It was always going to be a hard election to call. But one person who nailed it was Bernie Sanders.
A clip of Sanders being interviewed by Jimmy Fallon last month is going viral because of Sanders’ remarkably accurate prediction of how president Donald Trump would act on election night.
Sanders pointed out to The Tonight Show host Fallon on October 23 that studies showed Democrats are “more likely to use mail-in ballots” and Republicans to walk into polling booths on Election Day.
Sanders said it would likely be that “the first votes that will be counted will be those people who came in on election day, which will be Republican”.
Sanders predicted how Trump could attempt to use this to his advantage:
It could well be that, at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin, and he gets on the television and he says: ‘Thank you, Americans, for reelecting me. It’s all over. Have a good day.’ But then, the next day, and the day following, all of those mail-in ballots start getting counted, and it turns out that Biden has won those states, at which point Trump says: ‘See? I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And we’re not going to leave office.’ So that is a worry that I and a lot of people have.
Trump didn’t make his declaration at 10pm on Tuesday, but he did use a press conference in the White House in the early hours of Wednesday to falsely claim victory over Democratic nominee Joe Biden – even though millions of votes remain uncounted and no reputable organisation has called the winner of the election.
“We were getting ready to win this election. Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump said, inaccurately. “We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. It’s a very sad moment. We will win this, and as far as I’m concerned we already have won.”
Sanders’ prediction has now been seen more than seven million times on Twitter:
Check out Sanders’ full interview with Fallon here.
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