Did RealClearPolitics reverse Pennsylvania projection? Fact Check

ByCraig Haley

Claims on social media assert that Joe Biden has had is president-elect status revoked after RealClearPolitics reversed their projection for Biden in the state of Pennsylvania, thus reducing Biden’s electoral college tally to 257, below the 270 required to win.

FALSE

Such claims have been made by Rudy Giuliana and Pam Bondi.

#FakeNews won’t cover law suit which will invalidate 300,000 or more crooked democrat votes votes in Philly. Real Clear Politics just took PA away from Biden and made it a toss up. Only the beginning please look beyond the Big Media censorship to watch it all change.

2020 Presidential Election – Live Results | RealClearPolitics – they just rescinded their call for Biden winning Pennsylvania!

Various videos on social media then made further claims that this meant that Joe Biden lost his president-election status.

During the hotly contested 2020 presidential election, the majority of TV networks eventually projected that Joe Biden would win the state of Pennsylvania, and it was that state’s 20 electoral votes that took the former vice president over the 270 votes required to win the presidency. However Biden’s victory has been disputed by Donald Trump, who has pointed to Pennsylvania specifically to try and overcome Biden’s victory in the state.

A candidate becomes the “president-elect” when they appear to conclusively have won the election and many of the entities that “project” winners do so in the candidate’s favor. But at this stage, most accept that this is somewhat of an unofficial title up until the point an election’s results become officially certified. And that is because at no point before certification is the title officially awarded, and those who project winners may disagree on whether someone has conclusively won an election, meaning in certain circumstances, many will refer to the candidate as “president-elect” while others who have not projected a victory will not.

The claims spreading on social media claim that the news website RealClearPolitics, one of the entities that projects presidential election winners, projected Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, but then subsequently rescinded that claim, thus removing the title of “president-elect” from Biden.

This claim is false on two counts.

Firstly, Biden is still generally being referred to as “president-elect”. Tradition in the United States holds that the person who appears to have won a general election conclusively, and who has been projected as the winner by the majority of entities who project election winners, is generally referred to as the president-elect. Though as pointed out above, this title isn’t official bestowed at this point, so it cannot be officially rescinded either. Of course, if the majority of entities that project winners recall their projections (to be clear, this has not happened) it would be likely that the candidate would stop being referred to as president-elect.


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Secondly, and most importantly, RealClearPolitics has not reversed their decision to project Pennsylvania for Joe Biden, because they never projected it for him in the first place. Different entities may have different criteria for projecting winners of each state, and RealClearPolitics, at the time of writing, has never projected Pennsylvania for Joe Biden.

This was confirmed by the co-founder of RealClearPolitics, Tom Bevan.

This is false. We never called Pennsylvania, and nothing has changed.

As such, claims that RealClearPolitics has rescinded their projection for Joe Biden in Pennsylvania and that has consequently caused him to lose the title “president-elect” are both false.

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