Bret Weinstein on elections: what the evidence says · JRE #2198
SUBJECT: ELECTIONS
The short answer
Weinstein describes the 2020 election as 'the largest ever win' for Democrats, citing roughly 80-something million votes for Biden. Joe Biden received 81,283,501 votes in the 2020 presidential election (51.31% of the popular vote) per the Federal Election Commission's official certified results, becoming the first candidate in U.S. history to surpass 80 million votes; a separate compilation from the American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara) puts the figure at 81,268,773, with the small discrepancy reflecting different certification snapshots.
Not a true/false call. Every claim is logged with its sources; read the exhibits below.
So essentially in the 2020 elections, it was the largest ever win, right? The Democrats got 80 something million votes,
What the evidence says 01 / RECORD
Joe Biden received 81,283,501 votes in the 2020 presidential election (51.31% of the popular vote) per the Federal Election Commission's official certified results, becoming the first candidate in U.S. history to surpass 80 million votes; a separate compilation from the American Presidency Project (UC Santa Barbara) puts the figure at 81,268,773, with the small discrepancy reflecting different certification snapshots. That total exceeded Barack Obama's prior record of about 69.5 million votes in 2008 and was driven primarily by record voter turnout (about 66% of eligible citizens, the highest rate since 1900), not a landslide margin. Trump received 74,223,975 votes, giving Biden a popular-vote margin of roughly 7.06 million votes (about 4.5 percentage points), a large margin among modern elections but not the largest ever; several past elections (e.g., 1972, 1984, 1964) produced far larger percentage-point margins of victory. Describing 2020 as having the largest ever win is accurate only in the narrow sense of raw vote count, not margin of victory, so the framing overstates what the underlying data show.