Trump Shares the ‘Looney Tunes’ Math: A Midterm Democrat Beat Harris’s Texas Total by 397,000

President Trump spent Saturday doing what a lot of Republicans have been doing since Tuesday night: staring at the vote totals and asking how. In a string of Truth Social posts, he shared one calling the Texas results “Looney Tunes numbers,” shared a chart claiming Democrats “materialized 20 million new votes,” and then, in his own words, declared the Alaska Senate race finished.

“The Alaska Race is OVER. Dan Sullivan WON, BY A LOT!” Trump wrote Saturday afternoon.

Trump didn’t claim fraud in Texas or nationally, and he didn’t say he rejects the results. But the numbers he put in front of millions of followers are specific, so we checked them against the official counts.

The Texas post: “Looney Tunes numbers”

The first post Trump shared, Saturday morning, was a screenshot of a Nov. 4 post by Donald Ward, who writes on 𝕏 as @WardoftheStates. His argument was simple: Republicans showed up. Democrats showed up in numbers nobody saw coming.

“These are not normal midterms numbers,” Ward wrote, using a slur we’ve redacted to describe them as “r------ numbers.” “Not a single opinion poll before the elections came close to predicting this. Lines at the polling places in Texas should have been around the block to get these results.”

We checked the Texas math

Here’s how Ward’s numbers stack up against the Texas Secretary of State’s count, with about 99% of the 2026 vote in:

- Abbott beat his own 2022 total. He has about 4.53 million votes, up roughly 88,000 from the 4.44 million he won with in 2022. Ward’s “100K and counting” is in the ballpark. - Hinojosa gained 1.68 million on O’Rourke. She has about 5.23 million votes. O’Rourke got 3.55 million in 2022. That one checks out. - Hinojosa beat Harris by about 397,000. Kamala Harris got 4.84 million votes in Texas in a 2024 presidential election. Hinojosa beat that in a midterm. Ward said 400,000. That checks out. - The Biden line doesn’t hold in the latest count. Ward said Hinojosa had passed Joe Biden’s 2020 total. Biden got 5.26 million, so she’s about 27,000 short, close but not over.

Here’s what makes it strange. Midterms are supposed to shrink. About 8.1 million Texans voted for governor in 2022, and about 11.4 million voted for president in 2024. This year about 9.9 million voted for governor. Abbott’s side behaved like a midterm: he ran about 1.87 million votes behind Trump’s 2024 total, the usual drop-off when the president isn’t on the ballot. Hinojosa’s side behaved like a presidential year and then some.

Think of it like a high school reunion. Half your class shows up, which is normal. Then the other class shows up with more people than came to graduation. You’d ask who those people are.

That doesn’t prove anything was wrong. It’s the question Ward asked and Trump passed along, and Texas officials haven’t explained where the surge came from. Two days ago we reported that Texas processed 2.9 million new registrations between the 2022 and 2024 deadlines without anyone proving citizenship. That’s one place investigators could start looking.

The national chart: “20 million new votes”

Three minutes after the Texas post, Trump shared a chart from Kevin Bass, a writer on 𝕏 whose Nov. 5 post has been seen nearly 5 million times.

The chart compares the national House popular vote in 2022 with a projection for 2026. The 2022 side matches the House Clerk’s official statistics: about 54.2 million Republican votes and 51.3 million Democratic votes. Bass projected 2026 at 55.6 million Republican and 70.4 million Democratic votes. The chart itself says that projection was built on about 85% of the expected vote, so the final totals will move.

For scale: in the 2018 blue wave, Democrats got about 60.6 million House votes. Bass’s projection would put this year’s Democratic midterm vote roughly 10 million above that record.

Bass made a second point in later posts: there was “no increased crossover vote.” He cited NBC’s exit polls showing 5% of Republicans voted Democrat in 2024 and 6% did in 2026. If that holds, the Democratic gain didn’t come from Republicans switching sides. It came from new Democratic votes.

Trump also shared a chart titled “The 15% Band,” which found Republicans kept about 85% of Trump’s 2024 vote share in 30 Senate races, with nearly the same ratio in 29 governor races. The chart fits 88% of the variation in Senate races with a single formula. The pattern is almost too smooth to look natural. It’s also what a uniform national mood would look like. The data alone can’t tell you which.

Alaska: “I don’t know what takes so long”

Then Trump wrote his own post on Alaska, where Democrat Mary Peltola leads Sen. Dan Sullivan by 637 first-choice votes in the latest unofficial count.

“When you add Daniel (3,600, 1.68%) into Dan, and Gerald Heikes (4,846, 2.27%), Senator Dan Sullivan is up by thousands of Votes,” Trump wrote. “Remember, Heikes was also fraudulently put into the Race. I don’t know what takes so long to announce his win. This should be immediate!”

Daniel J. Sullivan Jr. is the retired teacher with the senator’s name, the “Decoy Dan” at the center of the Justice Department’s investigation. Trump called a vote for him “a vote for Senator Dan Sullivan.” Trump didn’t say what he meant about Heikes, who ran as a Republican, being “fraudulently put into the Race.”

Here’s why there’s no call yet. Nobody has 50%, so Alaska’s ranked-choice law takes over. The last-place candidates are dropped and their ballots move to each voter’s next choice. The state has said those ranked-choice results come Nov. 18, after late absentee and overseas ballots arrive. Trump’s math works only if those voters ranked the real Sullivan next. A decoy voter who never ranked the senator just drops out, and that’s exactly why the decoy was a problem in the first place.

What happens next

Texas counties keep finishing their counts ahead of the state canvass. The House popular vote will keep changing as California and other slow-counting states report. Alaska runs its ranked-choice tabulation Nov. 18.

On Saturday, the president showed Americans the numbers that are bothering him. The officials who ran these elections now have a simple job: explain them.