Recently on social media, I’ve noticed many people try to frame the 2024 presidential election as a landslide. Some people, including Donald Trump himself, also tried claiming a mandate on behalf of the American voters. This rhetoric may seem harmless at first, but painting a false picture of recent election results will certainly convince some members of the American public that the will of the people justifies Trump’s actions (including the illegal ones).

To preface this article, I’m going to reiterate that The Data Times is committed to remaining nonpartisan in the presentation of data and subsequent analysis. However, the active discussion of data in the news will inevitably intertwine bias within these articles every so often. That being said, I’d be writing this same article had the Biden camp claimed a landslide back in 2020. This article will also reach beyond the 2024 race, containing similar analysis and maps to my deep dive on swing states back in January.

When was the last real landslide?

According to the Electoral Landslide Index I’ve created (more on that later), the most recent presidential landslide in U.S. history was in 1988. In this election, George H.W. Bush managed to secure 426 electoral votes and won the national popular vote by roughly 8%. This was a much more impressive victory than Trump’s win (and anyone else in the 21st century for that matter), and it puts into perspective how insignificant 312 electoral votes are in the grand scheme of things. Trump’s 2024 win scored only 0.160 on the Electoral Vote Scale, which places the election in just 48th place (out of 60 total elections).

Using one of FDR’s wins as a reference point for a nearly perfect landslide, it becomes easier to visualize just how close the 2024 race ended up being. Trump only won the national popular vote by 1.5%, and he didn’t win a single non-competitive blue state. Additionally, he was separated from losing by only roughly 229,000 people in the key states of Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania. Had only half of them switched their votes to Harris, she would’ve won. These “tipping point voters” represented only 0.05% of the voting-eligible population in 2024. To be fair, this figure was even smaller in the 2020 election, though no one of significance was claiming that that was a landslide at the time.

Not only is this chart an indictment of the Electoral College (future article), it displays the mediocrity of Trump’s win. Five-hundredths of a singular percentage point determined the outcome of this election. That is not a landslide and is certainly not a mandate by the people, either. The idea that presidents can claim a “mandate” under our current electoral system is foolish. Some people might argue that simply winning an election gives a president a mandate to lead. While this might be true from an official executive standpoint, it’s unnecessarily dangerous to go down that slippery slope which can ultimately lead to the public thinking they’re obligated to grant unconditional and absolute support to any politician.

More than a third of people who can vote don’t, and the people who do vote are participating in what is arguably one of the worst methods of choosing representatives out there (the plurality voting system). Ultimately, anyone arguing that Trump won a mandate to use overarching executive power is completely unfounded. This also extends to anyone arguing Trump won in a landslide, as the numbers say otherwise. Presidents who claim to have won mandates or landslides (both Democratic and Republican) use these linguistic gymnastics to expand their authority. Before we get into the nuances of landslides themselves though, it’s important to remind ourselves that even presidents who won massive landslides still never earned a true mandate.

In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt won one of the strongest landslides on record, scoring a 0.94 on the ELI. And yet even in an overwhelming victory, only 3.26% of the total voting-eligible population across 17 states were needed to change the results of the election. This figure is still 65x the percentage required to change the 2024 election, but it proves how our current electoral system is nothing more than an illusion of choice. More than a third of eligible voters didn’t show up to the polls last November, and that number was largely driven by people thinking their votes didn’t have a significant impact on the results due to the election essentially being decided by only seven swing states. To provide a counterpoint, voting in elections is still incredibly important no matter where one lives in order to maintain a state’s status as being non-competitive. Unfortunately, the small fraction of voters that ultimately decide federal elections removes the possibility of a “mandate” ever being in question.

The tipping point voter percentage needed to change elections isn’t a variable that’s included in the Electoral Landslide Index, but there is a direct correlation between the two values. This fact by itself isn’t a huge surprise, as a bigger landslide would evidently mean a more comfortable margin across the board. However, there does appear to be a sharp increase in the tipping point voters required to change an election’s outcome once the ELI Score reaches 0.5 (the minimum value an election needs to meet to be considered a landslide by my standards).

The Electoral Landslide Index

The qualifications that determine whether or not a candidate has won a landslide are not black and white. The ELI uses a variety of indicators when determining the final score for each president and values every president’s win on a scale from 0.00-1.00. However, it’s technically possible for a raw score to fall out of this range (such as John Quincy Adams scoring negative and George Washington getting higher than a 1). To account for this, values are adjusted based on the level of opposition (essentially capping all scores at 1.00) and the circumstances of the results (eliminating any negative scores). A score greater than or equal to 0.5 denotes a landslide, while a score less than 0.2 indicates a significantly close election.

The Electoral Landslide Index uses four variables to determine a president’s final score, with each variable weighted differently according to its importance.

Variable	Weight
Voter Turnout (VAP)	(~5%)
Popular Vote (Total %)	(~15%)
Victory Margin Scale	(~20%)
Electoral Vote Scale	(~60%)

The Victory Margin and Electoral Vote scales are the two biggest pieces of the ELI, making up 80% of the score. Simply put, the Victory Margin Scale is the difference between the percentage of the popular vote won by the winning candidate and the percentage of the popular vote won by the strongest losing candidate, multiplied by five to highlight the significance of small differences. This makes the ideal margin of victory for a winning candidate +20%, as this would translate to a value of 1. For candidates such as George Washington and James Monroe who didn’t have an organized opposition, values can theoretically go up to 5. The Electoral Vote Scale on the other hand (along with every other value) can only go up to 1 and is valued based on the formula of [(EVs Awarded-Total EVs)-0.5]*2. The numerical adjustments are made to emphasize the difference between a narrow win and an overwhelming blowout. Overall, the EV scale and the three other defining metrics used in the index form a full data set that can be applied to all 60 presidential elections in this country’s history and any future elections.

Elections are becoming closer

Aside from the House of Representatives deciding the 1824 election, the only two elections that had significant disputes regarding the results took place in 1876 and 2000. This is quite a time jump, and it represents a trend of close elections that began in the 21st century. After yet another narrow Bush win in 2004 (ranking 55th in the ELI) and a couple of comfortable wins for Obama, the introduction of Donald Trump into politics has created a polarized nation that is largely split down the middle and unmoving. As much as I love looking at polls, their margins of error often exceed the shifts we see in elections nowadays. When we spend months and months looking at changes in the election cycle before an election, we’re analyzing minuscule changes in an overly represented fraction of the electorate (swing voters).

After Kamala Harris lost the 2024 election, everyone started jumping to their own conclusions about the wide-scale failures of the institutions of the Democratic Party. Although there have been many failures from Democrats in recent years, it’s completely pointless and misrepresentative of data to act like this was an election that could be predicted based on how select individuals felt about the DNC. There was no unforeseen “massive shift” of voters across the country toward conservatives, there was a shift of a couple of percentage points in select states that were anticipated to be extremely competitive.

Had Harris won the election, people would instead be talking about the multitude of failures from Trump’s campaign and his alienation of the voters he needed to win. It’s much easier to say something as simple as RFK Jr. dropping out and endorsing Trump was the defining moment that gave him the win than expressing all of your grievances about the Democratic Party. If Trump had won by an actual landslide with popular vote margins exceeding +10 nationally, this would be a different conversation. But recent elections have not had groundbreaking shifts that require several years of work from parties and their coalitions to get their votes back. This wasn’t always the case though, which is visualized in the map below comparing shifts in older elections versus today.

Today’s electoral trends paint a grim future of what’s to come in the realm of U.S. politics if our parties continue to push themselves further to the right to accommodate the extremists they’ve created. If we don’t remind ourselves that Trump’s win wasn’t an actual landslide, we then further blur the line of truth and allow election terminology to be beaten to a pulp until it means nothing. It’s a dramatic description, but the significance of quantifying these vague terms is more important now than it ever was before.

To end on a high note with some site updates, the Electoral Landslide Index now has its own page under the “More” section in the new site navigation and it will be updated after every presidential election. It’s worth noting that the table on that page will have more rows visible than the one displayed in this article (and potentially more data in the future). There have also been a few other changes to the site, including the extension of the Trump Approval Tracker which now has data going back to January 27th. We have a few more things in the works, including a revamp to the site’s home page and an email list which you can currently subscribe to at the bottom of most of the site’s pages.