Media

Cuomo Says Trump Got ‘Shellacked’ In Midterm Election ‘Popular Vote’

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Mike Brest Reporter
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CNN’s Chris Cuomo tried to cite a statistic about the “popular vote” of the midterm election to prove a point during a debate Thursday night with Don Lemon, but it doesn’t tell the full story.

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Lemon and Cuomo were discussing what appeared to them to be the disappearance of the coverage of the migrant caravan since the midterm elections on Tuesday.

“Some people took it as fuel for their own fire of righteous indignation against the Trump Administration,” Cuomo stated. “He got shellacked in the vote across the country. He lost this popular vote by more votes than he did in 2016.”

He was using the claim to prove his point that people weren’t pleased with the president’s rhetoric about the caravan and that was somewhat responsible for the outcomes of the various elections.

Many Democrats have brought up the fact that Senate Democratic candidates received nearly 9,000,000 more votes than their Republican counterparts. Despite that disparity, the Republicans managed to pick up seats in the Senate. However, some close races have yet to be finalized at this point.

Of the 35 Senate seats that held elections Tuesday, 26 of them were Democratic incumbents compared to 9 Republicans. Ninety-three percent of the senators that ran for re-election in 2016 — or 27 out of 29 — won, according to the University of Virginia Center for Politics.

Therefore, Democrats should have been expected to garner more votes because they had more candidates in position as incumbents more likely to get more votes than their challenger. (RELATED: Democrats Win The House, Delegitimize The Senate)

Cuomo also compared this Tuesday’s popular vote to that of the presidential election in 2016. In that election, Hillary Clinton garnered 65,844,954 votes throughout the country, while President Donald Trump received 62,797,879 votes. Despite losing the popular vote, Trump was able to reach the 270 electoral college threshold.

Overall, Republicans received fewer votes than Democrats in the 2018 midterms and it happened by a larger margin than the popular vote in the 2016 presidential election. But, this essentially could have been expected since Democrats were defending more seats.

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