US President Donald Trump has told confidants he'll declare victory on Tuesday night if it looks like he's "ahead," according to three sources familiar with his private comments and cited by Axios on Sunday.
That's even if the Electoral College outcome still hinges on large numbers of uncounted votes in key states like Pennsylvania.
Trump has privately talked through this scenario in some detail in the last few weeks, describing plans to walk up to a podium on election night and declare he has won.
For this to happen, his allies expect he would need to either win or have commanding leads in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Iowa, Arizona and Georgia.
Many prognosticators believe that on election night, Trump will likely appear ahead in Pennsylvania even though the state's final outcome could change substantially as mail-in ballots are counted over the following days.
Trump's team is preparing to claim that if that process changes the outcome in Pennsylvania from the picture on election night, then Democrats would have "stolen" the election.
Trump's advisers have been laying the groundwork for this strategy for weeks, but this is the first account of Trump explicitly discussing his election night intentions, according to Axios.
Asked for comment, the Trump campaign's communications director Tim Murtaugh said, "This is nothing but people trying to create doubt about a Trump victory. When he wins, he's going to say so."
Mail-in ballots counted after Election Day as set forth in state-by-state rules are as legitimate as in-person votes recorded on November 3.
Many states won't be done counting mail ballots by Tuesday night. In Pennsylvania, state law prevents election officials from counting mail-in ballots before Election Day.
Pennsylvania Secretary of State Kathy Boockvar said on NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday that there could be 10x as many mail ballots this year than in 2016, "so, yes, it will take longer" to count.
"I expect that the overwhelming majority of ballots in Pennsylvania, that's mail-in and absentee ballots, as well as in-person ballots, will be counted within a matter of days," Boockvar said.
Trump has long warned against mail-in ballots and said that the increasing use of this method could increase election fraud and uncertainty.
The President caused an uproar in August when he asserted in a tweet that the US should delay its upcoming presidential election due to fear of mass voter fraud if universal mail-in voting is permitted.
Trump subsequently clarified his original tweet and wrote, “Must know Election results on the night of the Election, not days, months, or even years later!”