Did Sen. Bernie Sanders eerily predict the course of events on Election Day during his appearance on “The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon” last week?
During Sanders’ Oct. 23 appearance on the NBC late-night show, the former Democratic presidential hopeful had some predictions for how the momentous night would play out after Tuesday’s polling. He also had some insight as to how President Donald Trump would falsely and prematurely declare himself the winner on election night and cry fraud over the votes yet to be counted.
Sanders, I-Vt., drew attention to a few concerns that proved to be spot-on. After Fallon asked him to predict the timing of when a final winner would be determined, Sander emphasized the importance of counting every vote.
“You’re going to have a situation I suspect in states like Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, other states, where they are going to be receiving huge amounts of mail-in ballots,” he said. “Unlike states like Florida or Vermont they aren’t able, for bad reasons, to begin processing those ballots until Election Day or maybe when the polls close. That means you’re going to have states dealing with perhaps millions of mail-in ballots.”
Battleground states that are still counting ballots as of Wednesday morning include Arizona, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and North Carolina.
Sanders expressed concern over President Trump going on television to prematurely declare a victory on election night while votes were still being counted.
“It could well be that at 10 o’clock on election night, Trump is winning in Michigan, he’s winning in Pennsylvania, he’s winning in Wisconsin, and he gets on the television and says, ‘Thank you Americans for re-electing me, it’s all over, have a good day,’ ” Sanders warned. “But then the next day and the day following all those mail-in ballots start getting counted and it turns out that Joe Biden has won those states. At which point Trump says, ‘See, I told you the whole thing was fraudulent. I told you those mail-in ballots were crooked. And we’re not going to leave office.’ “
As predicted by Sanders, President Trump held a press conference at about 2:20 am ET and falsely asserted victory. “Frankly, we did win this election. So our goal now is to ensure the integrity, for the good of this nation — this is a very big moment, this is a major fraud on our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner, so we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop. We don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list. It’s a very sad moment.”
Senator Sanders prediction on President Trump calling the results fraudulent was also on target as Trump has taken to Twitter to cast doubt on the integrity of mail-in ballots. “How come every time they count Mail-In ballot dumps they are so devastating in their percentage and power of destruction?” Trump wrote.
He also wrote, “Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key States, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the “pollsters” got it completely & historically wrong!”
Twitter flagged the post with a warning “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Watch Sen. Bernie Sanders predict the election results below: