Fox News host Jesse Watters said on Monday that if Joe Biden won the presidential election without cheating, he must have run “the greatest campaign in presidential history.”
The video: Watters offered the analysis on “The Five” during a discussion with his co-hosts about Biden’s apparent victory, which saw Democrats lose seats in the House.
“If this was a clean election, then Joe Biden ran the greatest campaign in presidential history because he shattered decades of records, over a century of records and trends in this election,” Watters said.
- “And the media isn’t even curious about it. How do you have a down-ballot wave on one hand and the opposite wave on the top of the ticket? That hasn’t happened for 120 years,” he added, apparently recalling the U.S. election of 1900.
- “Are you are saying the guy that got more votes than any other person [besides Biden] in U.S. history doesn’t have coattails?”
- Or Donald Trump, the incumbent, actually got more votes in his reelection race and ended up losing? That hasn’t happened in 150 years,” Watters went on, seemingly citing the election of 1888.
- “I mean, why isn’t the media saying, ‘Joe, what your secret? How did you do it?’ I mean, why isn’t the media talking about this transformation of the Democratic Party?”
State of play: Watters’ skepticism that Trump could have lost despite helping his party win has been vocally shared by the president and others who have rejected the unofficial results as fraudulent.
Trump has also reportedly expressed doubts in private, telling Michigan GOP lawmakers last month during a White House meeting: “I don’t get it. All these other Republicans, all over the country, they all win their races. And I’m the only guy that loses?”
However, a number of analysts have argued that the degree of vote-splitting in the 2020 election was actually less than extraordinary.
- National Review’s John McCormack noted in an article on Monday that Barack Obama failed to win back the House for the Democrats when he took the presidency in 2012.
- And according to McCormack, “There was actually much less ticket-splitting between the 2020 Senate and presidential races than there was in 2016 or 2012.”
Still, Trump appears poised to make election history in at least one way: If he sticks to his pledge, he will be the first major party candidate not to publicly concede since 1896, when Democrat William Jennings Bryan started the tradition.
