Trump Finally Gets Around to Claiming the Midterms Were Rigged

The midterm elections were a Democratic landslide, and instead of immediately crying election fraud the president started making excuses. He wasn’t to blame, of course — it was the Republicans on the ballot, like soon-to-be-former Texas Governor Greg Abbott, whom Trump slammed on Election Day for straying too far from the MAGA movement. It was also a race well run by the Democrats. “We’re going to work with the Democrats,” the president said. “I don’t want to be just sitting there for two years vetoing everything. I want to see things happen, too.”

Trump has since displayed a red “VETO” hat in the Oval Office, promoted Stephen Miller, and suggested Democrats should be prosecuted for conducting oversight into his administration. On Monday, almost a week after the elections, he finally started employing his favorite response to election losses: claiming it was all rigged against him.

“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???” Trump wrote Monday on Truth Social. “Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote. It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!”

Trump is right that pre-election polls were wrong … although not in the way he is suggesting. Democrats were polling ahead in many of the contested states they won, but pretty much across the board their margin of victory was even greater than polling indicated. The polls also showed Republicans in relatively good shape in states where they are now expected to lose Senate seats, like South Carolina and Mississippi.

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The biggest Democratic romp was in Texas, where James Talarico demolished Ken Paxton in the Senate race and Gina Hinojosa beat out Abbott for governor, to go along with a slew of other statewide victories. Abbott is still in office and Republicans control the legislature, so how exactly were Democrats able to rig the state’s elections?