Officials had been telling the public for months that because of Dems disproportionately voting by mail, and Republicans disproportionately voting on Election Day, early results would be misleading based on how states counted votes.... 1/ https://twitter.com/jonathanchait/status/1350446978933600256
2/ Ohio and Texas counted vote by mail early so those states would misleadingly seem stronger for Biden than they would prove to be when all votes were counted. The reverse would be true in Michigan and Pennsylvania. We’d been reporting this for weeks to prepare viewers.
3/ Trump knew this too and it was clear he intended to mislead the country by declaring the election decided before all the votes had been counted.

What I think many of us didn’t realize is the extent to which some Republicans and MAGA media would help him perpetuate this lie.
4/ This was one of the reasons that lawsuit from the Texas Attorney General was such utter garbage. There were a lot of just plain lies in that lawsuit, which the US Supreme Court rightly kicked to the curb, but this was one of the starkest.
5/ The suit claimed the “probability” of Biden “winning the popular vote in... Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin — independently given President Trump’s early lead in those States as of 3 a.m. on November 4, 2020, is less than one in a quadrillion.”
6/ We all knew and had been reporting that because Trump had been discouraging his voters from vote by mail and Democrats had been doing the opposite that the counting could very well proceed like that. The “statistic” was a lie.
8/ And 126 GOP Members of the House signed their names onto that lawsuit. Including @GOPLeader McCarthy and Whip @SteveScalise who knew the truth.

It lent further credibility to Trump’s Big Lie. And pernicious lies are what led to the January 6 terrorist attack.
9/ This is precisely why politicians and MAGA media who participated in this Big Lie are so eager to change the subject. They want to avoid accountability. They don’t want to face their role in what happened. Their Big Lie cost lives. And may still cost even more.
10/ Ask yourselves: have you heard even *one* Republican official or member of MAGA media express regret for pushing the Big Lie? Acknowledge how injecting this toxicity into the bloodstream of our body politics was a bad decision?
You can follow @jaketapper.
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