Did Democrats Object the Last Three Times a Republican Won the White House?
A tweet from Charlie Kirk is partially correct but is missing context.
Populist provocateur Charlie Kirk claimed in a recent tweet that in “The last 3 presidential elections where a Republican won the White House, Democrats in Congress objected to the electoral votes.” He added: “But now that Republicans are doing it, they're outraged.”
Kirk is partially correct: The 2000, 2004, and 2016 presidential elections saw some congressional Democrats object to the final electoral count. In 2000, the New York Times reported that “a dozen members of the Congressional Black Caucus, joined by a few sympathizers, tried in vain to block the counting of Florida's 25 electoral votes, protesting that black voters had been disenfranchised.” While members of either chamber of Congress may object to the certification of a state’s electoral votes, without at least one supporter in both chambers such objections are not formally considered and do not go to debate. As such, the objection to Florida’s electoral votes in 2000 quickly failed without a senator joining the cause. The 2016 election certification faced similar objections from the House that failed to find a supporter in the Senate.
The closest parallel to the upcoming objection to certifying the election results promised by 11 Republican senators and dozens of Republican representatives occurred in 2005, when then-Sen. Barbara Boxer joined Rep. Stephanie Tubbs Jones in objecting to the certification of Ohio’s electoral votes.
Kirk is correct that some Democrats objected to the electoral votes of the last three presidential elections won by Republicans. However, only one of those elections saw an objection similar to what some congressional Republicans are now attempting to do with support in both the House and the Senate.
If you have a claim you would like to see us fact check, please send us an email at factcheck@thedispatch.com. If you would like to suggest a correction to this piece or any other Dispatch article, please email corrections@thedispatch.com.
In all three cases--in all presidential elections we've had in the modern era as a matter of fact--the loser of the election congratulated the winner on election night or, in the case of Gore, when the hyper-close election coin toss was decided by the Supreme Court.
Republicans have no defense of Trump or what he does, so all they have is whataboutism. This tactic consists of describing something the Democrats that bears some passing superficial resemblance to what Trump and the Republicans are doing, and then saying, "everybody does it so I'm still going to vote for Trump".
The net-effect of this is to eliminate every single moral boundary any elected Republican has for the rest of time. Trump or a Republican could, literally, shoot somebody and Republicans would still support him. They would say that Dick Cheney shot somebody and nobody cared too much then, or that Obama ordered drone strikes which is the same thing, bla bla bla.
Try this exercise sometime with your friends as a drinking game: come up with most awful, outlandish and terrible thing Trump and/or the Republicans could do to the country, and then come up with the time and place the Democrats did it too using the same rules of non-evidence outlined above. Fun for the whole family.
This "fact check" is not a fact check, its commentary. In your own third sentence you acknoledge that what Kirk said was factually true. Then you proceed to draw different judgments based on those facts. If this was the kind of journalism I was interested in I'd just subscribe to the Washington Post instead of the dispatch.