Landslides, Mandates, and the English Language
Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election—there is no question whatsoever about that fact. He is indisputably the president-elect, winning the electoral vote and, as only the second Republican to do so since 1988, winning the popular vote. As a historical note, he is also only the second president, after Grover Cleveland (1884 and 1892), to win a second term after losing a reelection bid (2016 and 2024).
The question is, how do we properly and accurately characterize and assess that electoral win? To do so, it is vital to attend to the meaning of words. Consider the current claims that Trump won the 2024 presidential election by a “landslide” and received a corresponding “mandate.”
One columnist calls the Trump victory “one of the most resounding and consequential political mandates in generations.” He claims that this victory – “both in terms of electoral and popular vote – was a landslide.”
Similarly, Congresswoman Elise Stefanik called Trump’s victory a “historic landslide.” Trump himself claims “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” at 1:44 in this YouTube clip.
Sigh. Call me an old-fashioned, grouchy curmudgeon, but I continue to believe that words have meanings, meanings that we are obligated to respect.
I have a tremendous respect for language and a fascination with the way it works. I defer to my more literary colleagues in matters pertaining to poetry and fiction, but what is most important to me are the ideas that language structures thought and that words have a meaning.
What worries me, though, is that, as George Orwell’s famous “Politics and the English Language” warned, the corruption of language leads to the corruption of thought.
Of course, I understand that the meaning of words is subject to change and that I will continue to lose many battles on that front. See, for example, the drastic difference between the original and current meanings of “decimate,” or to be perhaps more pedantic, the atrocious use of “impact” and —argh—“impacted” as a verb.
Ah yes, verbs. Orwell offered several rules for effective English, of which one was to use the active rather than passive voice with verbs. (Active voice fixes responsibility—“I made mistakes”—while passive voice hides it—“Mistakes were made.”) Nowadays we barely even get any verbs at all in broadcast journalism (“TV speak”); we might get a gerund or two if we’re lucky. The vanishing verb is not a new issue. See this. But I digress.
We appear to be afflicted by what one philosopher calls “Humpty Dumptyism”: words mean what we want them to mean. Politically speaking, this means that instead of power being subordinated to meaning, meaning becomes subordinated to power. For those familiar with Plato’s Republic, this marks a fundamental reversal, the victory of Thrasymachus over Socrates.
Let’s look, then, at a few numbers relevant to the “landslide” and “mandate” claims. Trump won 8 more electoral votes in 2024 than he received in 2016, a meaningful but not exactly a massive increase (a modest 2.6%). Bearing in mind that what makes someone president is winning a majority of electoral votes rather than a majority of the popular vote, here are some interesting rankings for the political era that started with Ronald Reagan.
Electoral-vote winners since Ronald Reagan, ranked by totals and percentage:
Reagan 1984: 525 (97.6%)
Reagan 1980: 489 (90.9%)
Bush 1988: 426 (79.2%)
Clinton 1996: 379 (70.5%)
Clinton 1992: 370 (68.8%)
Obama 2008: 365 (67.8%)
Obama 2012: 332 (61.7%)
Trump 2024: 312 (58.0%)
Biden 2020: 306 (56.9%)
Trump 2016: 304 (56.5%)
Bush 2004: 286 (53.2%)
Bush 2000: 271 (50.5%)
In these twelve presidential elections, then, the Trump electoral-vote victory in 2024 ranks eighth in both raw and percentage terms. Let’s look at the popular-vote rankings for those same years.
Winning popular-vote percentages:
Reagan 1984: 58.8%
Bush I 1988: 53.4%
Bush II 2004: 53.2%
Obama 2008: 52.9%
Biden 2020: 51.3%
Obama 2012: 51.1%
Reagan 1980: 50.8%
Trump 2024: 49.8%
Clinton 1996: 49.2%
Bush II 2000: 47.9%
Trump 2016: 46.1%
Clinton 1992: 43.0%
The Trump popular-vote win in 2024 ranks eighth out of twelve, and his popular-vote total in 2016, lower than Hillary Clinton’s, ranks eleventh out of twelve.
Again, it’s the electoral vote that matters in presidential elections, but these Trump rankings do not strike me as impressive. Charlie Cook says: “Mandates are the product of landslide victories, a margin of 10 percentage points or more in presidential politics.” There aren’t many such margins in this list of results, and the Trump margins are nowhere near that. Indeed, as of the latest numbers, the Trump vote is close to but still less than 50%.
Unfortunately, it remains true that the more often someone repeats even the most blatantly false claim, some or even many people will be inclined to believe it. (That may well be the strategy here.) To anyone who understands and respects the English language, the Trump victory in 2024—yes, a real victory—is simply not a landslide or mandate, and wishing won’t make it so. If you can access this article by the New York Times’ Peter Baker, it too offers a good analysis of the landslide claim.
Still, I just keep thinking of a famous Marxist—not Karl, but Chico, asking Margaret Dumont in Duck Soup, “Who you gonna believe—me or your own eyes?” There seem to be a lot of Chico-Marxists in American politics these days.
Chico was funny. This is not.
Sigh.
Check out my fellow members of the Iowa Writers’ Collaborative
Amanda Carpenter's 2018 book on Gaslighing America, is consistent wih your writing. A CNN contributor, former Ted Cruz staffer, and "Never Trump" adherent--she explains how Trump’s lies and fabrications don’t horrify America—they enthrall us—and explains how we can avoid falling for them. But, few read the book and less listened.
Carpenter breaks down Trump’s formula, showing why it’s practically foolproof, playing his victims, the media, the Democrats, and the Republican fence-sitters perfectly. She traces how this tactic started with Nixon, gained traction with Bill Clinton, and exploded under Trump.
To complement professor Goldford's excellent remarks on the play with words that some people tend to indulge in, let me quote a Canadian community organizer (John Stapleton , I believe). He wrote that, instead of evidence-based decision-making, ideological conservatives are rather into the opposite: decision-based evidence-making (for example, when they are alarmed by the rise of criminality despite declining violent crimes rates). And by the way, the Hezbollah in Lebanon does the same thing when they claim a great victory against their "zionist enemy"!