MSNBC columnist Mike Barnicle on Monday said the nation has “pray there’s going to be a landslide for Joe Biden” over President Trump in November, alleging that “Republicans are good at fixing the way we count ballots in the country.”
Barnicle’s comments come after Trump suggested last week the possibility of delaying the 2020 presidential election, citing “dangerous universal mail-in-voting.”
Trump later said he only floated the idea to get the “very dishonest LameStream Media to finally start” talking about it.
Barnicle warned that this type of rhetoric could be laying the groundwork to challenge election results, pointing to the 2000 election as an example of Republicans finding a way to win in tight elections.
“One thing we all learned in the year 2000 is that Republicans are good at fixing the way we count ballots in the country,” Barnicle said in an appearance on “Morning Joe.”
“Now, with this furor over mail-in votes, we could be sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner not really knowing specifically who the president-elect of the United States is. So we all have to pray that there’s going to be a landslide for Joe Biden in order to avoid this conflict,” he added.
White House chief of staff Mark Meadows has dismissed the idea of delaying the election, saying in an appearance on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that Trump had not “looked at” making the move.
“[The president] has not looked at delaying any— any election. What we will do is if we try to transform this and start mailing in ballots all across the country, all 50 states, what we will see is a delay because they’re just not equipped to handle it,” Meadows said.
“We’re going to hold an election on Nov. 3 and the president is going to win,” Meadows added.
Many prominent Republicans have also scoffed at the suggestion of delaying the election, which has never occurred in the country’s history, including during the Civil War and World War II.
“Never in the history of the Congress, through wars, depressions and the Civil War have we ever not had a federally scheduled election on time and we’ll find a way to do that again this Nov. 3,” said Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) during a radio interview last week.
“We’ll cope with whatever the situation is and have the election on Nov. 3 as already scheduled,” he added.