Joe Biden Was Advised by Hillary Clinton Not to Concede in 2020

In an interview with Showtime's Jennifer Palmieri for The Circus, Hillary Clinton said that in 2020, Donald Trump will attempt to steal the election by suppressing absentee ballots. She tried to remind Joe Biden not to concede if the race was close. As reported by Politico, she said at the time, "Joe Biden should not concede under any circumstances because I think this is going to drag out, and eventually I do believe he will win if we don’t give an inch and if we are as focused and relentless as the other side is."

Clinton anticipated an election day that, owing to an expected rise in mail-in balloting because of fears about the coronavirus, could easily stretch into an election week or even an election month. Clinton's adoptive home state of New York has a history of close elections, so according to her, it was possible that neither candidate would be proclaimed the victor on November 3 or 4. And that uncertainty could reign while the nation waits to find out who will be its next president. She said in the interview, "We’ve got to have a massive legal operation; I know the Biden campaign is working on that. We have to have poll workers, and I urge people who are able to be a poll worker. We have to have our own teams of people to counter the force of intimidation that the Republicans and Trump are going to put outside polling places. This is a big organizational challenge, but at least we know more about what they’re going to do."

During the same month, Trump requested an absentee ballot that would enable him to vote in the Florida primary through the postal service. The White House Deputy Press Secretary, Judd Deere, said, "The President supports absentee voting, not universal mail-in voting, which contains several safeguards that prevent fraud and abuse." Trump stated his belief that fraud is inevitable when using mail-in ballots, which have been employed in the United States since the Civil War. He also rejected congressional Democrats' calls to increase funding for the U.S. Postal Service by billions of dollars to accommodate an expected increase in mail-in ballots due to the epidemic.

Trump continued to make false assertions regarding postal ballots and cast doubt on the legitimacy of the November election outcome, despite his subsequently expressed willingness to finance agencies. He confessed to the media, "Sure. A separate thing, I would do it. But one of the reasons the post office needs that much money is to have all these millions of ballots coming in from nowhere." In response to a question about whether he would tell the postmaster general to roll back several measures that Democrats have attacked for compromising the Postal Service's dependability, Trump remained unyielding. He further added, "No, not at all. No, I wouldn’t do that at all. No. I want the post office to run properly, which makes sense. They would need a lot more money if they’re going to be taking in tens of millions of ballots that just come out of the sky from nowhere."