White House officials and senior aides to President Donald Trump are preparing for “a disaster” on Election Day as they expect the president to be soundly defeated by Democratic nominee Joe Biden, according to a report.
In interviews with the Daily Beast, multiple officials and associates in Trump’s inner circle indicated they expected the president to lose the November 3 election.
Many of them have come to accept a Biden victory after a year of campaigning marred by coronavirus deaths, economic devastation and racial and civil unrest across the country.
Stephen Moore, a Trump advisor, lamented the prospect of a defeat, saying, “I believe the betting markets, which say there’s a 60 percent chance that Biden wins, and a 40 percent chance that Trump does.”
Moore said he had hoped that the Gross Domestic Product report that was released on Thursday would have given the Trump campaign a boost. He recalled advising the president during a White House meeting last month to play up the report for the American voters.
However, shortly after the report came out on Thursday—showing the economy had regained much of the ground it had lost in the spring-- Moore said he saw no political benefits in promoting the numbers.
“I really don’t have a good feeling about this,” he conceded.
Moore was not alone in his pessimism about the state of the presidential race.
Out of the 16 sources—campaign aides, Republican donors, senior administration officials, and close associates of the president and his family—whom The Daily Beast interviewed only five said the president had a good chance of winning.
One major donor, Dan Eberhart, chief executive at Canary, said he regrets donating to the Trump campaign.
“I think Trump has a 25 percent chance of winning the election. His campaign focused on exciting his base not on pursuing people in the center. COVID was a massive headwind that minimized the roaring Trump economy,” he said.
“The president has struggled to maintain message discipline. And the left is highly motivated to vote, as seen by the record turnout so far. That’s not to say there’s not a window for the president to win. It’s just being realistic that he’s the underdog in this contest,” he added.
Eberhardt said in retrospect he would have used his contributions to save the Republican-controlled Senate in this election cycle rather than donate to the president’s floundering campaign.
“Honestly, I would have put all my donations towards holding the Senate. I never thought the Senate would be in play,” he explained.
According to data provided by the Center for Responsive Politics, of the more than 1,100 donors who gave the $5,400 legal maximum to Trump’s 2016 campaign, about 450 of them have not made any contributions to his reelection effort.
Trump is behind Biden by an average of 8 percentage points in national polls, but the president claims the polls undercount his army of silent supporters who helped him win in 2016.
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