Where is a good landslide election when the country really needed one? Nope, not this year. The now utterly discredited polling industry promised one, but it spectacularly failed to occur.
Defined as 400 or more electoral votes, presidential landslides have occurred seven times in this country since World War II—six for Republicans and one for Democrats. The most common ingredients for a landslide are twofold: A magnetically appealing victor or a deeply flawed loser.
Examples of the victors are Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan, who both performed the feat twice (1952 and 1956, and 1980 and 1984, respectively) while garnering between 442 and 525 electoral votes out of a possible 538.
Examples of the losers are Barry Goldwater (1964) and George McGovern (1972), who were each so far out of the mainstream that they easily lost to two of the least lovable Presidents of the twentieth century—Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon—while gaining just 52 and 17 electoral votes for themselves.
Political parties that suffer landslide defeats are driven to serious introspection and a search for new faces, and new ideas—and sometimes rapid recovery results.
The primary benefit for victors in a landslide is stability and broad support from a voting public well-disposed to the vision that they overwhelmingly endorsed. Nonetheless that support is a resource that can quickly evaporate, as it did with both Johnson and Nixon who found their nemesis in Vietnam and Watergate.
Perhaps the greatest virtue of landslides is that they render real or alleged voter fraud absolutely irrelevant and guarantee that the occupant of the White House is indeed fully legitimate.
Prior to this year there have been five “cliffhanger” elections in the same post-World War II period.
In 1948 Harry Truman pulled the greatest upset in modern presidential history in a four- candidate race. Though he did not win a majority of the popular vote, he fulfilled the Founders’ metric for victory by amassing 303 electoral votes—gravely embarrassing the pollsters who had all predicted an easy win for Republican Thomas Dewey.
In 1960 John Kennedy also won 303 electoral votes—though his margin of victory was just 119,000 votes out of 68 million cast. Though there were credible reports of significant voter fraud in Texas and Illinois the loser, Richard Nixon—to his credit, chose, in the interest of national stability—not to challenge the results.
In 1968—arguably the most tumultuous election year in American history, beset with unpopular war, assassinations, and race riots—Richard Nixon gained 301 electoral votes in a three-way race by edging his Democratic opponent, Hubert Humphrey, by fewer than a million votes.
In 2000 occurred the most contentious Presidential election result in modern American history when Republican George W. Bush won the Electoral College over Albert Gore by the narrowest margin in history—271-266—and became just the fourth U.S. President to win despite losing the popular vote.
The contest was finally decided 37 days after the election and then only by a highly controversial 5-4 decision by the U.S. Supreme Court. It is fair to say that this result, in combination with the acrimonious impeachment of President Bill Clinton two years prior, marks the beginning of the highly toxic polarization that has uninterruptedly plagued this nation for the last twenty years.
In 2016 Donald Trump (the second man in the last four elections to win while losing the popular vote) defeated Hillary Clinton by carrying thirty states with 304 electoral votes. It was an upset more shocking than 1948 and even more contentious than 2000. And once again polling organizations utterly failed to predict this stunning result.
All of which leads us to the lamentable and dangerous circumstances of 2020. The national trauma of an unforeseen pandemic introduced an unprecedented new variable into the presidential election: the distribution in some but not all states of millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, for which no credible system ensuring integrity and accountability was possible.
In a close election this has become a clear recipe for a disastrous level of controversy within the courts and the public mind. The extent of any election fraud, major or minor, has not been, and perhaps can never be, reliably determined. Biden or Trump? Hard to say.
So at this writing the Great American Democracy finds itself deeply mired in an unparallelled existential challenge from which there will be no early or easy exit. We’re left with none of the clarity of a landslide and all the angst of a protracted cliffhanger. Fellow citizens, let us pray.
Bill Moloney is a fellow in conservative thought at Colorado Christian University 's Centennial Institute and a former Colorado Commissioner of Education..He studied at Oxford and the University of London
