The President of the United States, Donald Trump, stated that his party would have achieved a landslide victory in the midterm elections if he had been a candidate. This assertion came during a night of significant setbacks for the Republicans, after the president himself spent much of the campaign urging his supporters to vote as if his name were on the ballot.
"I was not on the ballot and, if I had been, we would have won by a landslide! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP," he wrote in a post on Truth Social shared during the election night of November 3.
"Let them know I'm on the ballot": the request he repeated during the campaign
On October 31, during a campaign phone event with Republican candidates from Florida, Trump explicitly urged his supporters to go vote on November 3 and told them, "Please pretend one thing: that I’m on the ballot." In that same speech, he endorsed Ashley Moody for the Senate and Byron Donalds for the governorship of Florida, according to the transcript from Roll Call Factba.se.
On November 1, during a rally in Dubuque, Iowa, he insisted: "Pretend I'm on the ballot because, essentially, I am." He added that a Republican victory would help protect the policies advanced by his administration, according to the transcript of his speech.
A day later, on November 2, he revisited the idea in a text message directed at voters in South Carolina: "Get out and vote tomorrow and pretend I'm on the ballot." He even stated that, in political terms, he was indeed on it because his Administration's proposals were at stake. The statement is included in the transcript of that event.
These were not isolated references: Trump had already used the same argument in Ohio on October 3 and in Kentucky on October 17. His stated goal was to mobilize supporters who tend to vote when he leads the presidential campaign.
A difficult night for the Republicans
The president's comment coincided with Democratic gains in various states. CBS News projected that the Democratic Party would regain control of the House of Representatives, while the contest for the Senate remained ongoing.
In the Senate, The Associated Press reported on Democratic victories that seized Republican seats in North Carolina and South Carolina, as well as significant wins for the party in Georgia and New Hampshire. The results were still being updated as the counting progressed.
The elections on November 3 did not include a presidential candidacy: all 435 seats in the House of Representatives were being renewed, and positions in the Senate, governorships, and other offices were contested. Precisely for this reason, Trump had tried to turn the vote for his party's candidates into a test of support for his administration, as CiberCuba noted in the lead-up to the elections.
The difference between the two messages is clear: before the election, he asked to act as if he were on the ballot; later, in light of the unfavorable results for his party, he claimed that his absence was the reason there hadn't been a landslide victory. Readers can follow .
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