Dems Will Try to Keep Alive Trump's 'Delay Elections' Talk, Say Experts

It’s been less than a week since President Donald Trump’s tweet set off a firestorm by including the words “Delay the Election.”  

Despite the president’s subsequent explanation that he was expressing his opposition to an election delay due to the counting of mail-in ballots, there are growing signs Democrats will try to make an issue of how they interpreted Trump’s tweet.

At her weekly press conference Friday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi spoke at length on the possibility of “delaying the election” — despite the fact that Trump and White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows had made it clear this is not what the president meant.

“Where did he get that from?” Pelosi told reporters, “[Russian President Vladimir] Putin?”

Other Democrat candidates have already begun to raise money on Trump’s statement.

In a provocative email to contributors entitled “Don’t Let Trump Cancel the Election,” Columbus, Ohio, City Attorney Zach Klein admitted that "Trump can’t actually cancel the election. But if we don’t win big in states like Ohio, he can undermine the legitimacy of it.”

So will the talk of “delay the election” be part of the Democrats' campaign rhetoric this fall? 

“If this was the last we heard of it, it would not be a big deal,” Bill Ballenger, editor of The Ballenger Report, a much-read blog on Michigan politics, told Newsmax. “But you know it will NOT be the last we hear of it.”

“It looks like Mark Meadows put it to rest — at least until Trump brings it up again,” said Dan Schnur, a professor at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communications and the University of California, Berkeley's Institute of Governmental Studies.

There were other opinions.

Asked by Newsmax if Democrats will make the “delay the election” talk an issue in the fall, G. Terry Madonna, considered the premier political pollster in Pennsylvania, replied: “Probably not. There is still much to happen.”

“No one doubts that the election will be held on Nov. 3, so the larger issue is the security of mail-in ballots, which the president rightly has concerns about," said veteran North Carolina political analyst Marc Rotterman. “One only need look at the recent Democratic congressional primaries that took a month to get a result to understand that mail-in ballots pose a real problem to the integrity of our elections." 

John Gizzi is chief political columnist and White House correspondent for Newsmax. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.