I imagine most of us would think a “Landslide” in an American presidential election is one in which a successful candidate harvested much better than a majority of the popular vote. Actually, such victories are not so common in our presidential contests.

You might be surprised to learn that in the nineteenth century the list of presidents elected by a minority of the popular vote is a long one. John Quincy Adams won the 1824 election with only 30.5% of the popular vote. How is that possible? Because, there were typically more than two candidates running. Third party movements have actually denied popular majorities for the winning candidate on many occasions.

The beneficiary of the first real popular vote landslide approaching 60% was the hero of the War of 1812, General Andrew Jackson. He was also the hero to all those Americans anxious to get a piece of the recently seized Native Americans lands taken in a treaty negotiated in the field by General Jackson. Elections in 1828 and 1832 gave him 56% and 55% of the popular vote. These wins were remarkable and arguably were the first “landslides” in popular vote victories- though short of my own personal -and arbitrary- definition of “landslide.”

The post -Civil War era saw “minority president’s elected from 1976 until 1896 when Republican William McKinley in 1896 won a popular majority victory over Populist/Democrat William Jennings Bryan (51.1% to 47.7%) but this was hardly a landslide when compared to a number of twentieth century elections.

McKinley faired only slightly better in his reelection bid in 1904. His VP, Theodore Roosevelt, became president when McKinley was assassinated and was easily the most popular president that anyone at the time could recall. He was elected in his own right in 1904 with 57.4% of the popular vote. With 336 electoral college votes, he more than doubled that of his leading competitor. It is arguable of course, but in my opinion, approaching 60% of the popular vote is the gold standard for defining a landslide.

The 1920 election would produce a genuine landslide. The country was in crisis after the First World War. Inflation was in the teens during and following the war years. Returning soldiers brought home a horrible epidemic in the form of influenza. When the Wilson Administration rapidly “dumped” returning soldiers on the job market by releasing them from service as quickly as possible, it led to a surge in unemployment and spread the flu. A nationwide epidemic broke just as pent-up consumer demand sent prices soaring. And, war-weary Americans were tending toward isolationism.

Returning African American soldiers had seen a better world in France, one which many of them hoped to create on American soil when they returned. African Americans were leaving the South by the tens of thousands to escape the oppressive and poverty insuring farm sharecropping system. They were flooding into Chicago, Detroit and many other urban centers where they hoped to find jobs. Foreign competition and surplus production crashed the cotton-based southern economy.

Ellis Island was swamped with refuges from war-torn Europe, immigrants typically arriving from southern and eastern Europe and crowding into large cities. The public was demanding limits on the number of immigrants while the Ku Klux Klan, with its nativist, racist and anticatholic doctrines was garnering members not just in the South, but in the borderlands of the Ohio River, in Indiana, Ohio, and Illinois-states over which the Klan would exert a dangerous political influence in the 1920’s. The heartland, settled by the oppressed “border landers” of Ireland and Scotland who had flooded the American frontier before the American Revolution, had moved west to avoid government control and were swept into the reactionary folds of local demagogs, and the reactionary, corporate-dominated Republican Party.

Most Americans wanted a return to “normalcy.” They got it in a sense when Warren Harding, an aging newspaper editor and recently elected Senator, ran on an isolationist Republican ticket. It is pretty obvious that Americans were angry and intensely partisan, faced as they were with new and in many ways menacing societal and economic changes. There was a “Red Scare” as paranoia set in following the communist takeover in Russia. Labor unions were becoming more of a political force and race relations, in both northern and southern cities, turned violent. Harding’s speech writer invented a new word to describe this impulse: “normalcy.”

Warren Harding race for the presidency in1920 was the first election in which women in every state of the union could vote in a national election, thanks to a recently adopted constitutional amendment. In the election of that year, the largely unknown nominee of the Democratic Party, James N. Cox, was only able to garner 9 million votes to Harding’s 16 million (60.4% of the popular vote- a “landslide” by any reasonable standard).

There is an interesting footnote to offer at this point: Socialist Eugene V. Debbs who spent the war years in federal prison, brought in nearly a million votes. Clearly, his backing from labor and reform-minded intellectuals suggested that progressives were doing more than wringing their hands. Unfortunately, it would appear his votes came from disgruntled Demoocrats.

These events inevitably remind us -one hundred years later- of our own times.

Let’s look at the “landslide” elections of the last hundred years. First of all, and oversimplifying somewhat, the rise of fascism in Europe was triggered by the collapse of the German economy after its defeat in 1918. A democratic regime came to power there near the end of the war and sued for peace. The badly damaged and exhausted, but victorious allies (France and Great Britain), wanted payback in the form of territories and reparations. The US in turn had loaned millions to the Allies and the Allies expected German reparations to pay off this debt. None of this worked. There was no plan to aid the democratic German government in rebuilding the German economy. America meanwhile became the dominant economic force in war-torn Europe and soon American- owned businesses were dominating manufacturing there. It was a no-win situation for both the victors and the losers of the Great War.

Meanwhile, back in the USA, inflation was destroying lives and livelihoods, as wages lagged behind prices at the same time foreign commodity imports were wrecking the farms of both the Great Plains and the deep South. Corrupt banking practices and racketeering flourished to the extent that the US started its own national police force, the FBI. Things came apart in 1929. Banks failed. millions were unemployed and an internal migration swelled as people mounted caravans and built roadside camps to travel to places where they might find a job or at least their next meal. To paraphrase comedian and cowboy philosopher Will Rogers, we couldn’t afford anything new, but we could elect a new president for free-and we did.

1932 saw brought an authentic landslide as a polio-stricken patrician from upstate New York defeated the man who should probably be remembered as the smartest man (except perhaps for Thomas Jefferson) and greatest humanitarian ever to occupy the White House, Herbert Hoover. Only a miracle could have saved Hoover. FDR won with 57.4% of the popular vote.

FDR’s fireside talks and empathy for the “forgotten man” combined with his plethora of “New Deal” Agencies -mostly aimed at stabilizing banks and creating public employment through massive public works projects -were appreciated by voters, who gave him an overwhelming victory in in 1936. I have spared mention of the Electoral College votes to this point, but it is worth noting here that Landon only received 8 Electoral College votes to FDR’s 523. In terms of popular votes, 1940 and 1944 (54.8% and 57.4% respectively) were decisive wins for FDR but neither equaled the totals of 1936- or quite reached my imaginary gold ring of 60%. FDR died shortly after his fourth election victory in 1944 and his VP Truman barely squeezed by in his bid for his own four year term with 49.5%. The country’s mood shifted again toward isolation as the “Cold War” with the Soviets spiraled into a nuclear arms race. Dwight Eisenhower, who had headed US forces in the invasion of Europe (1944) and defeated the Nazi’s changed was twice elected in 1952 (55.1%) and 1956 (57.6). Decisive but maybe not quite landslides.

“Who’s next?” as contenders for the title of “landslide” winners? It is those tireless adversaries Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson. In the wake of John Kennedy’s assassination, his Vice President, Lyndon Johnson, came to the Oval Office without having appeared on a presidential ballot- as had Lincoln’s Vice President Andrew Johnson, and McKinley’s Vice President Theodore Roosevelt. Before the antiwar movement drained his popularity, Lyndon Johnson demonstrated the importance of knowing the ropes in order to get things done. A longtime Senator from a Southern State, he would be the author of the greatest legislative achievements of the Civil Rights Movement and social supports for the poor. He was elected in his own right in 1964 with 61.1% of the popular vote, a landslide by my reconning. Eligible to run again in 1968, the once popular president declined to be nominated when public anger over the Viet Nam War made him the principle target of the anti-war movement. Its leader, Senator Robert F. Kennedy, demonstrated that he would likely be the Democratic nominee -but was assasinated shortly after winning the California Democratic Primary.

“Pride comes before a fall” according to scripture. So it was with Richard Nixon. Defeated in a very close race by John F. Kennedy in 1960, he left national politics an embittered man., His return to politics in 1968 was fueled by a desire by most Americans to see our intervention in the Vietnamese Civil War come to an end. Winning against Lyndon Johnson’s Vice President, Hubert Humphrey (43.4% to 42.7%), Nixon narrowly triumphed over a sharply divided Democratic Party. The return to peace and a still divided Democratic Party enabled him to score big in 1972 (Nixon’s 60.8% to George McGovern’s abysmal 37.7%). Of course, Nixon destroyed himself because it was soon learned that he had condoned the burglary of the Democratic Headquarters at the Watergate Hotel in Washington, D.C. -one of several breaches of his oath of office that seemed to foreshadow a humiliating impeachment by Congress. Perhaps landslides foreshadow downfalls. Nixon resigned the presidency.

And, afterward? -from Nixon to Trump? George W. Bush was the beneficiary of the next landslide election in 2004 (defeating John Kerry with 60.1%). Decorated war hero Kerry was the victim of a smear campaign that robbed him of the advantage many perceived as his due. This came at the height of the “War on Terrorism”- a war that destroyed the stability of the middle eastern countries and inspired the longest war in American history, beginning with Iraq and ending with Afghanistan. Bush’s miniscule abilities were overshadowed by a cabal of right- wing proponents of an imperial presidency led by former congressman Dick Chaney, his Vice President. Even Bush’s mother is said to have opposed the idea of his seeking the presidency. Yet he had won by a landslide.

In a nutshell, close races are typical, and popular-vote landslides -that is, meeting my arbitrary standard of a 60% popular majority- have been few. Professional historians’ rankings of presidents change from one such poll to the next, except that Lincoln, Washington, FDR and Theodore Roosevelt always appear in the top ten. Three of these won by a landslide. That said, Harding’s overwhelming victory in 1920 did nothing to save him as the crooked businessmen and administrators serving in his scandal-infected administration came under suspicion and indictment. Conveniently for his memory, he died before the scandals inspired impeachment proceedings. Nixon won big, but resigned to avoid impeachment. Lyndon Johnson’s failure to register big with historians is no doubt the result of his inability to get out of the Viet Nam quagmire. It is easy to conclude that a landslide offers no guarantee of who will be best remembered or admired.

Trumps victory in 2024 was an upset to be sure, but was far from a landslide. In fact, at 49.9 % of the popular vote, he joins a long list of presidents elected by a minority. His victory came because he carried the electoral college by a substantial margin. This set off a round of arguments and commentaries by pundits. Should the Electoral College system be jettisoned in favor of an all-out popular vote determination?

Just a footnote: President Trump has on occasion boasted about the fact that he carried an overwhelming number of counties. This of course means nothing. Votes in the Electoral College are assigned by the number of senators and congressmen in each sate. In most states, if a candidate wins the popular vote, he or she wins all the presidential votes for the state in the Electoral College. Clearly, the founders felt that some brake should be created so that some momentous event (inflation? war? invasion?) might raise a demagogue to the White House on the shoulders of misguided voters. As Aristotle has been quoted as saying, “All men desire what is in their own best interest, but they do not always know what that is.” Nor do they always adhere to what is right or just in their pursuit of their own best interests.