CNN’s resident numbers wizard has cast President Donald Trump’s thoroughly debunked claims of election rigging in 2020 as a losing strategy ahead of the November midterms.
“It is a losing message!” data guru Harry Enten, 38, told network viewers Monday, framing the divide it casts among the voting public as near-total. “The Republican Party is in one camp all the way over here on the right, and the rest of the American public is in the same camp.”
The claim still sells with the base, which is why, Enten went on, Republicans keep making it. About 60 percent of GOP voters called the 2020 contest stolen, a share that has since climbed to 63 percent, even though “there is no proof of that whatsoever!” He was blunter about the conviction itself, scoffing that Republicans “just believe this garbage.”
The trouble, as the polling analyst put it, is everyone else. Among Americans overall, 64 percent now call the 2020 result legitimate, up from 59 percent in 2021—a majority moving the opposite way from the voters the party is courting. That, Enten argued, is the trap: a message that wins a primary and loses a general election.
He pointed to Georgia as a case study of the dangers of touting Trump’s debunked claims. Republican Senate nominee Mike Collins, 58, is “starting to feel a whole heck of a lot like Herschel Walker 2.0,” Enten said—a nod to the former football star whose 2022 Georgia Senate bid collapsed against Democrat Raphael Warnock.
Collins holds “a winnable seat for Republicans,” he added, before warning that leaning on the stolen-election line is what “make[s] it very difficult to win.”
Collins won a House seat in 2022 and clinched the GOP nomination in a June 16 runoff over former coach Derek Dooley, with Trump’s endorsement landing days before the vote. He aired the fraud claim in remarks to CNN’s Manu Raju.
The seat ranks among the most consequential of the cycle. Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff, 39, the incumbent Collins is trying to unseat, is the only Senate Democrat defending turf in a state Trump won in 2024—making Georgia a true battleground after years of reliable Republican dominance.
Enten doubted that Trump could lift Collins to victory in November, citing the president’s own plummeting approval ratings nationwide.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House and Collins’ campaign for comment.
