Days after declaring himself “absolutely willing” to accept massive Republican defeats in the midterm elections, President Donald Trump suggested Monday on social media that Democratic victories were not “honest.”
“Does anyone really believe this ‘election’ was honest. How could the polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so big that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people turned out to vote,” he wrote on Truth Social, implying that there was something nefarious about elections run by different processes in different states.
“It all depends on the machines, which are much more important than the voter!” the message concluded, without further details. Election officials nationwide have indicated that voting this year was largely routine.
Trump was asked, speaking to reporters later in the day, whether he believed the midterm elections were rigged.
“Well, I think the numbers were terrible when it came to those early votes. You look at all those early votes,” he said, before talking about the still-undecided Senate race in Alaska.
A White House official, asked earlier in the day about the president’s position, noted that Trump told reporters before last week’s election that he would respect the results “if it was an honest election.”
As the election approached, the Justice Department sent a number of legal letters raising the specter of non-citizen voting and fraud in a number of Democratic-led states, which one judge saw as an attempt to intimidate election officials.
Trump has a history of denying election results. His previous false claims include that the 2016 Iowa caucuses were rigged against him when he lost to Senator Ted Cruz, that he won the national popular vote in 2016 despite losing nearly 3 million votes, and that he won the 2020 election despite losing 7 million votes.
Yet when election night arrived last week and the scale of the Democrats’ victory became clear, Trump hinted that he would accept the midterm results — while noting that he was not on the ballot.
“I am absolutely prepared to accept these results,” Trump told the New York Times in an interview Tuesday evening.
“I’m going to become a political expert, good and bad, on why these candidates won and lost!” » he wrote that evening on Truth Social.
“I wasn’t on the ballot and if I was we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote in another.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Trump discussed a number of reasons why Republicans lost, including that his deportation policy “might be too harsh” and that voters “didn’t like the war.” They didn’t like the gas to rise.”
“In some cases, they didn’t like the candidates, and that’s their prerogative,” Trump said in the interview recorded Friday.
“I wasn’t on the ballot, but I campaigned hard for some people, and I think if I had been on the ballot it would have been a lot different, because you saw the level of popularity and love,” he said.
His position appeared to begin to change on Saturday, after he replaced longtime chief of staff Susie Wiles with MAGA favorite Stephen Miller.
That’s the day Trump reposted an X user on Truth Social who wondered how so many states could have seen their votes fluctuate by 15% in the midterm elections.
“A model that requires even ballot-level responses: hand-counting paper ballots, recording ballots against counted votes, and voter files showing who actually turned out,” the post said.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told NBC News that Trump’s claims about the election were “completely false.”
“The systems worked” and “the election was a massive indictment of his leadership,” Aguilar said in a telephone interview.
“He is upset because he lost and people are holding him to account,” he added.
Allegations of rigged elections were rare as polls opened and results came in. Most focused on casting a conspiratorial shadow over real incidents caused by bad weather in Arizona and machine malfunctions in Westchester County, New York. In the latter case, election officials followed established contingency plans to use backup machines and said all votes cast would be counted.
The incidents received little coverage from influential accounts, and Trump paid little attention to them on his own social media.
Researchers at the University of Washington who tracked fake news on election night told reporters that their initial analyzes showed that the spread of such rumors was much lower early in the night than in previous elections. Immediately after election night, these rumors died down.
“What’s missing from this cycle’s election denialism? Grievances widely shared,” Kate Starbird, a university professor, wrote Sunday in a series of social media posts analyzing rigged election rumors, noting that the false narrative appears to have returned to the margins even as the president doubles down on efforts to reinforce them.
In an interview Monday, Starbird said Trump’s message caused an immediate increase in discussion of election denialism on X. But she said Trump still lacked some of the ingredients he would need to mobilize his supporters into concrete action, as he did after the 2020 presidential election.
“It’s a trial balloon. He’s going to see if his audience likes him,” she told NBC News.
“He can walk away from it or he can double down,” she said. “If it’s just the most die-hard conspiracy theorists picking it up, he risks losing energy if he can’t push it beyond that group.”
One person who quickly raised questions online about the integrity of the election after Democrats made larger-than-expected gains in the House, Senate and various state legislatures was MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who has made numerous debunked claims about the 2020 election.
Lindell was the subject of a $2 million defamation judgment related to these allegations last year.
While Lindell has previously made unfounded claims about foreign interference, the allegations this time focus on “algorithmic pattern matching.”
Trump now appears to be focusing on the numbers as well, but it’s not clear which polls he was referring to when he wrote: “How can the polls be so wrong??? »
Polls this election cycle underestimated the size of Democrats’ margin of victory, even though they “captured the direction of this year’s elections,” the Pew Research Center said in a preliminary analysis released Friday.
Trump previously said “real” polls showed Republicans winning and dismissed polls that showed Democrats would take control of the House and could take control of the Senate as “fake.” Democrats ended up performing better even in these polls.
“Radical left Democrats are going CRAZY with fake polls,” he wrote on Truth Social in August.
“They are broadcasting them at levels never seen before. They are called ‘demoralization operations,’ where they try to demoralize Republicans so they won’t get out and vote. But the polls right now are great and the spirit in our country has never been higher. We are winning against EVERYONE,” he wrote.
Aguilar said “election officials cannot and do not pay attention” to opinion polls. “We respect the law,” he said.
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