No, Donald Trump didn't win this election by a 'landslide'

15 November 2024

Donald Trump is joined onstage by his wife Melania at his election night rally at the Palm Beach County Convention Center in West Palm Beach, Florida, U.S., November 6, 2024. REUTERS/Brian Snyder

As the tallying of votes approaches finality, with no happy outcome for Democrats, the triumphal narrative proclaimed by Republican cheerleaders needs correction. There was no MAGA “landslide” on Election Night – unless, like so many other aspects of American life, we have decided to diminish what that term has always meant historically.

Donald Trump appears to have won the popular vote by just over two percent, according to the latest numbers published by the Cook Political Report, which netted him 312 electoral votes. While that represented a big improvement on Trump’s weak record in presidential runs (and certainly warrants deep Democratic introspection), it was far from anything that could be defined as a landslide. In California, where Kamala Harris won the state with nearly 60 percent, there are still more than three million votes yet to be tallied..

So let's nudge the Republicans and their media cheerleaders back toward reality.

The last time that a Republican presidential candidate achieved what we have traditionally called a landslide was in 1988, when George H. W. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis by eight percent of the popular vote and won more than 400 electoral votes. Ronald Reagan notched two landslide victories: the first in 1980, when he beat incumbent Jimmy Carter by more than nine percent in the popular vote and nabbed 489 electoral votes (although Carter was hobbled by the third-party candidacy of John Anderson, who got nearly seven percent); and the second four years later, when he crushed Walter Mondale with nearly 59 percent of the popular vote and carried every state except the Democrat’s Minnesota home.

And let’s not forget Richard Nixon’s similar trouncing of George McGovern in 1972, when the Republican won 520 electoral votes and 61 percent of the popular vote. (Tricky Dick resigned in disgrace two years later when after revelations about his cheating in that election and numerous other crimes.) Democrats have won big too, notably in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson won 486 electoral votes and more than 61 percent. The last Democratic victory that approached a landslide came in 1996, when Bill Clinton won reelection with 379 electoral votes and came in nine points ahead in the popular vote against the incumbent Bush (who also had to contend with self-funding third-party gadfly Ross Perot).

So no, Trump’s roughly two percentage points do not place him in that category. It’s scarcely more than half as big as President Joe Biden’s margin in 2020, which the MAGA Republicans have repeatedly insisted was no victory at all. Democrats are far more gracious losers (and winners) than the Trump Republicans, who don’t hesitate to threaten and employ violence when they don’t get their way. (Notice how all the pre-election claims of “fraud” suddenly vanish when they win?)

Whatever the final numbers say, this election was assuredly disastrous for the Democrats, the nation, and the world. The damage has only just begun and the recovery remains distant and uncertain. Yet there many signs that the Republican narrative is too simple and simply wrong – from the Senate races that Democrats won in four of the five battleground states to the ballot initiatives where Republican ideologues were defeated on paid family leave, private school vouchers, and especially abortion rights.

The other cliché that Republicans keep repeating as they yammer about their pseudo- landslide is “mandate.” But having lied about their intentions, pretending to disown the authoritarian Project 2025 agenda that they now openly embrace, they have no mandate.

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