Landslides

[pbrower2a]

The median result of an American election (in electoral votes) is about 62% of the electoral vote. That is what Obama did in 2012. If you expect the electoral-vote percentage to be distributed randomly, then percentages of the electoral vote for the winner would cluster around 62%. Margins beginning in 1900 from the narrowest to the broadest divides are

01 2000 50.4
02 1916 52.2
03 2004 53.2
04 1976 55.2
05 1968 55.9 mostly squeakers
06 1960 56.4
07 2016 56.5
08 1948 57.1
---------------
09 2012 61.7 hard to characterize
---------------
10 1900 65.3
11 1908 66.5
12 2008 67.8
13 1992 68.8 bare landslides
14 1996 70.4
15 1904 70.6
16 1924 71.9
---------------
17 1920 76.1
18 1988 79.2
19 1944 81.4
20 1912 81.9 landslides
21 1952 83.2
22 1928 83.6
23 1940 84.6
24 1956 86.1
---------------
25 1932 88.9
26 1964 90.3 big landslides
27 1980 90.9
---------------
28 1972 96.7
29 1984 97.6 gigantic landslides
30 1936 98.5

That's thirty Presidential  elections, and much has changed in technologies of transportation, communication, and computation. Campaign management has become a near-science. Public polling did not exist before Gallup invented it in 1948. Five states have been added to the Union  between 1907 and 1959. Educational standards are much higher now, with lots of small children being dragooned to toil in mines and factories around 1900 with the end of their formal education, and lots of people having graduate degrees now. The American population has expanded greatly and its distribution is very different. Women got the vote by law for the 1920 election. Blacks rarely voted in the former Confederate States until the 1960's due to sundry subterfuges, but that is over.  Life spans have increased, lengthening the number of years in which people could vote by about thirty years on the average. The legal age for voting has gone from 21 to 18, which typically adds one potential vote in a presidential election for us all. 

The Electoral College remains, and except for the small states of Maine and Nebraska (such happening recently) practically all states allocated their electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. The population has changed greatly in 120 years. The largest states in their counts of electoral votes today (CA 55, TX 38, FL and NY 29) having had 5, 15, 36, and 4 electoral votes in 1900, respectively. The four largest states in electoral votes in 1900 had 36 (NY), 32 (PA), 24 (IL), and 23 (OH). Iowa, Missouri, and Pennsylvania have lost nearly half the electoral votes that they had in 1900.   

First of all, eight elections are close. Except for 1948 and 1968 (which involve racist secessions against the mainstream Democratic Party), those elections could have gone either way. Truman kayoed Dewey by 114 electoral votes. In a two-way split of the electoral vote, such would give a  326-211 result, which would not be a close election.

that's 116 years between the first and last election in this  group, and forty elections in times of peace and war.

By looking for gaps one can subdivide the levels of victory. The biggest gap (5.8%) now separates Reagan 1980 from the three biggest electoral blowouts. A significant gap (4.2%) separates elections of 1924 and 1920. That's a good candidate for a break in classifications.

Splitting the shares of electoral votes by obvious gaps one finds

 
01 2000 50.4
02 1916 52.2
03 2004 53.2
04 1976 55.2
05 1968 55.9 mostly squeakers
06 1960 56.4
07 2016 56.5
08 1948 57.1
---------------
09 2012 61.7 hard to characterize
---------------
10 1900 65.3
11 1908 66.5
12 2008 67.8
13 1992 68.8 bare landslides
14 1996 70.4
15 1904 70.6
16 1924 71.9
---------------
17 1920 76.1
18 1988 79.2
19 1944 81.4
20 1912 81.9 landslides
21 1952 83.2
22 1928 83.6
23 1940 84.6
24 1956 86.1
---------------
25 1932 88.9
26 1964 90.3 big landslides
27 1980 90.9
---------------
28 1972 96.7
29 1984 97.6 gigantic landslides
30 1936 98.5

Do you like my classification?  Just over two weeks from now we will have some idea of where the election of 2020 belongs. The one in its own category is Obama in 2012, which was a few thousand votes away in Florida from being in the 'close' category. Until 2012 there was a huge gap (8.2%) between mostly squeaker elections and 'bare landslides'. 
 

[pbrower2a]

01 2000 50.4
02 1916 52.2
03 2004 53.2
04 1976 55.2
05 1968 55.9 mostly squeakers
06 1960 56.4
07 (tie) 2016 and 2020 56.5
09 1948 57.1
---------------
10 2012 61.7 hard to characterize
---------------
11 1900 65.3
12 1908 66.5
13 2008 67.8
14 1992 68.8 bare landslides
15 1996 70.4
16 1904 70.6
17 1924 71.9
---------------
18 1920 76.1
19 1988 79.2
20 1944 81.4
21 1912 81.9 landslides
22 1952 83.2
23 1928 83.6
24 1940 84.6
25 1956 86.1
---------------
26 1932 88.9
27 1964 90.3 big landslides
28 1980 90.9
---------------
29 1972 96.7
30 1984 97.6 gigantic landslides
31 1936 98.5


The elections of 1948 and 1960 were generally seen as squeakers at the time. OK, FDR and Ike had won elections with 80% or more of the electoral vote by 1960, so perhaps those seemed relatively close. Dewey may have had no chance, but Nixon thought that he did if a couple of states went his way as he hoped.

I have suggestions on why the 2012 election is in its own category. First, had Romney won Florida then that election would have been in the "squeaker" category.  Second, any Presidential nominee who sees the election as close is likely to 'play' specific states to get bare wins, which can often be done without abandoning efforts elsewhere. So if one sees one's opponent in the lead with 330 or so electoral votes one must take extreme chances to have a chance -- in which case one's efforts most likely result in losing by a bigger margin. Electoral collapses happen in that area. (Remember 1988?)  

I look at the tie for the #7 spot for closeness. In both cases three states would have made the difference. If Hillary Clinton had won Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, her three barest losses, she would have been elected. If Trump had won Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin, his three barest losses, then he would still be President.

... 2012 is the oddity, neither a squeaker not a landslide. It's in a zone that elections avoid even if it looks like a natural zone for the clustering of results. I have four categories of landslides. I can usually draw a line somewhere between categories. I'm not certain that my split between Ike in 1956 and FDR in 1932 is as significant as I suggest; I tried to keep Ike's two similar elections in one category.

-------------------------------------------------------

Over 120 years and 31 elections we have seen some big changes. We have five more states than we did in 1900. America is much more populous and more urban and far less rural. The Hispanic populations have greatly increased. One no longer needs be a white, property-owning male to vote. The effective single-Party elections in some states due to the absence of significant numbers of black voters despite large numbers of black people are no more (and may such remain so!) Technology in the delivery of the news and in the technology of electioneering have changed. Politicians travel by air and not by train or horse. Educational standards are much higher, and we have computers to disgorge information that can cause politicians to change their approaches on a tiny pivot. News media can give us economic data or expose scandals fast. We have seen the partisan orientation of many states flip decisively one way or another over a few years. We have seen great demographic change as states that had few electoral votes in 1900 (Washington 4, California 9, Florida 4, and Texas 15) are electorally large -- and so is Arizona, which did not vote in 1900. Can you believe that Iowa and Kentucky both used to have 13 electoral votes, that Nebraska had 8, Missouri had 17, or that Pennsylvania had 32?  Partisan orientation of some states has made a 180-degree turn.

What is unusual now is that we have extreme polarization between the states. Obama won 365 electoral votes in 2008 despite losing states by margins like those by which McGovern lost while winning slightly more states with margins characteristic of Reagan.   In 1976 in a close election Carter lost only six states by margins of 15% or more and those were electorally small, the biggest of them being Arizona (which then had only six electoral votes). He won only four states with similar margins. 25 states were decided by 6% or less. In 2020. fully thirty states were decided by 15% or more and only nine were decided by 6% or less. It's easy to see how badly many Trump supporters could see themselves as having been 'cheated'.  They see very isolated people as the only ones in their community who could vote against Trump.

Such polarization may prevent landslides such as those of FDR, Ike in the '50's, or Reagan in the '80's. High housing and vehicle costs may be making people much less mobile than they used to be. Educational results are very different in some states. We have had no event that can shake the fundamental assumptions that many of us hold. The last big cultural change was the rise of the Religious Right back in the 1970's, and only now is its importance beginning to fade. Farm states in the High Plains are hemorrhaging small farmers who were close to the political center as the giant farmers who remain become as reactionary as Junkers of Imperial Germany... while depending on non-citizen farm laborers to do the rural toil. If those non-citizen farm laborers' kids start to vote, then states like the Dakotas can swing very hard and very fast. If housing costs should stagnate (exponential growth in prices always crashes) then maybe people will move around more than they have been doing recently.

Then there remains the potential for the catastrophic failure of one Party or another... wars that go badly, domestic terrorism or criminality on a now unimaginable scale for America, or an economic meltdown as horrid as the one that started in 1929. Don't let me get started discussing climate change. What do we do when the first state to ratify the Constitution goes fully underwater?  
 



  
  

[pbrower2a]

OH, NC and SC are on the verge of flipping back D

NC yes.. the other two... not likely barring an R split.

OK, let's look at the "big" and "gigantic" landslides. Everything fell apart for Herbert Hoover in 1932 because he bungled the response to an economic meltdown that was sure to happen. Speculative booms always implode. Supposedly this is always a possibility because any economic good times can come to an abrupt end. In 1964 and 1972 the losing Party nominated someone that the winning Party found easy to cast as a dangerous extremist. In 1980 much went wrong for Jimmy Carter, including the rise of the Religious Right which gutted the Southern base of Carter's 1976 victory. Inflation was becoming less severe, and it's hard to see how Carter could have gotten different results in Iran other than a successful rescue mission.   1936 and 1984? The losing nominee had yet to get the message.

One of the supreme ironies is that Goldwater and McGovern supporters were happier with their nominees than any other supporters of any other nominee.  Strong support from the Base is just not enough. As FDR's wins show one wins big with lukewarm support from a huge part of the electorate.

The vast majority of Republicans are clueless about the failure of Trump as President. By any objective result not an electoral statistic Trump was a catastrophe as President. The support that he had in 2016 and 2020 is intact -- if still living. They will mostly remain clueless about Trump. I can at most see slow erosion of Trump support.   

Trump's political base has shown no sign of disintegrating. Democrats may see Trump as a dangerous extremist, but Trump supporters still think him the greatest thing ever in American politics -- much like Goldwater supporters in 1964 or McGovern supporters in 1972 with their then-heroes of politics.