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Days after saying he was “absolutely willing” to accept the massive Republican losses in the midterm elections, President Donald Trump suggested Monday on social media that the Democratic victories weren’t “honest.”
“Does anybody really believe that this ‘Election’ was honest. How could the Polls be so wrong??? Some early voting ‘dumps’ were so large that it was impossible to win, no matter how many people went to vote,” he wrote on Truth Social, implying there was something nefarious about elections carried out under different processes in different states.
“It’s all about the machines, which are far more important than the voter!” the post concluded, without elaborating. Election officials nationwide have reported that voting this year was largely routine.
Trump, speaking to reporters later in the day, was asked whether he thought the midterms had been rigged.
“Well, I think the numbers were terrible in terms of those early votes. You look at all those early votes,” he said, before he pivoted to talking about the still-undecided Senate race in Alaska.
A White House official, asked earlier in the day about the president’s post, noted that Trump had told reporters ahead of last week’s elections that he would respect the results “if they’re honest elections.”
In the lead-up to the election, the Justice Department sent a number of legal letters raising the specter of noncitizen voting and fraud in a number of Democratic-led states, which a judge found was an attempt to intimidate election officials.
Trump has a history of denying election results. His previous false claims include that the 2016 Iowa caucuses were rigged against him when he lost to Sen. Ted Cruz, that he won the national popular vote in 2016 despite losing it by almost 3 million votes, and that he won the 2020 election despite losing it by 7 million votes.
Yet, by the time election night arrived last week and the scale of Democrats’ victory became clear, Trump suggested he would accept the midterm results — while noting that he was not on the ballot.
“I’m absolutely willing to accept those results,” Trump told The New York Times in an interview Tuesday night.
“I’m going to become a Political Pundit, both good and bad, on the reasons these Candidates won and lost!” he wrote that night on Truth Social.
“I wasn’t on the Ballot and if I was, we would have won IN A LANDSLIDE!” he wrote in another.
In an interview with “60 Minutes” that aired Sunday, Trump ran through a number of reasons why Republicans lost, including that his deportation policies “might be too tough” and that voters “didn’t like the war. They didn’t like that gasoline was up.”
“In some cases, they didn’t like the candidates, and that’s their prerogative,” Trump said in the interview, which was taped Friday.
“I was not on the ballot, but I campaigned hard for some people, and I think if I was on the ballot, it would have been a much different situation, because you saw the level of popularity and love,” he said.
His stance seemed to start to shift Saturday, after he replaced longtime chief of staff Susie Wiles with MAGA favorite Stephen Miller.
That was the day Trump on Truth Social reposted an X user who questioned how so many states could have had their votes swing by 15% in the midterm elections.
“A pattern this even demands answers at the ballot level: paper ballot hand counts, poll-book check-ins against votes counted, and voter files showing who actually turned out,” the post said.
Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat, told NBC News that Trump’s claims about the election are “completely false.”
“The systems worked,” and “the election was a massive rebuke of his leadership,” Aguilar said in a phone interview.
“He’s upset because he lost and people are holding him accountable,” he added.
Claims about a rigged election were sparse as polls opened and results came in. Most focused on casting a conspiratorial shadow on real mishaps caused by bad weather in Arizona and malfunctioning machines in Westchester County, New York. In the latter case, election officials followed established contingency plans to use backup machines and said all votes cast would be counted.
The incidents got little pickup from influential accounts, and Trump paid them little mind on his own social media channels.
Researchers at the University of Washington who were tracking false narratives on election night told reporters their early analysis shows the spread of such rumors was much smaller at the onset of the night than during elections past. Immediately following election night, those rumors died down.
“What’s missing for election denialism this cycle? Widespread shared grievance,” Kate Starbird, a professor at the university, wrote in a series of social media posts Sunday analyzing the rigged election rumors, noting that the false narrative seems to have drifted back to the fringes even as the president puts renewed effort into boosting them.
In an interview Monday, Starbird said that Trump’s post caused an immediate spike in election denialism chatter on X. But she said Trump is still missing some of the ingredients he would need in order to mobilize his supporters into real-world action, as he did after the 2020 presidential election.
“It’s a trial balloon. He’s going to see if his audience likes it,” she told NBC News.
“He can walk away from it or he can double down,” she said. “If it’s just the hardcore conspiracy theorists reposting him, he may lose energy if he can’t push it beyond that group.”
One person who quickly raised questions online about the integrity of the election after Democrats made larger-than-anticipated gains in the House, the Senate and various state legislatures was MyPillow founder Mike Lindell, a Trump ally who’s made numerous debunked claims about the 2020 election.
Lindell was hit with a $2 million defamation judgment related to those claims last year.
While Lindell had previously made unfounded allegations about foreign interference, the allegations this time around are focused on “matching algorithmic patterns.”
Trump now appears to be focused on the numbers, as well, but it’s unclear which polls he was referring to when he wrote, “How could the Polls be so wrong???”
The polls this election cycle underestimated the size of Democrats’ winning margin, although they “captured the direction of this year’s election,” the Pew Research Center said in a preliminary analysis posted Friday.
Trump had previously said the “actual” polls showed Republicans winning and dismissed polling that showed Democrats would take control of the House and might take control of the Senate as “fake.” Democrats wound up overperforming in even those polls.
“The Radical Left Democrats are going CRAZY with Fake Polls,” he wrote on Truth Social in August.
“They’re putting them out at levels never seen before. They’re called, ‘Demoralization Operations,’ where they try to demoralize Republicans so that they don’t go out and vote — But the actual Polls are tremendous, and the Spirit in our Country has never been higher. We’re winning against EVERYONE,” he wrote.
Aguilar said that “election officials cannot and do not pay attention to” opinion polls. “We follow the law,” he said.
Dareh Gregorian is a politics reporter for NBC News.
Jane Lytvynenko is a senior technology reporter for NBC News.
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