JD Vance’s latest response to whether Trump lost in 2020 branded ‘pathetic’ and ‘shameful'

Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance is struggling to answer the very simple question of whether his running mate Donald Trump lost the 2020 election (he did) or not, with the latest instance of the Ohio senator facing the question – in an interview with The New York Times- ending with him once again failing to provide a clear answer.

Lulu Garcia-Navarro, the host of The Interview podcast, asked the question again following Vance’s comments during his vice presidential debate with Democratic candidate Tim Walz earlier this month, when he was pressed on whether Trump lost the last time around and deflected by saying he was instead “focused on the future”.

A day later, at a rally in Michigan on 2 October, Vance was again asked about the 2020 election, and this time replied: “The media is obsessed with talking about the election from four years ago; I’m focused on the election of 33 days from now.”

Amid all of this, comedy duo The Good Liars shared a clip which saw Vance tell Jason Selvig that he believed Trump did win in 2020.

But now it was Garcia-Navarro’s turn to get the Republican to answer an easy yes or no question about the vote, but on the first occasion, he replied: “I think that Donald Trump and I have both raised a number of issues with the 2020 election, but we’re focused on the future.

“There’s an obsession here with focusing on 2020. I’m much more worried about what happened after 2020, which is a wide-open border, groceries that are unaffordable…”

Garcia-Navarro asked the question again, and Vance replied with one of his own.

“Is it OK that big technology companies censored the Hunter Biden laptop story which independent analyses have said cost Donald Trump millions of votes,” he asked.

That laptop story, to recap, concerns the right-wing conspiracy theory surrounding a device being handed into a Delaware computer shop in 2019, later obtained by The New York Post which published a story in October 2020 about an email contained on the hardware.

The main allegation – dismissed by most legitimate news organisations at the time – was that Joe Biden’s son Hunter once arranged for his father to meet with an executive from Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian gas company of which Hunter was a board member.

The Washington Post would later reveal it had independently verified some of the emails from the laptop’s hard drive, but that none of these suggested any illicit or improper behaviour by either Biden.

Ex-Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, however, did admit that the Post story was suppressed by the social media platform during a hearing with US lawmakers in 2021 – though this was not due to the content but rather to do with the company’s ‘hacked materials policy’.

As for the “independent analyses” referenced by Vance, he may well be talking about 2020 polling commissioned by the conservative Media Research Center, which claimed that 9.4 per cent of Biden voters would have shifted away from backing him if they knew about the Hunter Biden laptop story.

Alternatively, he could be thinking of polling from “right-leaning polling outfit” TIPP Insights in 2022 which reportedly found that 79 per cent of Americans believe Trump would have been re-elected two years prior if voters “had known the truth” about the whole situation with the laptop.

Except, Washington Post correspondent Phillip Bump published a comprehensive factcheck in 2022 which pointed to CNN exit polling finding that the majority of Biden voters (68 per cent) voted for the Democrat mainly to vote against his opponent, compared to just 30 per cent of Trump voters backing the Republican because they didn’t like Biden.

Bump also addressed the 2020 MRC poll directly, and wrote it is “safer to view it as simply measuring how likely people are to say they would have changed their minds for nearly any reason”.

As for the 2022 TIPP Insights poll, the US non-profit PolitiFact said in February 2023: “The pool of respondents who answered this question leans Republican more strongly than the general population, so most of these voters would not have been voting for Biden in the first place.

“This makes the polling result illogical: understood literally, if many members of this group were to change their vote because of the laptop story, they might well have changed their vote from Trump to Biden.”

Vance continued to shift the conversation to tech companies when he was asked the question a few more times, taking the total number of attempts from Garcia-Navarro to get a straightforward answer on whether Trump lost in 2020 to five.

He was then asked a different question from the journalist: “Would you have certified the election in 2020, yes or no?”

“I said that I would have voted against certification because of the concern that I just raised,” he replied, before continuing to talk about social media censorship.

The whole exchange has since been met with shock and disbelief from social media users:

While Vance continues to hesitate over the real outcome of the 2020 election, Trump has at least once conceded that he lost the vote to Joe Biden – even if he did later backtrack on the admission.

Last month, he told podcaster Lex Fridman that he “lost by a whisker” in the last presidential election, which was a noticeable departure from his repeated false claims and “big lie” that the election was “stolen” from him in a case of voter “fraud”.

Except, when he was pressed on the comments during the presidential debate earlier this month, Trump claimed the remarks were actually “said sarcastically”.

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