Six days after the midterm elections, President Trump has questioned whether they were honest. In a Truth Social post on Monday morning, he blamed the polls, large early vote totals and the voting machines, and offered no specific evidence for any of it.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest,” he wrote. “How could the Polls be so wrong??? 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!”
The post stands against what he said on election night, when results showed Democrats winning both the House and the Senate. That night he said he was “absolutely willing” to accept the results and looked forward to working with the new majorities. In late October he had also said he would respect the results, as we reported in our earlier story. On Sunday, in a separate post we fact checked in our story on the market loss claim, he called the election a “giant step back.” Over the weekend he also reposted other users’ screenshots questioning the vote totals.
The claims do not match the record in three places. First, the polls: surveys before the election forecast a Democratic wave, and they understated the size of the swing by about four percentage points. They were wrong in scale, not in direction. Second, the “dumps”: early and mail votes are counted and reported in batches under state law, so large one sided totals arriving at once are a normal feature of the count, not an anomaly. In Texas, the Democratic Senate candidate’s early and postal votes alone exceeded his Republican rival’s total vote, which is what a wave looks like in the early numbers. Election researchers say the national pattern of the count followed the usual timing of past cycles. Third, the machines: election officials across the country have raised no major concerns about voting machines or early voting in this election, and the president’s post names no state, county, machine or specific error.
None of this brings a legal challenge by itself. A social media post is not a court filing, and certification of the results continues state by state on the normal calendar. What the post does is reopen a question the president had publicly closed on election night, and it does so while two Senate races and several House races are still being counted under state rules.
Transparency note: This story is based on the president’s own post, quoted in full above, and on reporting by USA Today, the BBC and The Times. Where the post makes a claim, we have checked it against the published polling record, the reported count and election officials’ statements, and said what we found.
