Google has seen a spike in searches as to whether President Donald Trump can still win the 2020 presidential election. The searches come because the president’s path back to the White House has effectively been closed.
Searches for “Can Trump Still Win Elections?” and similar terms saw a significant increase from Dec. 13, according to Google Trends. There have been periodic spikes in the days since many of the president’s supporters publicly refuse to accept his defeat.
The Electoral College met and confirmed President-elect Joe Biden’s victory on Dec. 14, which may help explain the rise in searches. Congress will meet on January 6 to finalize presidential voting.
At the time of writing, Googling “Can Trump Still Win Elections?” returned news articles about possible Republican efforts to reverse the election and one of the top results was a New York Times article claiming Trump cannot win the 2020 election at this stage.
The Trump campaign and other Republican litigation parties have filed more than 50 lawsuits against the results, but they have been overwhelmingly unsuccessful.
The US Supreme Court declined to hear a lawsuit in Texas billed by Trump and some of his supporters as “the great one.” The court, which has a conservative 6 to 3 majority, has also declined to hear other similar cases.
However, some of the president’s staunchest allies have suggested that Congressional Republicans could challenge certification of the results on Jan. 6. Rep. Matt Gaetz, a longtime Trump ally, has said, “Nothing is off the table.”
The procedure to challenge and possibly reject a state’s electoral roll is complex and there has been no successful attempt of this kind since the highly controversial election of 1876.
The 1887 election census was passed to address issues arising from those elections and the non-mandatory certification deadline – safe haven day – was met by 47 states, none of them swing states. The three remaining states were certified by the time the electoral college convened.
Since the House of Representatives and the Senate are controlled by Democrats and Republicans, respectively, the odds are close to zero that either house will agree to reject a list of voters based on an objection from the GOP. If the chambers disagree on certification, it will be unprecedented.
Fox Business host Lou Dobbs suggested on Tuesday that seven states had opted for dueling voter slates and that the presidency could ultimately be ruled by a rare vote of house delegations.
“If the House and Senate cannot agree on which voters to accept,” Dobbs said, “an untested constitutional process could result in each state getting one vote to assign to Biden or Trump. since the Republicans have 26 out of 50 state houses, there would at least be the mathematical possibility that President Trump could be called the constitutionally elected president. ”
However, alternate voters who pledged to Trump from states that certified Biden’s victory have no legal standing, and experts have rejected the idea that Congress would give them serious attention.
Senate Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), who this week publicly acknowledged Biden’s victory, told his GOP caucus that he didn’t want “stunts” during the certification process, according to a CNN report.
Speculation as to how Trump could get a last-minute victory will likely continue well past Jan. 6 and until Biden takes the oath of office at noon on Jan. 20.
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