Yesterday, President Trump tweeted an easily debunked claim about presidential elections in the United States: "No candidate has ever won both Florida and Ohio and lost." If this were true, that would make him the first candidate to lose despite winning those states, but as many people quickly pointed out, Vice President Richard Nixon won Florida and Ohio in 1960 but still lost to Senator John F. Kennedy. Curious about the history of the Florida-Ohio connection, I paged through electoral maps on Wikipedia and confirmed that the Kennedy-Nixon election is a precedent for this year's election. For a parody of claims like Trump's, see Randall Munroe's xkcd comic "Electoral Precedent 2020." (Andrew Shields, #111words, 10 December)
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