Trump Claims Nonexistent Youth-Vote Landslide

Donald Trump has a habit of grossly exaggerating his popular support, particularly his performance in elections. This had famously pernicious effects in 2020: He refused to accept defeat, claiming not just that he won but that he “won by historic numbers,” and tried to overturn the results with the help of a mob that assaulted the Capitol. But it came as no real surprise, since in 2016 he couldn’t be satisfied with an Electoral College victory, instead claiming an imaginary popular vote win robbed from him by millions of illegal votes, for which he had zero evidence.

Now he’s won again, and absolutely no one is denying it. But Trump can’t let it go at that; he has to insist on a massive triumph, presumably in order to claim an unlimited mandate to do whatever he wants. On Election Night, he called his margin of victory “unprecedented.” During his recent big interview with Time magazine, he said, “the beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive. Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate.” While, as is often the case, it’s unclear what precisely he was talking about, Trump’s electoral vote margin was the largest in … 12 years, not 129. His popular vote margin was the largest in … four years. It was less than a third of Joe Biden’s margin in 2020.

Now the president-elect’s extraordinary inflation of his victory is extending into subcategories of the electorate. In his first post-election press conference on December 16, he was asked about banning TikTok and gave this answer:

I have a warm spot in my heart for TikTok, because I won youth by 34 points … Republicans are always 30 points down in youth. I don’t know why. But we ended up finishing. There was one poll that showed us down about 30. We were 35 or 36 points up with young people. So I have a little bit of a warm spot in my heart, I’ll be honest.

Unless Trump has some data source he isn’t disclosing to us, this assertion is hallucinatory. According to exit polls, he didn’t win any age category of voters under the age of 50. (Kamala Harris won under-30 voters by 54 to 43 percent and voters in their 30s by 51 to 45 percent; the two candidates tied among voters in their 40s.) If you don’t trust the exit polls, the authoritative Tufts analysis of the youth vote did show closer margins, but Harris defeated Trump among under-30 voters by 51 to 47 percent and among voters 30-44 years old by 50 percent to 47 percent. There’s no Trump youth-vote victory at all, much less a 34-point win. Yes, the former president made significant gains over his wretched 2020 showing in this demographic, but the improvements are about a net gain of 13 points, not anything like what Trump is talking about.

Does it matter that the next president of the United States regularly and blatantly misstates his performance in elections? Is this just another example of utterances we should “take seriously but not literally?” I might be able to go along with that if he and his supporters had not used misinformation about election results to deny one defeat and to treat his narrow victories as representing a history-changing realignment that should silence all critics and opponents in both parties. Trump won the 2024 election and is inheriting enormous power as a result, thanks to our winner-take-all system of government. He shouldn’t be able to add to that power by just making up massive victories out of thin air.