Top Harris officials 'fully expect' Trump to declare victory before votes counted: report

Former President Donald Trump is making maneuvers to interfere with the election just as he did in 2020 — but Vice President Kamala Harris' campaign is already preparing to head it off, according to a report Friday.

"Senior Harris campaign officials say aides 'fully expect' Trump will declare victory before all votes are counted and that there are hundreds of lawyers around the country and in battleground states with 'thousands of pages of pleadings' ready to fight GOP legal maneuverings," reported NBC News Washington correspondent Yamiche Alcindor on X.

In the 2020 election, Trump held a premature press conference declaring victory even while several battleground states were nowhere near finished counting, and with a disproportionate amount of the outstanding vote being mail-in ballots from Democratic voters.

Thousands of Trump supporters converged on ballot counting centers to demand officials "stop the count" in areas where Trump was ahead, and the Trump campaign sought to obstruct the count with litigation of its own.

None of these lawsuits were successful — but they nonetheless formed a basis for conspiracy theories from Trump supporters about supposed election rigging, which ultimately fueled the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

From the outset of the 2024 election, Trump and his newly-installed leadership at the Republican National Committee took funding away from traditional in-house voter canvassing and outreach, and instead invested in an army of poll-watchers and election lawyers to challenge any results that may go against them in battleground states.

The voter outreach operation, meanwhile, has been farmed out to independent groups like far-right activist Charlie Kirk's Turning Point USA and tech billionaire Elon Musk's America PAC.

The latter has reportedly encountered numerous problems, including faked door knocking data and allegations that their subcontractor's employees have been abused and threatened by their managers.