illegal. I’m going to make them a little bit nervous.”
Giuliani tried to downplay similar remarks by Trump supporters about a “coup” and “bloodshed”.
“You can find just as many wacko nuts on her side,” he said.