Trump Campaign: ‘We’re Going to Follow the Numbers, Not What Fox News Says’

Senior officials within President Donald Trump’s re-election campaign told conservative news outlets on Wednesday that they are confident of victory and would reject efforts by media organizations to call the presidential race prematurely.

“We’re going to follow the numbers, not what Fox News says,” deputy campaign manager Justin Clark said, when asked what the campaign would do if Fox News refused to rescind its Arizona call and Democrat Joe Biden won Nevada, taking him to 270 — the majority needed in the Electoral College.

The campaign held a special call for reporters from conservative outlets, following an earlier call for the media in general. The message was the same in both: the campaign expects to win in Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, securing victory.

With regard to Pennsylvania, officials said, the campaign would make sure that “legal ballots are counted, and illegal ballots are not counted.”

Stepien and senior adviser Jason Miller said that they were “completely” confident of winning. Asked by a reporter about a tweet by CNN’s Jim Acosta suggesting the campaign was nervous about Georgia, Miller laughed and called it “fake news.”

Breitbart News asked whether Republicans had been adequately prepared for vote-by-mail. Stepien said that they had been — and had prepared by telling voters to vote in person, the “only reliable way to cast a vote. And we turned those voters out.”

He added that the contested result of the election showed the wisdom of that approach, saying it was better to have a vote counted right away onsite rather than depending on “some joker in Philadelphia who’s going to throw it in a waste bin.”
Asked whether the Trump campaign had considered pushing for a House of Representatives vote under the 12th Amendment, if there was no majority in the Electoral College. “We’re going to win the election before that,” campaign manager Bill Stepien said.

Miller said that the president’s tone, which has been defiant in the last two days, was “exactly right,” given that the outcome was exactly what he had predicted: strong Republican turnout on Election Day, followed by Democrats’ efforts to make up the difference as mail-in ballots were counted.

Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). His newest e-book is The Trumpian Virtues: The Lessons and Legacy of Donald Trump’s Presidency. His recent book, RED NOVEMBER, tells the story of the 2020 Democratic presidential primary from a conservative perspective. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.