A Wall Street Journal reporter noticed a shift in the confidence level within Donald Trump's campaign team heading into Election Day.
White House reporter Annie Linskey joined other panelists on "CNN This Morning" to discuss the election, and she said the former president's team no longer seems as confident than they did even a week ago.
"I've talked to some of the Trump people," Linskey said. "They were flat-out optimistic a week ago. I mean, people I was talking to were saying he is the president, [J.D.] Vance is the vice president. There was a confidence. That has shifted in terms of the staff members you talk to over there."
The Kamala Harris team, on the other hand, remained cautiously optimistic after Trump committed a series of unforced errors in the closing stretch of the campaign.
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"But on the Harris side there is this sense that Donald Trump has basically made her closing argument for her in some of the things he's said over the past 10 days and so they've sort of sat back a little bit," Linskey said. "I think that if, at the end of the day, and we don't know what's going to happen, but if at the end of the day she prevails, he really would have lost this election rather than the other way around."
Republican strategist Brad Todd has been working on Dave McCormick's U.S. Senate campaign in Pennsylvania, and he doubts that Democrats have done enough to drive out their base voters.
"The Democrat performance in early voting and absentee voting has been way off," Todd said. "They have to do something today they haven't done in 20 years, which is to get a massive performance on Election Day. Democrats through the Obama campaign, they shifted their voting to early voting 20 years ago. They became masters at it. They have not succeeded at that this year to the level they wanted. They have to do it today. Can it happen? Of course. They've done it before, but it's been a long time."
Former South Carolina legislator Bakari Sellers flatly disputed that assertion.
"No," Sellers said. "I mean we actually hit all of our numbers in early voting we wanted to hit. If you look at Georgia, North Carolina, we came on strong late, particularly in Georgia. But I mean we're going to be looking at – we still need, he is correct in the fact we need turnout today. Everybody is really confident about where we are. Georgia is ripe for a Harris victory, particularly in these three areas where people need to come out. In Georgia in particular, Republicans have exhausted all of their votes in Republican rural counties. They exhausted 98, sometimes more than 100 percent of their voters, but still in these areas like Fulton County, Chatham County, Richmond County, Savannah, Augusta, Atlanta – there's so much room there, you're going to see those people show up to the polls. In North Carolina we get 300,000 Black voters today to show up at the polls, we win North Carolina. Is that a lot? No."
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