As the results of the Tuesday elections roll in, former President Donald Trump (R) attempted to halt enthusiasm by downplaying Florida Governor Ron DeSantis (R) and his landslide victory, making the claim that his win in 2020 for Florida was much more impressive than the victory DeSantis experienced on Tuesday, despite the fact that the claim does not hold water at all.
“Now that the Election in Florida is over, and everything went quite well, shouldn’t it be said that in 2020, I got 1.1 Million more votes in Florida than Ron D got this year, 5.7 Million to 4.6 Million?” claimed Trump via social media. “Just asking?”
Attempting to compare the turnout for midterm elections to that of presidential elections is almost impossible due to the turnout being substantially higher for all presidential elections. A metric can be used to compare the two events, however, and that is the margin of victory.
Back in 2020, Trump was able to take win the state by roughly 371,686 votes or 3.3 points. However, DeSantis was just able to win the state by a staggering 1,507,081 votes or by 19.4 points.
DeSantis was able to handily secure a massive 62 counties of the state’s total of 67, of which 59 sported a double-digit margin. The governor was able to secure Miami-Dade County, the largest in the state and a known stronghold for Democrats, by almost 11 points. He took Palm Beach County, another Democrat stronghold and the state’s third largest, by three points.
While speaking during a NewsNation interview, Trump claimed that DeSantis should be far more gracious to him due to Trump winning the governor his primary race for the seat.
“I got him the nomination. He didn’t get it. I got it,” exclaimed Trump. “And I thought that he could have been more gracious, but that’s up to him.”
In the run-up to the recent election, Trump made quite sure to repeatedly go after the Floridian governor and even celebrated when another Republican candidate ended up losing a prime U.S. Senate race that could have been a seat that determines which party controls the U.S. Senate.
As part of the very same interview with NewsNation, Trump claimed that he should be the only one given all the credit for anyone who won their races throughout the recent midterms and that no one should try to place the blame on him if they ended up losing.
“Well, I think if they win, I should get all the credit. And if they lose, I should not be blamed at all, okay?” claimed Trump. “But it’ll probably be just the opposite. When they win, I think they’re going to do very well, I’ll probably be given very little credit even though in many cases I told people to run and they ran and they turned out to be very good candidates.”