Trump’s Bogus Swing State Claim

At a rally in Georgia, President Donald Trump continued to make baseless claims about the 2020 election being “rigged,” drawing false comparisons at one point between President-elect Joe Biden’s performance in swing states and that of the last two Democratic presidential nominees:

• Trump said Biden beat Hillary Clinton “in the swing states, but she beat him everywhere else.” That’s false. Biden outperformed Clinton in every state — not just swing states.
• He also wrongly said “President Obama beat Biden all over the country, except in some of the swing states.” When comparing the candidates by percentage of total votes, Obama did better than Biden in most states, including four of the six swing states being contested by Trump. And Biden would still win the presidency without the two other contested states.

The president visited Valdosta, Georgia, on Dec. 5 to campaign for the state’s two Republican senators who were forced into runoff elections against their Democratic challengers. But the president spent most of his 90-minute speech repeating false, misleading and unsupported claims about the election that he made just a few days earlier in an online video that he billed as perhaps “the most important speech I’ve ever made.”

At the rally, Trump insisted that he won Georgia (“You know we won Georgia, just so you understand”) and Wisconsin (“Well, actually I won Wisconsin”) — even though both states have certified Biden as the winner after recounts. Georgia counted its ballots three times.

Trump also repeated bogus claims about secret, illegal ballot “dumps” in both states that we have already debunked. This time, the president suggested that the ballot “dumps” explain what he described as a “very interesting” and “statistically impossible” anomaly in some swing states won by Biden. (His campaign has gone to court to challenge the results in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Nevada and Arizona.)

After correctly noting that he won Florida, Ohio, South Carolina and Iowa, the president said this:

Trump, Dec. 5: And we won all over the place. And many of these swing states, you know, it’s a very interesting statistic. President Obama beat Biden all over the country, except in some of the swing states where Biden beat him badly. How does that work? And they say it’s statistically impossible. He beat crooked Hillary. Think of this. He beat crooked Hillary in the swing states, but she beat him everywhere else. Let me tell you, this election was rigged.

All of that is wrong.

“There is no such thing as a ‘statistical impossibility,’ for starters,” Charles Stewart III, a political science professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told us in an email. 

Biden vs. Clinton

Using Dave Leip’s Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections, we looked at the 2016 results and found that Biden outperformed Clinton in every state — not just swing states – both by the number and the percentage of votes. (The unofficial 2020 results were as of Dec. 8.)

Stewart said he prefers comparing candidates by percentage of votes, but without minor party candidates’ vote totals. By that measure, we found Clinton outperformed Biden in only six states (California, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Nevada and New York) and Washington, D.C. Only one of them — Nevada — is a swing state where Trump has been contesting the results. Clinton barely edged Biden there, garnering 51.29% of the Nevada vote, compared with Biden’s 51.22%.

In his own analysis of the 2020 and 2016 elections for us, Stewart said he found “what political scientists would call a ‘uniform swing’ for Biden nationwide,” with some minor variations.

“[T]he way elections work, it would be unlikely a winning candidate would do better (compared to 4 years before) in only the close states and not the uncompetitive states,” Stewart said.

Stewart provided this scatterplot that shows a “uniform swing” toward Biden.