Why American politics could benefit from a landslide
Because the parties are so fully sorted and evenly divided, voters rarely give them an unambiguous message about what they want. So they get gridlock instead.
Abasic principle in data analysis is that two data points do not make a trend. Yet so many political analyses these days are predicated narrowly and exclusively on the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections, as if there were none before, not a midterm in between, and no question that future election outcomes will feature the same dynamics that were in place then.
It doesn’t seem to matter to these casual students of electoral behavior that they are comparing what happened in 2020, a year in which both the Democratic share of the presidential vote (51.25 percent) and the victory margin (4.45 points) were the best since 2008, with 2024 and Donald Trump’s win that saw the highest presidential GOP vote share (49.70 percent) and victory margin (1.47 points) since 2004. In the former, the election’s focal point was Trump; a weariness had set in among swing voters who just wanted things to get back to normal. In 2024, soaring inflation and interest rates, a porous border, and a botched withdrawal from Afghanistan convinced those same swing voters that the Biden-Harris administration was not up to the job. The declines in Democratic vote share came disproportionately among young, mostly non-college men of all races. These were among the most economically vulnerable voters hurt worst by inflation. Those liabilities were not offset by the abortion issue or Trump’s persistent problems with many women voters.
Therein lies both good and bad news for Democrats. The bad news is that swing voters have not forgotten nor forgiven what happened in 2021-2025. The good news is that this election is not likely to be about that; it will be about Trump and the party holding both the House and the Senate majorities. It’s important to remember that hate is the strongest emotion in politics, a far stronger driving force than love, admiration, or appreciation.
A recurring theme in this column has long been just how evenly, narrowly, and deeply divided our country has become—evenly in that both parties are basically the same size, narrowly in that there are very few actual voters in between, and deeply in that two broad-based, ideologically and geographically diverse parties have now morphed into polar opposites, with virtually nothing in common in terms of policies or even values.
Democrats have approximately 47 or 48 percent of the vote locked up, just as Republicans have their own 47 or 48 percent that they can bank on. So these elections turn on two factors. First, will either party have a disproportionately high or low voter turnout, and second, how will that 4-6 percent of voters who truly are independents break? Hint: In recent years, they break almost invariably against the party in power. They punish when they’re disappointed or angered, and they’re rarely in an appreciative mood.
Even the small shifts they create have enormous policy consequences. Since Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, we have had five consecutive presidents who took office with majorities in both the House and the Senate. When each of the five left office, their party had given up control of all three branches.
It is interesting to look at the results of the 25 presidential elections over the last 100 years, starting with Herbert Hoover’s 1928 victory over Al Smith. Ten of the 25 elections (40 percent) produced landslide victories—margins of 10 points or more. The most recent of these, however, was Ronald Reagan’s 49-state, 18-point victory over Walter Mondale in 1984. To put it differently, landslides occurred in 10 of the first 15 elections in this 100-year span; we now have had 10 consecutive elections without one.
A landslide presidential election is a clear, unambiguous, indisputable statement by the American people about what and whom they want, and about what and whom they have rejected. This clarity is useful, albeit quite painful for the losing candidate and party. A lack of landslides means that voters are not giving clear guidance on the direction that the country should go or what kind of leaders they want.
When ideological sorting began in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Democratic Party became more monolithically liberal or progressive and the Republican Party more populist and conservative. Each party lost its moderating influences, moving away from that narrow but critical sliver of true independents in the middle. Increasingly, each side has lost the ability to understand and court those pure independents, leading those voters to swing back and forth, punishing whichever party is in power, which they see as having “gone too far.” That is the real trend, with far more than two data points to support it.