Trump by a Landslide

If Donald Trump won the 2024 election by a landslide, what should we call past US election results?

Words and visuals by Will Koeppen

Donald Trump holds onto hyperbole like a pit bull, and he particularly loves the word "landslide." In 2016, after losing the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes but still eking out an electoral college win, he called his win a landslide. After losing both the popular vote and the electoral college in 2020, he blamed illegitimate voters, election workers, and voting machines for undermining what was, in his mind, a landslide win.

In the years while Trump was not president, he simmered at Mar-a-Lago and described his endorsements as having the effect of causing landslides for their recipients. Ron Desantis and Brian Kemp were both given landslides, though poor Mitch McConnell was only meted out a 20-point bump.

Sometimes it seemed like he sensed the word was losing its meaning so he upped the ante to "massive landslides," and before the 2024 election he latched onto the phrase "a landslide too big to rig" during rallies. A search on Roll Call's Factba.se provides more than 600 results of Trump repeating the word "landslide" as he described his own wins and other people's losses across the country.

And he hasn't stopped.

A lot of academic and journalistic effort has been put into how "landslide" is not the term to use for the size of Trump's wins (just a few examples: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8). Even Fox News Chief Political Analyst Brit Hume had a measured response to Trump's terminology, saying "You have to be careful about these things, real mandates are rare, and landslides are perhaps even rarer." He went on to warn Trump that introducing a lot of socially-focused legislation without the mandate of a landslide could imperil his administration's political future.

I didn't want to rehash what is or is not a landslide. But I did want to look back through history using Donald Trump's purported landslide as its own unit of measure. In other words, if Donald Trump won the 2024 election by exactly one landslide, how did every other presidential winner do? Here's the list (click on the title to flip between the Electoral College and the popular vote margins in landslide units):

The United States is not a democracy. It's a unique mix of a system meant to diversify congress by using equity programs to boost the voices of states with fewer people, one of which is called the Electoral College. Using the Electoral College margins, Trump's landslide was outmatched by 34 of the past 50 presidential election winners. Presidents that truly wiped the electoral map, like Ronald Regan in 1984, Richard Nixon in 1972, Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964, or FDR in 1936, won by 4-6 of Trump's landslides.

Of course, the popular vote does speak to the legitamacy of the social contract by which Americans allow themselves to be governed. By those margins, 42 of the past 50 election winners won by more than one Trump Landslide, and 14 of them won with over 10 landslides. Calvin Coolidge really brought it home in 1924, winning by 20 landslides over his closest opponent, John W. Davis. (Davis was a Democrat from West Virginia who won all of the South but only the South. He was seemingly hampered by a strong third party contender, Robert M. La Follette from Wisconsin, who created his own party for the election and gathered almost 17% of the popular vote, mostly from Davis.)

My qualitative impression is that some Trump supporters believe he won by a landslide purely because he said he did, he's repeated it so often, and they have been warned away from trusting other sources of information. To his other allies, his inflations may just be an acceptable storytelling technique: Paul Bunyan was taller than trees, Blackbeard was the most feared pirate on the sea, and Donald Trump wins by a landslide.

More pragmatic people might justify his terminology by saying that Trump won the electoral votes of seven states that were deemed to hold the key to his 2024 election — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. But to me that's a narrow form of math that treats both state politics and party platforms as more static than they really are. In 1996, Democrat Bill Clinton's 2.6-landslide win included Florida, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Kentucky. And in 1988, Republican George H. W. Bush picked up a number of so-called blue states, including California, in his 3.7 landslide victory.

It's impossible to predict what's going to happen in the next four years of the United States. Donald Trump is using his executive orders with abandon, sometimes on issues that are popular on the right and sometimes on pet power plays. His embrace of tech oligarchs angers populists on the right and some early moves appear to be either poorly thought out or just botched. Although many voters say they selected Trump on his plans for the economy, his team appears more obsessed with censoring certain objectional words from government publications. As he follows Mark Zuckerberg's early but now discarded mantra to "move fast and break things," he may find that Americans are hungry for change regardless of their short-term effects, or that a shattered government is too much for most to bear. But, regardless of the outcome of the next election, it will almost certainly be won (and lost) by a landslide.

"Watch out, landslide!" - Kotor, Montenegro, in Montenegrin