Summary
Donald Trump and his team are attacking media outlets like Politico and The New York Times for reporting that his 2024 election victory over Kamala Harris was narrow, not a “landslide.”
Trump won by 1.6 points and failed to secure a majority of the popular vote, a smaller margin than Hillary Clinton’s over him in 2016.
Despite these facts, Trump and his allies continue to tout his win as “historic” and “dominant,” aiming to bolster his political mandate amid criticisms that his victory was less decisive than claimed.
I’m not one for conspiracy theories, and we don’t have any evidence to back up any sort of claims of rigging or election fraud. In fact, the various lawsuits Trump initiated in the last cycle and audits and recounts and so on provided a pretty damning pile of evidence for “not rigged”.
Republicans aren’t rigging elections themselves. There’s no tomfoolery going on with voting machines, or people voting twice, or similar. They’re “rigging” it with legal means – disenfranchising voters, suppressing turnout, financing third party candidates to peel votes away from the other side, gerrymandering districts, and using massive propaganda systems to influence who decides to vote and what they choose when they do vote.
All said, though, we can always make the system more robust, and increase both voters’ confidence in the system and allay any fears of actual rigging. But election reforms are often a “Democrat” issue, so almost any Republican will oppose meaningful reforms that don’t do one of the things above to suppress voters.