Kellyanne Conway's 2016 'Landslide' Tweet Comes Back to Haunt Her After 2020 Electoral Tally Solidifies
A 2016 tweet by Kellyanne Conway has resurfaced this week, following the final tally of electoral [...]
A 2016 tweet by Kellyanne Conway has resurfaced this week, following the final tally of electoral college votes in the 2020 presidential election. According to a report by CBS News, the final count shows 306 votes for President-elect Joe Biden and 232 votes for President Donald Trump. In 2016, Conway — and many other Republicans — called 306 votes "a landslide."
Conway, an adviser for the Trump campaign and later the Trump administration, retweeted a graphic from CNN back in 2016. It showed the final vote giving Trump 306 electoral college votes, which she called a "landslide. Blowout. Historic." However, Biden has now won the 2020 election with the exact same number of electoral college votes — and many more votes from individual Americans — yet the Trump administration continues to deny the legitimacy of the election, with no evidence whatsoever.
306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic. https://t.co/ObYZDo8cBq
— Kellyanne Conway (@KellyannePolls) November 28, 2016
"I guess 306 electoral votes is only a landslide if you're a Republican," one person tweeted. Another wrote: "I like presidents that win the electoral college AND the popular vote."
In point of fact, Trump's 2016 victory was not "historic," nor was it a "blowout" — he lost the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes, yet the spread of those votes allowed him to win the presidency through the electoral college. Conversely, in 2020 Trump lost the popular vote by over 5 million votes, and also lost the electoral college by nearly the same margin he won it by in 2016.
With all this in mind, many commenters on Twitter found a tweet like Conway's damning to the Trump administration's current conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election. With no evidence to back up his claims, Trump continues to insist that there was voter fraud and election tampering all over the country, on a scale great enough to sway the election in his favor. This is not true, yet the president's insistence on it has already led to real world consequences.
On Saturday, Trump's supporters turned out for a protest in Washington, D.C., incorrectly convinced by him that the election had been tampered with. Before the march was even scheduled to begin, small fights and scuffles broke out between Trump supporters and counter-protesters. This included the Proud Boys, a white supremacist militia group that Trump famously failed to condemn in one of the presidential debates.
Trump's calls for a recount, and even his lawsuits in some states and cities are legal, but critics are more concerned with his false public claims that the election was illegitimate. They fear that this denial of objective fact could have dire consequences for democracy itself.