Former President Donald Trump keeps telling the lie that he won Georgia in the 2020 election. This weekend, he delivered a new false claim in support of that old false claim.
Trump’s deception about what happened in Georgia has not relented even as he prepares to turn himself in this week to face charges in Fulton County over his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden. On Saturday, he posted on social media that despite having won Georgia in 2016, doing a “fantastic job” as president and earning millions more votes in 2020 than he did in 2016 and more votes than a sitting president had ever received before, he had “shockingly, ‘LOST’ Georgia” – putting lost in quotation marks.
Trump then continued, “All this despite winning nearby Alabama and South Carolina in Record Setting Landslides.” He concluded the post: “Does anybody really believe I lost Georgia? I DON’T!”
Facts First: Trump lost Georgia fair and square in 2020, by 11,779 votes, and his claim that he won South Carolina and Alabama in record landslides is not even close to true. Numerous previous candidates have earned far larger margins of victory in South Carolina and Alabama than Trump did in 2020. Even Trump himself won each state by a larger margin in 2016 than he did in 2020 – a fact that contravenes his insinuation that his 2020 failure in Georgia was mysteriously at odds with a better-than-ever performance elsewhere in the region.
The decline in Trump’s Georgia margin between 2016 and 2020 (about 5.4 percentage points) was larger than his declines in South Carolina (about 2.6 points) and Alabama (about 2.3 points), both of which he won big in both elections, but that does not suggest that anything nefarious happened in Georgia. States are simply different. Adjacent states often have social, economic and political differences that can lead to divergences in their…
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