Here's why Donald Trump thinks he deserves credit for the 2020 election - CNN

None of which you would know if all you did was listen to the former President's interview on Tuesday night with Fox News' Maria Bartiromo.

Here's Trump congratulating himself for his work on behalf of House candidates last November:

"We did a great job. You're going to lose from 15 to 25 seats the last time. I got involved. I worked very hard. I made tremendous amounts of meetings, speeches, and teleconferences, and everything else, for 56 of them. I had 56 basic teleconferences with thousands of people on the line on each one."

"Tremendous amounts of meetings," you say? Also, 56 teleconferences! "Thousands of people on the line on each one!"

Republicans' surprising gains in the House -- they netted double-digit seats -- were, according to Trump, the result of teleconferences, meetings and speeches. By him.

Which seems, um, overly simplistic?

There's no doubt that House Republicans upended expectations in 2020. Most non-partisan analysts had predicted they would lose seats in the run-up to the vote. So, what happened?

The best explanation is from The Washington Post's Aaron Blake: "Our politics are increasingly less about people and incumbents and more about party. We've been talking about increased polarization for many years, but the 2020 election really drove it home."

Republicans gained in the House because there was simply no party-splitting happening. The vast majority of the districts they gained had been ones that Trump had either won or narrowly lost in 2016. And because his previous four years in office had been an overt effort to divide the country along party lines, there was even less crossover voting in 2020 than in 2016. How little crossover? How about this stat: Only Sen. Susan Collins (R-Maine) won a Senate race that her party's presidential candidate lost in 2020.

We now live in what amounts to a British parliamentary system. People vote for their party's flag rather than making any real assessments of the actual candidates (beyond which party they affiliate with, of course.)

Which, I suppose, Trump does deserve some "credit" for. He provided jet fuel to the partisanship already coursing through our political system.

But the idea that Trump somehow teleconferenced Republicans to their surprising gains last November is laughable. Almost as laughable as how the White House took to describing Trump's daily activities in his final weeks in the White House.

"President Trump will work from early in the morning until late in the evening," the daily guidance read. "He will make many calls and have many meetings."

What, no teleconferences?

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Here's why Donald Trump thinks he deserves credit for the 2020 election - CNN
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