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00:00Well, I'm pleased to welcome live to the programme now Todd Bell. He's the
00:04Director of the Political Management Programme at George Washington University. He joins us
00:10live from there. Hello to you. Thanks very much for speaking to us on this historic election day.
00:16I wonder what you made of what we were hearing in that report, that Trump is all but certain
00:23to claim this is fraudulent somehow if he loses the election. How seriously should Americans be
00:29worried about that? Good morning. It's great to be with you. Thanks for having me on again.
00:34I think, you know, the only way we don't see Donald Trump to provide these lawsuits is if
00:41he wins big in Pennsylvania and Kamala Harris concedes. I think this is a given. You know,
00:48these lawsuits he's been preparing. He had them last time. And we know that both campaigns have
00:53dozens of lawyers at the ready. They're prepared for these legal challenges. And the other fact
00:59is that Donald Trump has a lot more supporters in election offices and canvassing boards now.
01:05And many of them have been empowered by state laws to be able to mount challenges to the counting of
01:11votes. So there is a lot of ways that he can slow this down, muddy the waters and try to provide
01:17some of that political cover and public opinion cover for making it seem like these court cases
01:25might be legitimate. Well, I suppose he tried the same thing, didn't he, after the last election
01:31in 2020. Eventually, of course, it was clear that Biden had won that election. There was no
01:40real doubt about it in the minds of experts, of observers. But there are still a good chunk of
01:47Americans who believe that actually that election was stolen from Donald Trump. So now, four years
01:54on, what do you think it will take for those same Republicans, the MAGA Republicans, as they're
01:58known, the supporters of Trump, to accept the results of the vote if indeed Harris does win?
02:06Right. I mean, you're absolutely correct that in 2020, we had the safest and most accurate vote
02:12count. And that phrase actually comes from Donald Trump's own Secretary of Homeland Security. And
02:20the 60 court cases, none of them can prove any sort of problems with the counting. But it is
02:28a testimony to Donald Trump's ability to have an impact over people just by constantly saying it.
02:33And a majority of Republicans do believe that the 2020 election was fraudulent. So what would it
02:39take to get Republicans to believe that the count is legitimate? It would take Donald Trump telling
02:44them so. Nothing else would do it. Well, that is quite a thought. And we all remember what happened
02:50after the 2020 election, January 6, the storming of the US Capitol. Do you think the United States
02:55should be braced for more violence if that scenario does play out again? Not only do I think
03:01so, the states and Washington, DC think so. In this city right now, there are stores being boarded
03:10up. And I'm sure that we're going to start seeing some more police forces coming out and perhaps
03:15even National Guard troops. I think this is also going to be the case at state capitals. My concern
03:20mainly is some of these smaller counting facilities, which might be more targeted by some
03:28of these people who are concerned about the steal, as they call it. And I really just think that
03:34there's going to need to be enough forces out there to dissuade people from taking these sorts
03:40of violent actions. And a word then on Kamala Harris. She, in contrast to Joe Biden when he was
03:47the candidate, didn't focus so much on the threat that Trump posed to democracy at the beginning of
03:54her campaign. She was trying to sort of offer a different vision to the American people. But she
04:00did in the past few weeks try to highlight the dangers that she believes he poses to American
04:05democracy. Do you think that was the right strategy from her? Will it have worked?
04:12Well, I don't think it was as black and white as that in terms of a real pivot. She has been talking
04:17about the threat he is to democracy. And certainly, she talked about that at the convention. And she
04:23talked more about that in recent weeks. But I actually attended her speech on the mall, and
04:28about half of it was about her economic plans. And a good portion, of course, was about the threat of
04:33Trump to democracy. This is an issue, the threat to democracy that turns out Democratic voters,
04:40it doesn't really convince a lot of people in the middle. It's those economic issues that do.
04:45But this is also the message that gets through in the press. Unfortunately, for all the economic
04:50plans that these candidates have, they haven't gotten a lot of coverage of those. It's messages
04:55like this that actually get more traction and are turned into what we call earned media, which means
05:01their messages are reported and rebroadcast on the news.
05:05Todd Belt, really good to get your analysis on all of this. Thank you very much indeed.