Why there are no more landslides

Since 1984, no president has won as much as 54 percent of the popular vote.

Between Sen. John F. Kennedy’s nail-biting win over Vice President Richard Nixon in 1960 and former California Gov. Ronald Reagan’s landslide win over President Jimmy Carter in 1980, our presidential elections alternated between close calls and landslides (defined as a double-digit margin of victory). Kennedy won by less than 1 percentage point, but Lyndon Johnson followed it with a 23-point shellacking of Barry Goldwater in 1964. Richard Nixon’s close victory in 1968 (0.7 percentage points) preceded his own 23-point landslide in 1972, which in turn was followed by Carter’s very close victory in 1976 (2 percentage points).

Then came back-to-back landslides that broke the pattern—Reagan’s 9.7-point win in 1980 followed four years later by an 18-point win.

Landslides are important for more than just bragging rights; they signal an election without ambiguity. A subset of landslides are mandates—when a party scores not only a landslide victory in the presidential race, but also enjoys enormous gains in the House and Senate, or retains huge majorities in each chamber. In those cases, the electorate speaks in a clear, emphatic voice: One party was embraced, while the other repudiated.

Our parties in those days were both ideologically and geographically diverse. Conservative Democrats, including white Southerners and rural Democrats, existed alongside liberal Republicans, often from big cities and major metropolitan areas in the Northeast, across the Great Lakes states, and out on the West Coast. There was a large pool of malleable voters who would cross party lines if their own party’s nominee was weak or uninspiring. This had moderating influences on both parties, keeping their extremes in check and keeping the parties relatively balanced.

This was before our parties became so “calcified,” as UCLA political scientists Lynn Vavreck and Chris Tausanovitch and their Vanderbilt colleague John Sides put it in their terrific book about the 2020 election, The Bitter End. The battle lines had not yet hardened, making landslides not only possible, but fairly frequent. With landslides possible, mandates became possible, and the system allowed consensus to be reached.

But in the 10 elections since Reagan’s 1984 win, there have been no landslides; in fact, all 10 victories had winners garnering 53 percent or less. Two were inversions, in which one candidate won the popular vote and the other the Electoral College. In four, the winner received less than 50 percent of the vote.

Today, about 47 or 48 percent of voters are Democrats or lean toward the Democratic Party. They will not vote for any Republican no matter what. The reverse is true as well. In this environment, landslides are not possible, nor are mandates, and no consensus is reachable.

Another notable pattern has emerged as well: We’ve now had five consecutive presidents whose parties held trifectas, their party winning not just the White House but also majorities in the U.S. House and Senate, only to lose the majorities in both chambers before they left office.

After Bill Clinton was elected president in 1992, Democrats promptly lost the Senate and House majorities two years later, not reclaiming either for the duration of his presidency. Democrats had held onto the Senate majority for 34 of the previous 40 years and the House majority for all 40 years. Both Donald Trump in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 won in trifecta elections as well. In both cases, their party lost control of the House two years later, and in year four their parties lost the White House and their Senate majorities as well.

Barack Obama’s party lost its House majority two years after his 2008 election. He was reelected in 2012, but Democrats lost the Senate majority two years later in his second-term midterms.

The details were considerably more complicated with George W. Bush. The 9/11 attacks during his first year in office boosted both Bush’s and the GOP’s fortunes prior to the 2002 midterm election, and arguably the 2004 elections as well. In 2006, his second-term midterm election, Republicans lost their majority in the House. Two years later, at the end of Bush’s presidency, the GOP lost eight Senate seats and control of the Senate.

These are examples of a dynamic that political scientist Christopher Wlezien wrote about (in a slightly different context) 30 years ago, “thermostatic politics.” When your home is too cold, you turn the thermostat up; if it’s too warm, you turn the thermostat down. Voters have demonstrated a tendency to do this, whether it’s in response to Democrats going too far left or to Republicans going too far right, or for that matter, if they see a president trying to do too much.

Any president or party trying to force an overly ambitious agenda on a country with 47 or 48 percent in adamant opposition and another 5 percent fickle, naturally skeptical about politicians, is tempting the political gods.

With close to half of the electorate hostile to Trump to begin with, by 2020 another 5 percent had grown weary of him and were ready, willing, and able to send him packing. Unfortunately, the vehicle for dispatching Trump from the White House was Joe Biden, who, rather than understanding that key slice of voters just wanted things to be normal again, interpreted the win as a green light for an aggressive legislative and regulatory agenda that was not only more than the swing voters had bargained for, but arguably exacerbated inflation and, ultimately, interest rates to levels not seen in 40 years.

Now it’s Trump’s term to misinterpret an election, after voters simply wanted to get rid of Biden.

That is what should make House Republicans nervous about next year’s midterms. Those in the MAGA world and some other Republicans may be ecstatic about much of what Trump is doing and how he is doing it, but swing voters simply wanted Biden, and by extension Kamala Harris, out. What they have seen this year is not the cruise they signed up for.

Given the configuration of next year’s Senate contests, it is close to impossible to see how Democrats can score the net gain of four seats to win a majority there, but given what Trump is doing and where he seems headed, in the absence of a mid-decade redistricting, a loss of two or three dozen House seats would look pretty likely. All the Republican gerrymandering might save the GOP a dozen seats or so, but it seems pretty futile given how aggressively Trump is digging himself and his party a hole.

It would seem obvious that a party might seek to find a happy medium on that thermostat, but apparently not.