Trump’s Legal Strategy to Squeak Out an Election Victory Actually Kind Of Sucks

WASHINGTON — President Trump’s campaign and GOP supporters have launched a wave of legal challenges in 2020 battleground states aimed at improving Trump’s dwindling reelection chances. 

But they’ve got one big problem: So far, these frantic legal gambits look unlikely to make a meaningful dent in the vote margins. 

In one courtroom brawl in Pennsylvania, Republican operatives are furiously fighting over fewer than 100 mail-in ballots. In Michigan, Trump’s campaign wants to pause a vote count in a state where his opponent, Democratic nominee Joe Biden, is leading handily. In Wisconsin, Trump wants a recount that even former GOP Gov. Scott Walker says is highly unlikely to negate Biden’s lead. 

Trump’s biggest legal problem is that his overblown rhetoric about supposedly widespread fraud doesn’t match up to facts on the ground, legal experts say. That’s leaving pro-Trump lawyers grasping for evidence of irregularities that would warrant a strong legal challenge, without finding much. 

“I haven’t seen one lawsuit yet that looks like it could change the results one way or another, or anything close,” said Justin Levitt, an election law expert at Loyola Law School. “There’s no indication yet that there have been any meaningful violations of any statute or the Constitution. Put differently: There’s nothing for the courts to decide.”

Still, the race remains close, as counting drags on in multiple states where the election will be decided—and the lawsuits are stacking up. Here’s what’s winding its way through the court system. 

The most high-profile pending legal fight of the 2020 election involves the possibility that the Supreme Court might decide to throw out late-arriving mail-in ballots in the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. 

The high court previously opted to allow the state to keep accepting mail-in ballots for three days after Election Day. Trump filed a motion to intervene in the case on Wednesday. 

If the result in Pennsylvania turns on a razor-thin margin, and the Supreme Court ultimately decides to disallow ballots arriving from Wednesday to Friday, then this legal battle could come back with a vengeance. But for now, those are two big ifs. 

Some legal observers say the court may be reluctant to sweep in and change the rules after votes have already been cast. 

“I wouldn’t want to speculate on how the Court would rule, but the argument that voters relied on the rules in place on and before Election Day—and should therefore have their votes counted—is very strong,” Dan Tokaji, dean of the University of Wisconsin Law School, told Politico. 

Meanwhile, skirmishes continue in other cases in Pennsylvania. 

Republicans also want the courts to toss out early mail-in ballots that were corrected after election workers found they weren’t filed correctly or had technical problems. There might be only 93 such cases, according to oral testimony in a recent hearing, and the judge didn’t sound convinced that even those should be binned.  

Elsewhere, the Trump team is also arguing their observers have been kept 25 feet away from vote counting officials, which they say is too far to keep a watchful eye on the proceedings. 

On Thursday morning, the campaign trumpeted an “incredible legal victory” after a judge ruled they could watch from a distance of less than six feet. But moments later, the Pennsylvania Supreme Court overruled that decision, handing a fresh defeat to Trump. 

Trump was still leading in Pennsylvania around midday on Thursday, but a significant number of votes from the Democratic-leaning Philadelphia and Pittsburgh areas remained to be counted. 

In Wisconsin, the Trump team says it plans to ask for a recount. But Biden leads by roughly 20,000 votes, and past recounts in the state have only moved the needle by more like 130 votes. 

Still, Biden’s margin is less than 1 percent, and campaign manager Bill Stepien has insisted there were “irregularities” in Wisconsin, without pointing to specifics. 

Former GOP governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, publicly dismissed the idea that a recount will change the result in his state.

Late on Wednesday, the Trump team filed a lawsuit in Georgia asserting that 53 ballots had been counted late and should be tossed. 

On Thursday morning, a local judge slapped their claim down. 

Two witnesses called by Republicans stated under oath that they didn’t actually know whether the ballots were submitted on time or not.  

The Trump campaign was still in the lead in Georgia as of midday Thursday, but more ballots from Democratic strongholds around Atlanta and Savannah remained to be counted. 

In Michigan, the Trump campaign is seeking to stop the counting of ballots while insisting they’ve been denied access to ballot-counting locations. 

Yet the broader strategy of the lawsuit remains a bit murky. On the surface, Trump seems to be trying to stop counting more ballots in a state where, if the counting stopped immediately, Trump would lose. 

In a brief to the court, Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson called the Trump campaign’s arguments “entirely without merit, if not frivolous.”

In Nevada the Trump campaign said it’s filing a federal lawsuit alleging that “illegal votes” were cast in the state. The campaign said it would provide evidence that votes were cast in the names of dead people and former state residents. 

For the moment, however, details about that lawsuit were slim. 

As of midday Thursday, Trump was losing Nevada by approximately 12,000 votes.