Trump scrambles to sow doubt in outcome of midterms after his gigantic loss

President Donald Trump is boosting a post that suggests Democrats’ blowout win in Texas was too big to be real.

On Saturday, Trump shared on Truth Social, without comment, a screenshot of a post from an X account. The post argued that Democrat Gina Hinojosa’s vote total in the Texas governor’s race was impossible.

“A lot of yammering about Republican turnout,” the post began. It claimed that Gov. Greg Abbott, a Republican, “EXCEEDED his 2022 midterms performance by 100K votes (and counting)” and that “the problem is Gina Hinojosa gained 1.7 million votes more than Beto O’Rourke,” the Democrat Abbott beat in 2022.

“Those are Looney Tunes numbers,” the post continued. “Hinojosa got 400K more votes in Texas than Kamala Harris in 2024. She’s got more than Joe Biden in 2020 by 5,000 votes and counting. These are not normal midterms numbers. These are r----- numbers.”

The post added that “not a single opinion poll before the elections came close to predicting this” and that “lines at the polling places in Texas should have been around the block to get these results.”

It included an image comparing the 2022 results with this year’s. With 95% reporting, the image showed Hinojosa leading Abbott 52.8% to 45.7%, or 5,230,908 votes to 4,524,948.

The post doesn’t explicitly allege fraud. But by sharing it, Trump adds to a growing chorus on the right questioning Tuesday’s results, as Republicans lost both chambers of Congress and Democrats flipped Texas.

Kari Lake, Trump’s head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media, wrote on X this week that “the numbers make NO sense in AZ, Texas, Kansas, Mississippi and many other places,” and called for an inspection of the election.

The post Trump shared also undercuts its own argument. At the bottom of the screenshot is a chart from data scientist Lenny Bronner, posted on election night, under the line: “Todays story is that Democrats showed up as if this were a presidential election... and Republicans didn’t.”

The chart is titled “The voters who stayed home were Republicans.”