Trump reverted to familiar playbook, sowing doubts about the voting until results showed him winning

Donald Trump won the 2024 U.S. presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024. (Carolyn Kaster/AP Photo)

WASHINGTON -

U.S. President-elect Donald Trump and his Republican allies had spent months seeding doubt in the integrity of American voting systems and priming supporters to expect a 2024 election riddled with massive and inevitable fraud.

The former president continued laying that groundwork even during a mostly smooth day of voting Tuesday, making unsubstantiated claims related to Philadelphia and Detroit and highlighting concerns about election operations in Milwaukee.

Shortly before polls began closing, he took to his social media platform to announce, without providing details, “A lot of talk about massive CHEATING in Philadelphia.” The declaration produced immediate denials from city leaders who said there was zero evidence of any wrongdoing.

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Yet Trump's grim warnings abruptly ended in the later hours of the evening as early returns began tipping in his favor. During his election night speech, the president-elect touted a “magnificent victory” as he claimed ownership for the favorable results and expressed love for the same states he’d questioned hours earlier.

The messaging pivot was part of a Trump playbook that many in his party have adopted: To preemptively defy a loss with claims of widespread cheating but be ready to quickly disregard them in the event of a win.

In 2020, when he lost to Joe Biden, Trump carried out the other side of that strategy — spending the following four years doubling down on the false notion that the election was stolen, straining to convince supporters he was the rightful winner. The campaign was successful in changing minds: Polls show that more than half of Republicans still believe Biden was not legitimately elected in 2020.

In the weeks and months leading up to Tuesday’s election, many Trump supporters propped up supposed evidence of fraud that they abandoned when it became clear Trump was in the lead.

Several Republicans in Congress had also fought to require proof of citizenship for voter registration and argued there was no way the election could be fair without that extra layer of security. Yet the biggest proponents of the legislation congratulated Trump overnight without repeating those concerns.

It’s become a common trope to see candidates only focus on claims of potential fraud if they’ve lost or believe they will lose, said David Becker, a former U.S. Justice Department lawyer who serves as executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research.

“I think it’s somewhat telling that we’ve seen fewer fraud claims in the aftermath of an election in which former President and future President Trump won,” Becker said Wednesday.

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The strategy sets a problematic precedent that “if your preferred candidate doesn't win, it must mean that the entire system is illegitimate,” said Leah Wright Rigueur, a history professor at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University.

As Republicans have often pointed out, it’s not only their party that has refused to accept races they’ve lost. They often highlight the example of Democratic activist and former Georgia state Rep. Stacey Abrams, who ended her 2018 campaign for governor without explicitly conceding defeat to her Republican opponent, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp.

Still, Trump is the only American president who has taken steps to try to overturn the results of an election he squarely lost. The part he played in the violent Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, after he urged his supporters to “fight like hell,” has been condemned by democracy advocates in both political parties.

Democratic Vice-President Kamala Harris called Trump on Wednesday to congratulate him on his election victory. Some widely shared left-leaning posts on the social platform X had encouraged her not to concede or called for a 2024 recount, raising unsubstantiated suspicion in the results.

And for some right-leaning election skeptics, even their candidate's decisive win didn't prove that the election was aboveboard.

“They rigged 2020. We weren’t ready. They tried to rig 2024. We were ready,” David Clements, a former public prosecutor and conservative public speaker, wrote in a social media post.

It remains to be seen exactly how the next Trump administration might seek to reform U.S. elections. MyPillow founder and election denier Mike Lindell sent an email to supporters Wednesday saying he had discussed with Trump plans to discard machines and go "back to paper ballots, hand-counted.”

Nearly every ballot cast in American elections already has a paper record, and election officials warn that hand-counting all ballots would be costlier, more prone to error and far more time-intensive than machine counting.

Becker said even though the absence of fraud allegations in Trump's victory speech showed his hand, it was a positive development.

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“If we can get to the point now where President Trump and his supporters believe in the integrity of our elections ... I will take it,” Becker said. “We wake up this morning with less likelihood that election officials around the country are going to be targeted – by name in many cases – for potential violence, and that’s a good thing.”

Associated Press writer Gary Fields in Washington contributed to this report