President Donald Trump has resorted to posting dubious figures to console himself after his party’s brutal midterm rout.
Trump, 80, shared two posts on Truth Social on Sunday, comparing his party’s midterm performance to that of past presidents Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and Ronald Reagan.
The president’s posts featured graphics comparing the number of Senate and House seats each listed president’s party lost in their respective midterm elections, with Trump’s losses appearing smallest.
Trump has repeatedly blamed his hand-picked candidates for the GOP’s staggering defeat in this year’s midterm elections.
However, the octogenarian cherry-picked the figures without crucial context, including the size of each party’s pre-election majority and, the political landscape in which the elections took place.
Trump’s graph showed that Republicans lost 48 total House seats, compared with 54 for Clinton’s Democrats and 63 for Obama’s. But the president failed to account for the vastly larger House majorities both Democratic presidents held at the time, leaving more seats at risk.
Trump’s smaller loss of House seats doesn’t put into perspective the magnitude of the shift in Democratic power.
Donald Trump/Truth Social
During Obama’s first term, Democrats held 256 seats before dropping to 193, while during Clinton’s administration, the party fell from 258 seats to 204. This year, Republicans entered the election with a narrow 218-seat majority and emerged with 169 seats—fewer than Democrats held after either of those earlier midterms.
Trump’s House graphic also omitted the margin by which Democrats beat Republicans in the national House popular vote.
The Democratic Party’s estimated 13 percent advantage over Republicans in the national House popular vote is second only to the party’s massive 16.6 percent margin in 1974, which followed President Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal.
Trump’s Senate graph was similarly missing important context.
Trump boasted he lost fewer Senate seats than Barack “Hussein Obama.”
Donald Trump/Truth Social
Going into the midterms, Trump’s GOP held 53 seats while Democrats held 45, plus two independents who caucus with them.
While the president’s party lost eight Senate seats, one less than Obama’s Democrats lost in 2014, the states that flipped blue are of particular importance.
Democrats flipped five states that Trump had won in 2024 by double-digit margins: Iowa, Texas, South Carolina, Kansas, and Mississippi. In reliably red Texas, Democrat James Talarico trounced Trump-endorsed Republican Ken Paxton by a whopping 12 points.
Additionally, with only about a third of the Senate’s seats up for grabs every two years because of senators’ staggered six-year terms, direct comparisons of raw seat losses alone offer an incomplete comparison of midterm performances, since the electoral map differs from cycle to cycle.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
Despite initially accepting the results of this year’s midterms and saying he would “look forward” to working with Democrats, Trump has turned back to his old habits of publicly questioning election integrity, without providing evidence of any wrongdoing.
Trump complained that the election was not “honest.”
In the roughly two weeks since Election Day, the president has repeatedly cast doubt on the midterm results, expressing skepticism about early vote counts and voting machines.
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong???,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week. “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!”
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