Rick Santorum Highly Skeptical of Trump’s Claims of Election Fraud in Pennsylvania: ‘It’s a Tough Case to Make Just Looking at the Facts’

Former Pennsylvania Senator and CNN contributor Rick Santorum offered a detailed analysis of the electoral situation in the Keystone State, coming to the conclusion that the facts simply did not support President Donald Trump’s accusations that the election was being stolen from him.

Anderson Cooper started the discussion with a mention of a recent tweet from Trump, claiming that he had “such a big lead in all of these states late into election night, only to see the leads miraculously disappear as the days went by.”

As countless commentators and elections officials have pointed out, the Democratic shift in the ballots was very much expected: with Trump himself discouraging his voters from voting by mail, the Election Day votes leaned Republican, and the mail ballots, which were counted later in many of the states still up in the air, leaning Democrat. Add in the fact that many of the larger quantities of ballots waiting to be counted were in metropolitan areas far more likely to be liberal, and the fact that many of these votes are majority for Biden, even overwhelmingly so, is about as surprising as the sun rising in the east.

Santorum mentioned his own Pennsylvania roots and the accusations that the state was a “center where fraud happened” because Trump had been “way, way ahead and it’s gone away.”

Besides the Democratic voters’ preference for mail ballots, Santorum went through an analysis of several counties and cities across the state, noting that among the major counties, there were “only two in which the president did better.”

In all other Pennsylvania counties, even the ones where he won, Santorum said, Trump performed worse than he did in his 2016 contest against Hillary Clinton.

One of the counties where Trump did better was Philadelphia County. He still lost, but improved his percentage by 4.5 points from his performance in 2016.

However, as Santorum noted, the turnout did not increase in Philadelphia as much as it did in most of the rest of the state: turnout in the city of Philadelphia increased by 3%, but increased b 11 or 12% in the rest of the state.

“Here is my point,” Santorum said. “If you’re going to steal an election, they did a pretty bad job in Philadelphia,” where Trump had improved his percentage of the vote but “they didn’t turn out as much as the rest of the state.”

“I’m not saying there isn’t anything there. There may be something. It may be worse. The point is, looking at the face and saying what doesn’t look right here…it’s a tough case to make just looking at the facts.”

David Axelrod quipped, “I think you lawyers call that an unfriendly fact.”

Watch the video above via CNN.