Did RealClearPolitics Rescind a Projection That Biden Won Pennsylvania?

The site has not made a call on the outcome of the Keystone state.

By Alec Dent

Nov 10, 2020

Prominent right-wing figures including Sean Spicer and Rudy Giuliani claimed that RealClearPolitics rescinded its projection that Joe Biden won Pennsylvania.

While RealClearPolitics’s website does show Pennsylvania as uncalled, the Wayback Machine shows that this isn’t an update: The website hadn’t issued a call for Pennsylvania to begin with. Archived images of the site from November 7 show that the site did not call Pennsylvania on Saturday when other prominent publications including Fox News, CNN, and the New York Times did. The archived versions of its county breakdown of Pennsylvania on November 8 shows that the website had not called it for Biden at that point either.

Shortly after Guiliani’s tweet, Tom Bevan, founder of RealClearPolitics, took to Twitter to respond and confirm that the site had never called Pennsylvania:

This is false. We never called Pennsylvania, and nothing has changed. https://t.co/YXZ1PjI7Ud

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About Alec Dent

Alec Dent is the culture editor and a staff writer for The Dispatch. He is a graduate of the Hussman School of Journalism and Media at UNC Chapel Hill, and previously oversaw The Dispatch's fact checking team.