© Evan Vucci/AP PhotoDonald Trump Jr., and his girlfriend Kimberly Guilfoyle, right, talk with Lara and Eric Trump as President Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally on Nov. 2.
President Donald Trump's top surrogates are painting a rosy picture of an overwhelming reelection victory, even as polls have him trailing in many key battleground states.
Lara Trump, a senior adviser to Trump's reelection campaign and the president's daughter-in-law, said Tuesday that they believe the president will decisively beat Democratic nominee Joe Biden without the need for a protracted ballot count.
"People have not been talking to pollsters, and we think it's going to be a landslide victory and we aren't even going to need to take this into further days," Lara Trump said on Fox News.
Public polling and election forecasts indicate that a Trump victory is possible, though it is unlikely to be by the margins that Trump and other allies say they're envisioning - and potentially with less than the 306 electoral college votes he earned in the 2016 election.
The president has repeatedly bemoaned the possibility that a victor will not be known by daybreak on Wednesday, given the crush of mail-in ballots that states are sorting through this election cycle.
Trump has cast doubt on the legitimacy of a protracted process, demanding an Election Night decision and insisting that anything elese raises the risk of fraud and could spark violent unrest throughout the country. But even in a typical election, results are not certified for days or weeks after Election Day. Election Night calls are informal calls, typically from media organizations, based on projections.
The president took a calmer tack Tuesday, saying "there's no reason to play games" and that he would declare himself the winner "only when there's victory."
A clear result in Trump's favor would obviate some of the concerns raised by Democrats, though it would require pre-election polls to have been off by an even larger margin than in 2016.
Kayleigh McEnany, the White House press secretary who has also taken on an advisory role with the Trump campaign in its final days, argued Tuesday that was the case.
"I am predicting now we win Nevada, we win Minnesota, I do believe the president has a landslide and this talk of litigation is nothing," McEnany said on Fox News.