Ron Johnson Claims Equal Number of Americans Rejected the Results of 2016 and 2020 Elections: Here’s the Reality

On Thursday, Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) whitewashed the extent to which supporters of Donald Trump believe the 2020 election was stolen from him. He did so by invoking the 2016 election and claimed that, in each case, “half the country” viewed the winner as illegitimate.

Speaking with Larry Kudlow on the first anniversary of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Johnson condemned the attack on the Capitol.

“Listen, I condemned the violence that day,” he said on Fox Business Network. “I repeatedly condemned the violence, but then I get attacked for really discussing it in a very balanced way like you have.”

Johnson blamed the rioters for giving “Democrats this issue now to bludgeon Republicans and conservatives with ad nauseam in an endless fashion.”

Later, the senator discussed election integrity and described the current political climate as one of instability.

“This is an unstable state of affairs, Larry, where you’ve got half the country in 2016 not believing that’s a legitimate result,” said Johnson. “Four years later, the other half’s not agreeing that it is a legitimate result. We need to restore confidence in our election system.”

The problem is, the numbers simply don’t support Johnson’s characterization. According to a poll taken a day after the 2016 presidential election, 84% of Americans said they regarded Trump as the legitimate president, including 76% of Hillary Clinton voters.

But the 2020 election was a different beast entirely thanks to Trump’s false claims about widespread voter fraud.

Additionally, Johnson said on election night, “Frankly, we did win this election” while millions of votes had yet to be counted. As a result, millions of his supporters came to believe the election had been rigged. The result was predictable. In January 2021, just 58% of Americans believed that Joe Biden legitimately won the election. Notably, a whopping 62% of Republicans said Biden’s win was illegitimate.

These days, the number of Republicans who think Biden wasn’t legitimately elected only seems to have increased. One poll released this week puts the figure at 71%.

So no, the reaction to the 2020 election was not 2016 all over again, but just the other way around as Johnson claimed. While Clinton placed blame everywhere – James Comey’s letter, Russian hacking, disinformation campaigns, etc. – at no point did she suggest that state voting apparatuses had been rigged against her, as Trump did after he lost.

Watch above via Fox Business Network.