Trump Thinks He Is Changing Votes?
The “red mirage” has again tricked President Trump and his followers, who were already salivating for a 2026 election fraud conspiracy theory — ideally one in a blue or purple state — to catch on this midterms cycle.
“Tricked” is perhaps too generous a word here. Back in 2020, when President Trump was lying that the election had been stolen from him and riling up his supporters to spread conspiracy theories and baseless myths about rampant voter fraud in some key blue and purple parts of the country, much of Trump’s complaints about the results seemed to stem from him not understanding the “red mirage” effect common in modern elections. In 2020, Trump watched as late-counted ballots shifted his election night lead in a handful of swing states, leading Trump to believe that the counting was somehow rigged.
Studies have shown that the the counties that went for Joe Biden in 2020 tended to be urban ones, with more ballots to count and slower counting processes than counties that went for Trump. Mail-in ballots also tend to be counted later than Election Day ballots. Democratic voters tend to vote by mail more often than Republicans, who tend to vote in person on Election Day, in part because Trump has built a political brand out of claiming that mailed-in ballots are subject to fraud.
The trends create an effect where in recent elections it has appeared that Republicans are doing better early on on election night before things like mail-in ballots are tallied. Add into the mix the fact that California allows voters to vote-by-mail more extensively than other states — and has millions of votes to count — and you’ve got a normal situation ripe to be seized on by President Trump and his allies looking for a reason to begin spreading lies about midterms “fraud.”
In reality, Trump is just projecting his willfully ignorant ideas about election counting trends on to California after the primary saw Democratic socialist candidate and Los Angeles City Councilwoman Nithya Raman surpass washed up reality TV villain and Republican candidate Spencer Pratt for the number 2 spot in the LA mayoral primary race (California has a unique top-two primary system where the first and second place primary candidates advance no matter their political party).
But Trump’s online theorizing about supposed fraud in California’s mayoral and gubernatorial races exposes a fundamental misunderstanding of how counting and political trends in voting work, at best.
And his remarks in the Oval Office on Wednesday suggest something more sinister — or dumb.
Trump claimed that the reason California Republican gubernatorial candidate Steve Hilton secured enough votes to advance to the general election was because Trump started talking about his belief in rampant fraud in the state’s election.
“After a week, they determined that a kid who’s leading and had all the mojo, all of the sudden he doesn’t make the runoff, and then I hit them hard on that,” he said, referencing Pratt.
“I started talking about Steve Hilton who’s a fantastic guy and I saw them say it was going to be two weeks before they knew, and I started hitting them,” he said, “it’s going to happen to Steve Hilton.”
“And they approved Steve Hilton very quickly,” he concluded. “There was too much heat on them.”
His remarks seemed to suggest that his social media posts were in real time influencing how votes were counted. It also seemed confused about how race projections — carried out by the Associated Press and similar organizations — work.
Today’s remarks at best illustrate his delusion that all Republican losses in elections are the result of fraud … even in somewhere as blue as California. As worst, they demonstrate what we’ve had a window into since 2020: an attempt to confuse his followers about the mechanics of elections, regardless of his own beliefs, for his own personal gain.
— Nicole LaFond
SPLC Warns of Danger of Jan 6 Pardons
The Southern Poverty Law Center — the group that tracks far-right extremism and white supremacist activity in the United States and is currently being targeted by the Trump Justice Department — put out its annual Year in Hate & Extremism report this week. The group found that in the first year and a half of Trump’s second term, the Trump administration has radically shifted federal policy to “favor hard right, extremists.” The report frames Trump’s immigration enforcement and the threat it poses to minorities in America, plus his pardoning of Jan. 6 defendants and his weaponization of the Justice Department for his own political aims, as the pillars of the federal government’s shift toward extremism. Per SPLC:
The current partisan, skewed view of political violence, coupled with the promotion, normalization and mainstreaming of extremist and bigoted ideas, has led to a significant inflection point. Through its attempts to silence nonprofit organizations, ignore or downplay the very real threat of far-right and white supremacist extremist violence, and eliminate or misallocate violent extremism prevention resources, the Trump administration has created an environment that is less safe.
— Nicole LaFond
Americans Are Working More and Earning Less. But Trump ‘Love[s] the Inflation’
Americans started their day with yet another dismal economic snapshot and by lunchtime, they heard yet another flippant remark about it from the president.
The most headline grabbing news came when the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported inflation rose by more than 4% year over year for the first time since 2023. But buried in that data was the agency’s real earnings report, which showed what the headline inflation numbers actually mean. Americans earned 0.4% less money in May compared to that month last year in real average weekly earnings, defined as wage and salary inputs adjusted for inflation to reveal actual buying power. This decrease in income came after a 0.3% increase in the average workweek, which means that increasing the amount you work does not, on average, make up for the impact of inflation on your personal finances.
Fuel oil and gasoline up a staggering 58.9% and 40.5% respectively. (Now’s a good time to issue a reminder that the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, which is causing these price spikes, had been predicted and was entirely preventable.) But it’s not like the price for other consumer goods is going down. Food was up 3.1% year over year, and, excluding energy, price inflation was up 2.9%, though by less than in March.
How did the president respond? “I love the inflation,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office earlier today. “You know why? Because as soon as this war is over …,” Trump began before waxing poetic about an alleged U.S. scheme that he claimed removed 22 ships worth of oil from Iran, unbeknownst to Iran until that moment.
Later, Trump finished his thought. “When the war’s over? It’s going to come down like a rock.”
— Layla A. Jones
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