President Donald Trump questioned the legitimacy of last week's midterm election results on Monday, days after telling reporters on election night that he was "absolutely willing" to accept the outcome. "Does anybody really believe that this 'Election' was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong?" he wrote on Truth Social, making vague references to polling errors, vote "dumps" and voting machines without specifying what he believed had gone wrong.
Democrats retook both chambers of Congress in last week's midterms, with the party winning 54 Senate seats and 254 House seats as of Monday, even as counting continued in a handful of races, including Senate contests in Alaska and Mississippi. State and local officials across the country have said voting was mostly problem-free.
Trump's reversal was stark. On election night, he told the New York Times he would "probably work something out" with Democrats and looked "forward to working with" the new majorities. He has since offered a more partisan accounting of the defeat, telling Fox News that the Iran war — which has driven up gasoline prices — had cost Republicans votes, a view Vice-President JD Vance has also voiced.
Election experts rejected any implication that something irregular occurred. Charles Stewart III, a political scientist at MIT who studies election administration, said vote reporting "proceeded as normal" nationwide, noting that states like Florida and Georgia simply report early and mail ballots faster than others. Ruth Greenwood, director of the Election Law Clinic at Harvard Law School, said slower counts in some states reflect local law and logistics rather than wrongdoing: "We just need to trust local election officials to count every vote and tell us the results when they are done."
Monday's post echoes a pattern Trump has repeated since his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, when he and his allies spent weeks unsuccessfully litigating the result. In the run-up to this year's midterms, the Justice Department filed lawsuits challenging vote counts and certifications in states including California and Alaska; judges ruled against the administration in nearly every instance, including a Supreme Court rejection of its bid to halt California's count of 20,000 disputed ballots. Election officials told the BBC they had spent months preparing for exactly this scenario, regardless of which party lost.
A separate newsroom's closer look at the specific voting-machine and ballot-count claims Trump revived six days after the result became official traces several of them back to theories that circulated, and were debunked, after the 2020 election.
