Within 24 hours of Donald Trump being named winner of the 2024 presidential election, headlines began circulating that suggested he’d done so by a “landslide.”
But the truth is that the election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will be decided by about 1 percentage point, which is nowhere near landslide proportions.
MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell expertly laid out the case against a landslide on his show Monday evening, noting:
“Ballots received in the mail tomorrow will be counted in California. So there are literally millions of ballots yet to be counted in this country, including in the state of Pennsylvania, where thousands of votes remain to be counted to determine the balance of the United States Senate.”
“Republicans will probably have 52 senators next year or 53 if Republicans win the Pennsylvania Senate election. The Democrats will probably have 47 members of the Senate or 48 if Democrat Bob Casey wins the Pennsylvania Senate race.”
The GOP will also have a narrow margin of control in the House.
“We still don’t know which party will control the House of Representatives, but we do know that it will be very close. As of tonight, Republicans have 214 seats in the House and Democrats have 205 seats in the House, according to NBC News, with 16 remaining to be decided.”
And then there’s the Trump-Harris margin of victory, which is getting smaller by the second as more ballots are tabulated.
“In the presidential vote. Donald Trump currently has 50.2% of the vote to Kamala Harris, 48.1% of the vote. But that margin will probably narrow after all the California votes are finally counted, and it is possible that Kamala Harris will end up with only one– 1% of the vote less than Donald Trump, a 1% gap. Right now, she’s at 2% less than Donald Trump.”
“If you hear anyone calling this election a landslide, please stop listening to that person! About elections, at least.”
What qualifies as a landslide? Well, when Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 by a whopping 9%, even that wasn’t considered to be a landslide.
O’Donnell concluded his summary with this historical reminder of what a landslide looks like:
“The last landslide we had was Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, where he won 49 states in the Electoral College, with only the state of Minnesota voting for Walter Mondale, who was from Minnesota. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18 points. That’s what a landslide looks like.”
Here’s the video from MSNBC:
