Kamala Harris continues to surge in the polls, leading Donald Trump in key battleground states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin, and Democrats expect that to expand following their national convention in Chicago next week.
As enthusiasm is seemingly waning among Republicans, Gary Bauer of the Campaign for Working Families is concerned about the Democrats' dishonesty.
"Donald Trump has turned his life upside down to run for president three times. He's won once, he was cheated once, and obviously, he would like to win again. He and his family members and those aligned with him are doing everything [they] can possibly do," says Bauer.
But he is not sure it will be enough.
"Just as we're trying to stop the cheating … Democrats are doing everything they can to make cheating easier," he laments.
That is obvious to him, but he says it does not appear to be so to "half the country," as there have already been some setbacks.
"One of them was in Wisconsin, where they reversed a previous decision, and now drop boxes are allowed again," Bauer notes. "In Arizona, a court ruled that it was OK for Arizona to have a regulation, a law that said that the state had a right to ask for proof of citizenship, and another panel of that court overturned that."
Those are things, he says, "that make it very hard to stop the cheating."
Virginia's governor, however, may have just put his state in play for Trump.
With Executive Order 35, Gov. Glenn Youngkin (R) recently codified election security protocols established under his governance for all future elections. The state's chief executive is ordering all votes for the 2024 presidential election to be cast by paper ballot.
"Every legal vote deserves to be counted without being watered down by illegal votes or inaccurate machines," he declared. "In Virginia, we don't play games, and our model for election security is working."
"This puts Virginia in play," says columnist Robert Knight. "The Democrats count on vote fraud; I'll just say it. Otherwise, why would you loosen the rules? Why would you get rid of voter ID? Why would you make vote fraud so much easier to commit?"
"Governor Youngkin's making vote fraud hard to commit," Knight continues. "That'll make it an honest election. And I think in this atmosphere, in an honest election, people will look at what the Biden-Harris administration has done to this country and vote accordingly. In any fair election, the Democrats would be in very deep trouble today."
Knight adds that overcoming rule-changing and irregularities and winning Virginia, where Joe Biden officially won seven of 11 congressional districts and defeated Donald Trump by 10 points in 2020, would be a real plum for the former president.
