Chris Evans poked fun at President Donald Trump on Twitter on Saturday as Trump falsely claimed he won the 2020 presidential election. The race has not been called by The Associated Press, CBS News and most other news outlets, but Trump is disputing the results with no evidence in his own favor. By this weekend, the Captain America star had had enough.
“I WON THIS ELECTION, BY A LOT!” Trump tweeted on Saturday, as Biden was projected to be the winner. “No you didn’t. You lost,” Evans responded. The actor’s tweet got nearly half a million likes, and thousands of retweets and responses. Many fans were still worked up about the election themselves, though some supported the president’s erroneous claims of victory. Evans, who is often political on social media, actually backed off of the subject in the hours that followed.
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No you didnโt. You lost. https://t.co/M1RQAaF6L8
โ Chris Evans (@ChrisEvans) November 7, 2020
The 2020 presidential election was unique because the coronavirus pandemic caused voters to rely more heavily on mail-in voting and early voting. This drove up voter turn-out overall, which most people saw as a good thing for civic engagement, but it presented logistical challenges as well.
Some states were well-equipped to count mail-in ballots and early ballots, having used these processes in the past to facilitate votes from U.S. military service members, and others who could not be present for the election. However, some states did not have these processes in place, and were stopped from getting them in place in time. In particular, swing states like Pennsylvania and Arizona were blocked from counting mail-in ballots ahead of time by their GOP-controlled state legislatures.
This lengthened the wait for the election results, and sparked confusion among many Americans. While journalists have been warning for months that the 2020 election results would be slow to come, many were surprised as they waited days to find out the results. The confusion led some to believe in Trump’s false claims about election, but so far there is no real evidence of voter fraud or election tampering of any kind.
The Trump campaign is well within its rights to continue pursuing recounts and lawsuits in certain states and cities, but it is lying when it claims that there is evidence of mishandling in these places. At the same time, these lawsuits are unlikely to actually flip the results of the election. Trump is 54 votes short of victory in the electoral college, meaning he would need to discover real election tampering in several states to make up the difference. It is almost that enough cases will go in his favor to reverse the projections that Trump lost the election.