The Daily Populous Friday June 26th, 2026 evening edition
Authored by nymag.com and submitted by Zipper222222

California mail ballots. Photo: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg/Getty Images

As we are learning each day, there is nothing nearer and dearer to our president’s heart than election conspiracy theories. It’s bad enough that his personal litmus test for loyalty is whether someone subscribes to his totally debunked claim that he won the 2020 presidential election (just as he claims his narrow wins in 2016 and 2024 were, in fact, vast historic landslides). But his election denialism is prospective as well as retrospective. As we speak, he is all but refusing to do his job until Congress passes his “final version” of the SAVE America Act, which is based on the totally unsubstantiated belief that millions of noncitizens are voting in U.S. elections. He is demanding that the bill’s complex new ID requirements for registering to vote and its sharp new restrictions on voting by mail be implemented right away, blowing up preparations for the 2026 general election and possibly keeping millions of actual citizens from participating.

So it’s of more than passing interest to learn that Trump may not understand how, mechanically, votes are counted in a state he regularly accuses of rampant voter fraud. That’s the clear implication of a remark he made about California this week, as reported by Politico:

President Donald Trump acknowledged having called federal prosecutors in California to probe the state’s primary election results, claiming without evidence on Tuesday that his intervention resulted in Republican Steve Hilton advancing to the runoff in the gubernatorial race.

His remarks, at a rally in Pennsylvania, came weeks after California primary results first cemented Democrat Xavier Becerra as the front-runner advancing to the November ballot, with results for the Trump-endorsed Hilton arriving days later.

“I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California. I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look,’” the president said. …

“About an hour after the call, ladies and gentleman, Mr. Hilton has won,” Trump said. “Had I not made that call, Steve Hilton would be watching the election from home.”

To be clear, Steve Hilton was running either first or second in the tabulations from the moment they began to come in on June 2 until the Associated Press confirmed he’d won a general-election slot on June 9. The only mystery during that week is whether third-place finisher Tom Steyer would gain enough ground in late-reporting urban counties to catch up with Hilton. A day or two into the count, it was pretty clear that wasn’t going to happen. There was absolutely nothing mysterious or nontransparent about this process.

The underlying reality is that Californians had nearly a month to cast the mail ballots that were sent out to all voters in early May. It makes no sense to assume they would all be returned in some sort of straight-line proportions by candidate preference, or would be counted in a way that the order of finish was guaranteed never to change. A lot of California Democrats deliberately held back their ballots to minimize the risk that their votes would be so evenly distributed that two Republicans would lock out the whole Democratic field from the general election under the state’s top-two primary. So of course the early vote skewed Republican, even if you don’t take into account the very well-established fact that Democratic-leaning non-white and younger voters almost invariably vote later than older and whiter voters.

So not only is there no evidence that some sort of ballot stuffing was going on in the later vote count, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for how it all transpired without resorting to conspiracy theories. Would such theories lose much of their popularity if California spent the vast amount of money necessary to count all those mail ballots rapidly or relied on voting by mail less completely? Sure. But that doesn’t prove there’s anything funny going on, as those watching neighborhoods, cities, and counties posting regular updates in the vote totals knew.

The president’s phone-call fable ultimately tells you two things about the situation and about his election denialism generally. First, it was inconvenient for him that Hilton did edge out Steyer and avoid a Democratic top-two lockout. If the Democratic fix was in, how did that happen? That’s where this apocryphal intervention by Trump and then by an unnamed U.S. attorney supposedly changed everything, flipping the results at the last moment. (How? We aren’t told.) Second, the president appears to believe voting is so fundamentally corrupt that he can corruptly change the results himself — again, with just one phone call. No wonder he so blithely claims victory in his own elections no matter what the numbers initially show. It’s all a matter of who wins the last count. And in 2026, Trump is determined to count, and laugh, last.

mr_evilweed on June 26th, 2026 at 11:23 UTC »

"I saw that the sun was going to rise. I called the weather channel. Said do me a favor, take a look. An hour later, the sun rose. If it wasnt for me the sun wouldn't have risen."

La-Boheme-1896 on June 26th, 2026 at 11:10 UTC »

> “I called up the very powerful, very good U.S. attorney in California. I said, ‘Do me a favor. Take a look,’” the president said. …

> “About an hour after the call, ladies and gentleman, Mr. Hilton has won,” Trump said. “Had I not made that call, Steve Hilton would be watching the election from home.”

> To be clear, Steve Hilton was running either first or second in the tabulations from the moment they began to come in on June 2

tldr - the thing that was happening, happened. Trump takes credit for it.

AINonsense on June 26th, 2026 at 11:06 UTC »

Those vote-counting computers again? Or did he ask the election officer to find him eleven thousand more votes?