Trump surrogate and Vance debate adviser Monica Crowley is already alleging Pennsylvania is stealing the election

Crowley: Pennsylvania officials are going “to figure out how many votes they need to make up to defeat Donald Trump”

Written by Eric Hananoki

Published

Monica Crowley War Room image

Monica Crowley, a Trump campaign surrogate and Project 2025 contributor who is reportedly helping vice presidential nominee Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) with debate prep, is already telling her followers that Pennsylvania is trying to steal the election. After the state warned it may not have full results tabulated on election night, Crowley claimed it’s “clear” that Pennsylvania is going “to figure out how many votes they need to make up to defeat Donald Trump.” 

Right-wing election deniers have long targeted Pennsylvania’s voting system, including by claiming election officials there commit fraud and rig the outcome. 

Trump himself has promoted conspiracy theories about Pennsylvania’s elections, including recently pushing the claim “that 20% of the Mail-In Ballots in Pennsylvania are fraudulent.” Vance has also repeatedly attacked Pennsylvania’s voting system. 

Crowley is a right-wing commentator who worked as a Treasury Department spokesperson during the Trump administration. Her history as a commentator includes conspiratorially claiming that former President Barack Obama lied about being Black. 

The Trump campaign has deployed Crowley as a surrogate in 2024, including to battleground states like Arizona and Wisconsin. Trump sat for an August 29 interview with Crowley, where the two discussed the possibility that the Pennsylvania assassination attempt was an “inside job.” 

Steve Bannon has mentioned Crowley as a potential national security adviser in a second Trump administration. Crowley is also a contributor to Project 2025’s policy book.

CNN reported on Monday that Crowley has been helping Vance with preparation for his October 1 debate against Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz. 

Crowley has already started alleging that Pennsylvania is trying to steal the vote from Trump. During her September 5 podcast, she said: 

MONICA CROWLEY (HOST): Every action that the regime and the system takes now needs to be questioned because it's all geared to the result on November 5. We might not even know the results the night of November 5. You have big states like Pennsylvania already warning you, “Hey, guys, yeah, we're not going to have results on election night.” And the reason, of course, is clear because they’ve got to figure out how many votes they need to make up to defeat Donald Trump. This is — they are running the exact same playbook that they ran in 2020 and that they were too late in the game in 2016 to stop Donald Trump and America First. 

Pennsylvania stating that its voting results may not be ready on election night is not evidence of fraud. In reality, as the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania wrote on its website (emphasis in original): 

Hundreds of thousands – sometimes millions – of mail ballots are cast in every election, and current state law does not permit counties to begin opening these ballots until 7 a.m. on Election Day. That means county election officials cannot even remove the ballots from the envelopes and prepare them to be scanned until that time – on a day when those same officials are also running more than 9,000 polling places across the state. 

Then, under the Election Code, counties may not even begin to record and publish mail ballot results until after the polls close at 8 p.m. Election Day.

In July, The Washington Post noted that “the Democratic-led Pennsylvania House of Representatives passed a bill in May that would have allowed county officials to begin pre-canvassing mail ballots seven days before Election Day, as was recommended by a bipartisan panel. But the Republican-controlled State Senate never brought it for a vote, with some Republicans arguing that the change wasn’t needed or that it should include other changes to election laws.” 

Crowley later claimed that “the system” tried to assassinate Trump, stating: “I thought that the system was more creative. And believe me, they are. But when you start seeing retreads of stuff that worked in the past, like assassination attempts. I mean, they tried to JFK DJT. This time it didn't work.”