Fact check: Trump makes false claims in New Hampshire victory speech

Former President Donald Trump made several false claims in a speech Tuesday night after CNN and other media outlets projected that he would win the Republican presidential primary in New Hampshire.

CNN also watched rival candidate Nikki Haley’s Tuesday night speech in New Hampshire; Haley’s claims were either accurate or too general to fact check. Here is a fact check of some of Trump’s assertions.

The 2020 election

Trump repeated some of his familiar lies about the 2020 presidential election.

At one point, he claimed, as he has repeatedly in the past, that “they used Covid to cheat.” At another point, he claimed that in addition to winning in 2016, “we also won in 2020 – by more. And we did much better in 2020 than we did in 2016.” He dismissively said, “But as they said, we lost by a whisker.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are false. He lost the 2020 election fair and square to Joe Biden, by a 306 to 232 margin in the Electoral College, and also lost New Hampshire in that election. There remains no evidence of any fraud even close to widespread enough to have changed the outcome in any state.

Democrats and taxes

Trump Tuesday night said, “Do they hate our country? They must hate our country. Because there’s no other reason that they can be doing the things they do. Take a look – the taxes, they want to raise your taxes times four.”

Facts First: This is false. Neither Biden nor other top Democrats are proposing anything close to quadrupling people’s taxes.

CNN previously fact-checked a similar Trump claim that “they want to double, triple everything.”

Howard Gleckman, senior fellow in the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center at the Urban Institute think tank, said in a November email: “I don’t know what ‘they want to double, triple everything’ means. But if he’s suggesting that Biden would ‘double, triple’ federal income taxes, he’s just making up numbers. There is no evidence to support that claim.”

Gleckman said his organization’s analysis of Biden’s budget proposal for fiscal 2024, which included his most recent tax plan, found that the major tax provisions would “would raise taxes by an average of $2,290, or reduce taxable income by 2.3 percent.”

General elections in New Hampshire

Trump claimed that he has always won the state – not only in Republican primaries but in general elections.

“You know we won New Hampshire three times now three. We win it every time. We win the primary. We win the generals. We won it and it’s a very, very special place to me.” Trump said.

Facts First: Trump’s claim is false. He lost New Hampshire to Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton in the 2016 general election and to Democratic candidate Joe Biden in the 2020 general election, though he did win the Republican primary each time.

Primary voters

Criticizing Republican New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu, a supporter of Haley, Trump said that because of Sununu’s incompetence, “in the Republican primary, they accepted Democrats to vote. In fact, I think they had 4,000 Democrats – Democrats before October 6 – they already voted. Now, they’re only voting because they want to make me look as bad as possible.”

Facts First: Trump’s claims are misleading at best. People registered as Democrats were not allowed to vote in New Hampshire’s Republican primary. Only registered Republicans and independents (people registered as “undeclared”) were allowed to cast ballots in that primary. While it’s true that nearly 4,000 people who had been registered as Democrats switched their affiliation to either undeclared or Republican by October 6, the last day to switch in time to potentially cast a ballot in the GOP primary, it’s not yet clear how many of these people actually ended up voting. And it’s important to note that New Hampshire made its primaries open to independents decades before Sununu became governor in 2017.

Also, while Trump was complaining about people formerly registered as Democrats being permitted to vote in the Republican primary, it is standard for states to allow people to switch affiliations by a certain date in order to participate in another party’s primary – and some states have switching deadlines closer to an election day than New Hampshire does. In Trump’s state of Florida, to name one, voters can switch from Democratic to Republican by February 20 and cast a ballot in the Republican primary in the early voting window that begins less than three weeks later or in person a month later on the March 19 election day. (Unlike in New Hampshire, independents can’t cast Republican primary ballots there.)

Finally, the motivations of the recent New Hampshire affiliation-switchers are not nearly as clear as Trump suggested. While some might have indeed switched with the sole intention of opposing him, some others might have sincerely decided that they no longer saw themselves as Democrats. There was all kinds of affiliation-switching before October 6. For example, the New Hampshire Bulletin reported that 719 people switched from Republican to undeclared and 132 people switched from undeclared to Republican.