Multiple news outlets have now declared Joe Biden the winner of 306 electoral votes in the presidential election, a figure that President Donald Trump has often called a “landslide” after he won the same total in 2016.
Outlets including CNN and NBC on Friday called Georgia as a win by Biden ― he leads by more than 14,000 votes there, with a recount underway ― with no states left to project. Georgia’s 16 electoral votes put Biden at the 306 electoral vote mark, with 270 needed to win the White House, while Trump has 232. (HuffPost’s election map relies on calls by The Associated Press, and that outlet has yet to declare a winner in Georgia).
The president has repeatedly tried to cast doubt on this year’s election results, falsely and dangerously claiming that widespread voter fraud led to Biden’s winning margin in key states that Trump won in 2016. No evidence has surfaced to support his claims and lawsuits filed by his campaign have either been thrown out of court or given no chance of reversing the election’s results.
For all his lies about fraud in the 2020 race, Trump had plenty of faith in the vote-counting process in 2016 when his wins in several states by razor-thin margins awarded him ― coincidentally ― 306 electoral votes.
In the immediate aftermath of that election and throughout his presidency, Trump has touted that total for him as a “landslide” win over challenger Hillary Clinton (in another baseless claim, he still tried to claim fraud as the reason he lost the popular vote to her by almost 3 million votes).
CNN put together a series of clips showcasing examples of Trump’s boasts.
“We had a massive landslide victory, as you know, in the Electoral College,” Trump said in December 2016.
Flash forward three years, and Trump was still referring to the win as a “landslide.” In a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) Trump reminded her that Clinton lost “in an Electoral College landslide (306-227), and you and your party have never recovered from this defeat.”
Even at the start of this year, just months before Trump ramped up attacks casting doubt about mail-in voting, he was still bragging about his win.
“We had a tremendous landslide, Electoral College victory like people haven’t seen in a long time,” Trump said in January. (In 2012, then-President Barack Obama won reelection with 332 electoral votes; he first won the White House four years earlier with 365.)
Twitter users pointed out on Friday that former White House counselor Kellyanne Conway’s 2016 tweet after Trump won.
“306. Landslide. Blowout. Historic,” Conway tweeted out.
Historic indeed.