Trump is apparently confused as to why news outlets projected the election winner as he rails against the results
- President Donald Trump has refused to concede to President-elect Joe Biden.
- Insider and its election partner, Decision Desk HQ, projected Biden the winner of the 2020 election on Friday, and other major outlets like the Associated Press and CNN called the race for Biden on Saturday.
- Trump has so far refused to accept his loss, falsely claiming victory, and on Sunday expressed confusion at the long-standing process of news outlets calling US elections.
- His rejection of the results appears to be at odds with his past claims that the election needed to end on Election Day; regardless, it takes days to weeks for states to certify their election results.
President Donald Trump has lost his bid for reelection, Insider and its election partner, Decision Desk HQ, projected Friday, making Joe Biden the president-elect, but Trump has so far refused to concede the race and on Sunday expressed confusion with the common practice of news outlets calling the race.
"Since when does the Lamestream Media call who our next president will be?" Trump tweeted Sunday. "We have all learned a lot in the last two weeks!"
Major news outlets such as the Associated Press, NBC News, Fox News, and The New York Times called the election in Biden's favor after he pulled ahead in the key battleground of Pennsylvania by more than 30,000 votes on Saturday, a day after Insider and DDHQ projected Biden the winner.
Trump has falsely claimed victory in the election, first in the early-morning hours Wednesday following Election Day. On Saturday he in a tweet again falsely claimed victory, not long before major news outlets called the race in Biden's favor while the president golfed in Virginia.
The process is typical in a presidential election. As DDHQ's president, Drew McCoy, a longtime campaign analyst, explained to Business Insider's Jake Lahut, DDHQ chose to project Biden as the election winner Friday because the "data led us there."
"Homework led us to a benchmark," he said. "We weren't going to simply call it if, you know, Joe Biden had a 20-vote lead or something like that. It had to be a substantial lead that met certain benchmarks."
DDHQ has been calling races since 2012. The Associated Press, which has long called races, has said: "AP does not make projections or name apparent or likely winners. If our race callers cannot definitively say a candidate has won, we do not engage in speculation."
As Poynter noted, the Associated Press has been the "gold standard" for calling races for decades and began "counting the vote" in 1848. In the highly contested 2000 presidential race between George W. Bush and former Vice President Al Gore, for example, the Associated Press noted, it never made a call.
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The president's comments Sunday also appear to be at odds with his prior position that a winner should have been declared on Election Day and "not weeks later." According to the National Association of State Election Directors, deadlines for states to certify election results range from two days from Election Day to up to a month afterward.
As the Associated Press explained, electors in the Electoral College, which typically cast their ballots based on the state popular vote, do not vote until December 14, and the official results are not announced by the US Senate until January 6.
Since his lead in the election began to slip, Trump and his allies ramped up their baseless allegations about voter fraud and lobbed allegations that Democrats are attempting to "steal the election" from him.