In 1948, beset by labor issues and changing technology, the Chicago Daily Tribune was forced to print its first presidential election night issue with only a small percentage of ballots counted. Relying on polls and the prognosticating reputation of their Washington correspondent, editors announced the victory of Republican New York Gov. Thomas Dewey over the incumbent president, Democrat Harry S. Truman.
After Truman’s landslide victory, he was photographed holding up the mistaken front page in what would become an iconic reminder of the frailty of polls and the perils of calling an election before a majority of the ballots had been counted.
No one in their right mind could have foreseen a United States president replicating the most famous journalistic error in this country’s history as a political tactic.
Yet four years ago this week, that is precisely what Donald Trump did.
Early on election day 2020, then-President Trump led former Vice President Joe Biden in several key states. As more ballots, many of them mailed in or dropped off due to COVID-19 concerns, were counted, those leads began to vanish.
By midnight, there was no clear winner: Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Nevada and Pennsylvania remained too close to call. (Fox had called Arizona for Biden earlier but not every outlet agreed.)
Based on voting trends, and the demographics of areas where ballots remained uncounted, networks and pundits began cautiously predicting a Biden win — after midnight, Biden gave a speech in which he expressed confidence that he would prevail — but neither candidate had enough electoral votes to declare victory.
And yet, at 2:21 a.m. on Nov. 4, that is precisely what Donald Trump did.
Dismissing the protests of all his top aides, with the exception of a reportedly drunk Rudy Giuliani, Trump called the press to the East Wing of the White House, where he stood in front of a bank of American flags and attempted to steal the election.
In a matter of minutes, he claimed he had won the election (he hadn’t), that he had won Georgia, Pennsylvania and Michigan (he hadn’t, and didn’t), that Democrats had perpetrated fraud (they didn’t), that voting needed to stop (it had, hours before) and that “we don’t want them to find any ballots at 4 o’clock in the morning and add them to the list” (in some states, ballot counting would, by necessity, go on for several days).
The country, and the world, had never seen anything like it.
Historically, various news outlets “call” election results after the majority of the ballots have been counted and the winner typically waits for his or her opponent to concede before delivering victory remarks.
Twenty years ago, that pattern of protocol was interrupted by then-Vice President Al Gore after his race against Texas Gov. George W. Bush came down to an election-night seesaw in Florida. First called for Gore, it later was called for Bush. Gore first conceded, then, as continued counting narrowed Bush’s apparent victory, withdrew his concession. For a month, we watched the “hanging chad” convulsions of the Florida recount and related court cases until a highly controversial 5-4 Supreme Court decision allowed Bush to win Florida and the presidency.
Which Bush had not claimed until it was official. Yes, he had been, not surprisingly, a bit testy when Gore called to withdraw his concession, and many questioned, and continue to question, the legitimacy of the final outcome.
But neither man claimed to have won the presidency while ballots were still being counted or recounted.
Yet here was Trump, mere hours after polls closed in the middle of a global plague, implying that his brief, early lead in certain states equaled victory; that Biden’s growing gains constituted fraud; and that any ballot that had not been counted before 2:21 a.m. had been “found” and was somehow suspect.
It was lunacy, attempted larceny, an attack on democracy. And it was only the beginning.
Trump apparently believed that he could win simply by saying he had won. And that if he hadn’t won, it was because his opponent cheated. A case of massive oppositional mendacity that borders on the hilarious — except that many people believed and continue to believe him, all evidence to the contrary.
Which is astonishing, infuriating, horrifying and queasily understandable.
During the 2020 campaign, as polls began to lean in Biden’s favor, Trump had gone to great lengths to undermine his supporters’ trust in the increased use of mail-in and dropbox ballots. Trump voters, who already mistrusted any media outlet that wasn’t Fox (and then Fox too, after it called Arizona for Biden), expected Trump to defy predictions as he did in 2016. (Heading into that election day, most polls had Hillary Clinton leading; she won the popular vote, but Trump took the Electoral College.)
Still, on Nov. 4, 2020, the fact that he was president of the United States made it very difficult, even for those who did not vote for or admire him, to take in what we were seeing and hearing: That Trump was attempting to call the election, by himself and for himself, before millions of ballots had been counted.
It was the kind of transparent lie associated with authoritarian nations, not the world’s largest democracy. While news outlets rushed to provide “fact-checking,” which boiled down to “None of this is true,” the country, already exhausted and traumatized by a pandemic, tried to contextualize the enormity of Trump’s actions.
Many Trump supporters heard a president vowing to fight a conspiracy he had been describing to them for years. The rest of us experienced an emotional tsunami that went from dumbfounded disbelief — surely this was one last bit of rhetorical self-aggrandizement that would lead to concession if he lost — to hideous apocalyptic foreboding — this is how democracy ends, not with a bang but with a 2 a.m. press conference.
Even in our shock, we knew there had been signs. While campaigning against Clinton, Trump had positioned his victory as a litmus test for democracy. If he won, justice had prevailed. If he didn’t, the system was corrupt and the Democrats were cheats.
This is, of course, the “logic” of authoritarianism, and Trump continued to espouse it throughout his presidency and the 2020 campaign. So when, in the early hours of Nov. 4, even many members of his own campaign began agreeing that Biden seemed the likely winner, Trump took that twisted “logic” to its unnatural conclusion. In his mind, he should have won, therefore he did win. And anyone who said otherwise was a cheater.
Many hoped that night’s statement was the last gasp of Trumpian lies and hyperbole. As results proved Biden to be the winner, there were a few moments when it was hoped that Trump would remember his oath to uphold the Constitution and, after legally contesting the results in certain states, accept the courts’ conclusions and concede that he lost.
We all know how that turned out. After the armed mob he sent to the Capital on Jan. 6, 2021, failed to keep Congress from certifying the election results, Trump finally conceded that Biden would become our 46th president, though not that he, Trump, had lost the election.
Instead, for almost four years, Trump has incessantly repeated the lie he first told in that infamous press conference — that the only votes that matter, the only votes that should count, are the ones cast for him.