Whether or not you want to use the term ‘landslide,’ Trump’s sweep of the swing states adds up to a mandate for change in Washington.
The New York Times is concerned that Donald Trump and certain Republicans are boasting that the 2024 election was a landslide.
By traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.
Eh, we can quibble about what qualifies as a landslide, but Trump won a solid, decisive victory that tipped the scales away from the lingering perception that this is a 50-50 nation.
At 76.7 million votes and counting, Trump has now won the second most votes of any presidential candidate in history, behind only Biden’s 81.2 million four years ago. (Note that Kamala Harris has now crossed the threshold of winning the third-most votes in history. Also note that the “20 million missing votes” meme is now well out of date; turnout is estimated to finish at about 155.8 million, about 2.6 million behind the turnout from 2020.)
In retrospect, Hillary Clinton winning the popular vote in 2016 was extremely important to Democrats’ worldview, because it allowed them to believe that they were still, in fact, the more popular party, and that Trump’s victory just reflected a quirk in the electoral college. Democrats kept repeating that other than 2004, they had won the popular vote in every election since 1992, and that America consistently preferred them to the GOP.
Well, whether or not Trump is above 50 percent or not, that’s no longer the case. Republicans are America’s majority party, in the White House, Senate, House, governors and state legislatures.
What makes this election feel like a landslide is the fact that Trump won all seven key swing states and won six states that he lost four years ago. If a state was considered in play, Trump won it.
What’s more, a bunch of previously not-all-that-competitive blue states started to look pretty purple. As the Times noted, Mr. Trump improved on his 2020 margin in 2,764 counties, and his margin decreased in only 317 counties.
Yes, there are some indications that the Republican wave of this year was uneven. The GOP House majority is a narrow one, and as Dan McLaughlin notes in the most recent issue of the magazine, Republicans could have and should have done better in the Senate races. But if you want to dispute that Trump won a mandate on Election Day, you have to accept that Democrats earned an anti-mandate, a rebuke.
Let’s also note that the established precedent for a presidential candidate winning a “mandate for change” is 43 percent of the vote.