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Comment by inglor_cz | Hacker News Reader

Trump won by an extremely narrow margin in the popular vote, but by a high margin in the electoral college, which was the real prize fought over by the two candidates. He took all seven swing states.

IDK if this counts as landslide in the American sense. I mostly heard that expression used for results of European elections.

Edit: instant downvote, didn't even take a minute from the original posting! Wow.

Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics. The fact that Trump got 312 electoral votes to Harris' 226 is just that, a fact. It does not reflect any subjective attitudes or preferences of anyone taking part in this discussion, wisdom or idiocy of current White House policies etc.

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A lot of Republicans are calling it a landslide, but I think they've forgotten what a landslide looks like; along with forgetting a lot of other things.

Out of 538 votes, in 2024, Trump had 312; in 2020, Biden had 306, just a few less, and Trump had 304 in 2016, only 8 less than his "landslide". In 2012, Obama had 332 and in 2008, he had 365. Clinton had 370 and 379. I wouldn't call any of those landslides though.

GHW Bush had 426 which is quite a lot, but Reagan before him had 489 and then 525. Those are landslides.

Nixon got 301 the first time, which is just a win; but he got 520 in his second term. That was a landslide.

I would draw a line in the sand at 90% of the electoral vote is a landslide, and anything less is puffery. Ranked by percentage of electors, Trump's "landslide" is only 44 out of 60. That's the saddest landslide ever. 58% of electors is a clear and undebatable win, but it's not a landslide and it's not a mandate, or even a large margin. It might be an indictment of the Democratic Party or some other lesser hyperbole though.

I agree with you the true landslides were Nixon, Reagan, FDR, etc.

The absence of electoral landslides in recent years implies both parties are better tuned and optimized now. Their data collection to enable a "winning campaign platform" is probably much better now, resulting in close elections.

My theory is that it's a result of institutionalized corruption: neither party wants to win by a landslide anymore. They want to win, in Dick Cheney's words (quoted in Obama's biography), "fifty percent plus one".

They want to share the spoils of victory with as few as possible. Winning with a big margin, to the party apparatus, is evidence that you wasted valuable political capital on pleasing voters that could instead have been spent on pleasing donors.

> Sheesh, people, don't be so sensitive about political topics.

However, I am sensitive about shoe-horning political talking points into a conversation.

Did I do that? Not knowingly; my main intent was to reflect on what "landslide" may mean in various perspectives.

Personally, I am more to the right than to the left, but I don't enjoy the clusterfuck of the current administration at all, doubly so because our local security (a small NATO member which used to be subjugated to Moscow) has been thrown into total uncertainty.

You didn’t, the (grandparent)post you replied to did.

You can ignore politics but politics won't ignore you.

"you're either with us or against us"

Indeed. You can try not to be with or against a totalitarian regime, but they'll still interpret your position as against.

Landslide is about popular vote not electoral. Because a small shift in popular vote can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Claiming somin has a landslide is silly

This is partially true but not the whole picture. A small shift in popular vote across the seven swing states can result in a massive swing in electoral vote. Shifts in safe states don't register in the electoral college but do register in the national popular vote.

Even the popular vote was the biggest landslide in ... the last 8 elections I think?

Absolutely not. Trump got 49.9% to Harris’ 48.3, he didn’t even get the majority.

Biden was 51.3 to Trump’s 46.8 in 2020.

This was not a landslide. Trump did not get the majority of votes.

He has much less of a “mandate” than Biden did.

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