As President Donald Trump and his allies desperately try to push the narrative that the election that’s slipping away from him is actually being stolen via voter fraud, a longstanding top operative in the Republican Party threw cold water on the suggestion.
Karl Rove, the former adviser to George W. Bush, wrote a blog post on Thursday describing the state of the race. His overall analysis seemed to generally match the consensus view of election analysts at the time — votes in key swing states remain outstanding, but results look increasingly favorable for Joe Biden — though he didn’t explicitly lay out that Trump is on a track to lose. He even put a negative spin on his analysis for Biden, arguing that his campaign did nothing to lift up down-ballot Democrats.
But in one notable paragraph, he sharply broke with the president and his allies who are concocting baseless claims about voter fraud to cast doubt on the results and drum up legal challenges to the process. Continue reading.