Republicans are already laying the groundwork for rejecting the results of next week's US presidential election if Donald Trump loses. The initial lawsuits baselessly allege fraud and polling by right-wing groups that analysts say may be exaggerating his popularity and could be exploited by Trump to claim that only fraud prevented him from returning to the White House.

The warnings — from Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans — come as Americans prepare to vote on Tuesday in the most consequential presidential race in generations. Most polls show Trump and Kamala Harris, the vice president and Democratic nominee, tied, with the two candidates appearing tied in seven key swing states.

But suspicions have been raised based on a spate of recent polls, mostly in battleground states commissioned by groups with ties to Republicans, in which Trump in particular is ahead. The prediction of rising support for Trump as Election Day approaches has inspired optimism among him and his supporters.

“We’re way ahead in all the polls,” Trump said at a rally in New Mexico on Thursday. “I can’t believe it’s a close race,” he said at a separate rally in North Carolina, a swing state where polls show him and Harris in a virtual dead heat.

An internal memo sent to Trump by his chief pollster confirms this story: Tony Fabrizio explains that the former president's position “nationally and in every single battleground state is SIGNIFICANTLY better today than it was four years ago.”

Pro-Trump influencers have also reinforced the impression of an inevitable victory by quoting anonymous White House officials predicting Harris' defeat in social media posts. “Biden tells aides the election is 'dead and buried' and calls Harris a congenital idiot,” conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec posted this week.

According to a New York Times study, Republican-leaning voting groups released 37 polls in the final stretch of the campaign, while longtime pollsters limited their surveys of voters. All but seven showed a lead for Trump, in contrast to results from long-established nonpartisan pollsters, which showed a more mixed picture – often with Harris in the lead, albeit within margins of error.

A poll last Tuesday by the Trafalgar Group – an organization founded by a former Republican consultant – showed Trump with a three-point lead over Harris in North Carolina. By contrast, a CNN/SRSS poll two days later in the same state had the vice president ahead by one point.

Pollster Nate Silver – who said his “gut feeling” was in favor of a Trump win while arguing that people shouldn't trust their gut – expressed doubts about the ex-president's apparent rebound in an interview with CNBC. “Anyone who is confident about this election is someone whose opinion should be disregarded,” he said.

“There has certainly been some momentum against Trump in the last few weeks. (But) these small changes are swamped by uncertainty. For every indicator you want to point out, I could give counterexamples.”

Democrats and some poll experts believe the polls commissioned by conservatives are aimed at creating a false narrative of unstoppable momentum for Trump – which could then be used to challenge the result if Harris wins.

“Republicans are clearly strategically incorporating polls into the information environment to create the impression that Trump is stronger. Their incentive is not necessarily to find the right answer,” Joshua Dyck of the Center for Public Opinion at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell told the New York Times.

Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist and blogger, said it follows a trend set in the 2022 congressional elections, when a series of polls favorable to Republicans raised expectations of a Republican “red wave” on Election Day never occurred.

“Those polls were usually two, three, four points more Republican than the independent polls that were done, and they ended up having the effect of shifting the poll averages to the right,” he told MeidasTouch News.

“We must not allow ourselves to be deceived by this again. It is critical to Donald Trump's efforts as he attempts to cheat and distort the election results. He must have data showing that he somehow won the election.

“The reason we need to denounce this is because Donald Trump needs to go into Election Day with some data showing that he won. So if he loses, he can say we cheated.”

Trump falsely claiming that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election is also paving the way for the accusation to be repeated through legal means.

He said at a rally in Pennsylvania that Democrats in the state were “cheating,” and on Wednesday his campaign took legal action against election officials in Bucks County, where voters waiting to submit early mail-in ballots were turned away because the deadline had passed . A judge later ordered the county to extend early voting by one day. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in elections in Pennsylvania or any other state, and mail-in ballots are in high demand in part because Trump himself has promoted early voting.

The lawsuit, which alleges – without evidence – that there was voter fraud, is part of a well-known pattern in which Trump casts doubt on election results that do not go his way. After the 2020 election, his team filed 60 lawsuits challenging the results, all of which were forcefully dismissed in court.

Anti-Trump Republicans have expressed similar concerns to Democrats about Trump's actions. Michael Steele, a former Republican National Committee chairman and Trump critic, told the New Republic that the GOP-commissioned polls were rigged in Trump's favor.

“You find different ways to weight participants and that changes the results you get,” he said. “They are being tricked in the back of their minds so that Maga can claim the election was stolen.”

Stuart Stevens, a former adviser to Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican nominee, and founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, told the same source: “Their plan is to make it impossible for states to certify.” And These fake polls are a great tool to do that because you make people think the race was stolen.”

Pro-Trump polls have influenced polling averages published by websites such as Real Clear Politics, which have included the results in their forecast election night map and are predicting a victory for the former president.

Elon Musk, Trump's richest supporter and surrogate, posted the map to his 202 million followers on his own X platform and proclaimed: “The trend is here to stay.”

Trump and Musk have also promoted online betting platforms that have reinforced the impression of a surge for the Republican candidate based on big bets on his victory.

The New York Times reported that a small number of high-value bets from four accounts linked to a French citizen appeared to be responsible for $28 million wagered on a Trump victory on the Polymarket platform.

Trump referred to Polymarket activities in a recent speech. “I don’t know what the hell that means, but it means we’re doing pretty well,” he said.