It’s been a heck of a few weeks. Everyone seems to have something to say about the allegedly “historic” election of Donald Trump. Well… it IS historic, in the sense that it’s only the second time in the country’s history that a president has been elected to two nonconsecutive terms in office. The other was Grover Cleveland, elected in 1884 and 1892. The two men have other things in common, as well. Cleveland, like Trump, was once embroiled in a public sex scandal—one that even involved a court case against a former mistress. Cleveland was married to a much younger woman, a celebrated beauty, like the former model Mrs Melania Trump. Wait, there’s more! By now we’ve all heard Trump’s cringey jokes about how his daughter Ivanka is so beautiful that he would date her if she weren’t his daughter. That’s also weirdly reminiscent of the Clevelands. You see, Mrs Frances Folsom Cleveland was someone toward whom one might expect Mr Cleveland to have paternal feelings, not romantic ones. He met her as an infant and she grew up basically as his ward after her father, a close friend of Mr Cleveland’s, passed away when she was a child. He supported her and her mother financially, provided for her education and spent time mentoring her. She even called him uncle! History may not repeat, but it “rhymes” as they say.
As for the kind of “history” being touted in this election, such as Trump receiving an “unprecedented mandate” and having won by “landslide” etc., that’s a much flimsier claim. As I anticipated before the election (and pointed out repeatedly since), it was actually very close. The impact of the election is certainly significant, because there is a wholesale power transfer. The Republicans—or more accurately, the ascendant, vaguely populist wing of the Republican Party—will have full control of the government. They have the presidency, both houses of Congress and the federal judiciary, due to the timing of retirements and deaths among Supreme Court Justices in recent years (enabling Trump to appoint a full THIRD of the justices of the current Supreme Court during his first term). Trump’s announced cabinet picks and policy directions for the second term signal big changes, some worrying and some genuinely refreshing. On that basis, it is certainly important to think about not only what’s happening going forward, but also the trends that are driving the changes. However, we must avoid overreading the tea leaves.
First of all, how large is Trump’s victory, really? Let’s look at the numbers. The electoral vote count for Harris was 226, only six fewer than the number Trump received in 2020 against Joe Biden. That election was considered decisive but somewhat close. But a difference of 6 electoral votes (the equivalent of one small state) makes this one a landslide? The popular vote this year was approximately 49.9 per cent to 48.4 per cent, a slimmer margin than in 2020, when Biden won against Trump 51.3 per cent to 46.8 per cent. Slimmer even than in 2004, when George W Bush led John Kerry, 50.7 per cent to 48.3 per cent.
Since the election of George HW. Bush in 1988, in almost every presidential race the popular vote winner had just a plurality of the vote, or an extremely thin majority. The exceptions were the moderately healthy margins in the two Obama elections and Biden’s election in 2020 (and that count was bitterly disputed). In two of the elections, the presidency was won, due to the idiosyncrasies of the electoral college (discussed below), by the candidate who actually received fewer popular votes than his opponent. This happened five times in US History (John Quincy Adams, 1824; Rutherford B. Hayes, 1876; Benjamin Harrison, 1888; George W Bush, 2000 and Donald J Trump, 2016). Against this backdrop, winning the popular vote is obviously cause for relief and celebration for a candidate and his supporters. But objectively speaking, it’s nonsensical to talk about it as some kind of tectonic shift in the political landscape or a grand mandate, as so many seem hellbent on doing. Perhaps it’s because humans have a need and a knack for endowing events—especially big, impactful ones—with meanings and patterns that may or may not be there.
A funny example of this is something I saw posted by tech billionaire Elon Musk on X (formerly Twitter). He shared a headline about the internet supposedly being “Stunned After An Attractive Biological Female Human Of Healthy Weight Wins Miss Universe Pageant”. Probably largely a harmless joke on his part, but thousands of people descended on the thread expressing various degrees of joy and relief as though some major corner in human civilisation had been turned. “The world is healing” and “This is the Trump effect” were recurring themes. Most of them weren’t joking.
Here’s the thing though: whatever you may think about the “inclusiveness” culture of recent years—and whether we’ve gone too far in “body positivity” or whether transwomen belong in beauty pageants, or whatever the issue—the FACT is that recent Miss Universe winners have NOT veered in any of those unusual directions. There has NEVER been a plus-sized or transgender Miss Universe. This year’s crown went to a lovely young woman from Denmark, who is in no way a departure from all of the conventionally beautiful young women (with slender but curvy figures, clear skin, symmetrical features, etc.) who have won the title every single year of its existence. The only difference one might notice is that this year’s winner is the first blonde-haired, northern European-looking winner in some years, unlike the first 30 or 40 years of the pageant’s history, during which the winners were almost ALL white European-descended, sometimes even white Africans, until becoming more diverse since the 1990s (still including many white or white-Hispanic top-tier placements and winnings). Given that pageant organisations are commercial entities interested primarily in market penetration and given that regional or national representation often aids in that, it is POSSIBLE that Trump’s victory is signaling to the market that US policies in the near future might favour western European countries, which makes these countries potentially lucrative market opportunities. It would be absolutely fine with me if someone wrote about that honestly. But painting this as some kind of self-evident “healing” of an allegedly broken global society, is ludicrous.
Winners of presidential elections often make exaggerated claims about their victory that are misleading, even if technically true. For example, Joe Biden and his supporters have repeatedly said, after the 2020 election, that he received “more votes than any candidate in history,” which is true. But also true, is that, in the same election, his defeated opponent Donald Trump received the second highest votes of any candidate in history” up to that point! So, it wasn’t so much a huge margin as a huge turnout—for both candidates. This year, Trump-supporters are making equally indefensible and broad statements (in tones that are alternately solemn or giddy) about how the country has roundly rejected, not just Kamala Harris, but the Democrats and progressive politics generally, and how they’ve enthusiastically embraced Trump.
Some media personalities have been sharing red-and-blue coded maps of political survey results, showing that most of the country is red (conservative)** with much smaller areas of blue (liberal)** concentrated on the coasts and urban areas. They claim that this shows that “America is conservative.” Many long threads of social media pontification have been generated based on this. However, this is completely baseless, because it fails to consider where the country’s population centers are. The “blue” urban areas are much more densely populated than the vast swaths of red rural plains, mountains and deserts. The geographically tiny city of New York (the CITY, not the whole state) has a population of almost 9 million people, more than 10 times the population of the state of Alaska, which has the largest landmass of any American state. So, all of the ink and airtime spilled on this admittedly stunning graphic is utterly meaningless.
Elon Musk said, in a reply to renowned biologist Richard Dawkins on social media, that Donald Trump had “won the hearts and minds” of Americans. This is an astounding overstatement, since almost as many people voted for Kamala Harris as did for Donald Trump. Also, many who voted for Trump did so because they hate him a little less than they hate Harris and the Democrats, not because he won their “hearts and minds.” The reverse is, of course, true of Harris as well.
But the worst of the exaggerated claims, in my opinion, is the myth of the landslide. There is no landslide.
The obvious complicating factor in all this is the electoral college system, which dictates the candidate who becomes president is not simply the one who got the most votes; it’s the one who got the most “electoral votes.” It was originally devised as an indirect election, in which voters in each state selected a group of electors who would, in turn, cast the votes for president and vice-president. However, even though we technically still have this indirect voting system, every state has updated the system so that the voters choose which presidential and vice-presidential candidate the electors will vote for, not who the electors will be. In the current system, after the general election and vote count are over, the state formally appoints the electors, who are pledged to cast their electoral votes according to the voters’ choice. In theory, an elector could ignore the state’s election result and vote according to his/her own choice. This is called a “faithless” elector. The US Supreme Court has ruled that the federal Constitution does not prohibit faithless voting. But various state laws and political party rules generally deter it. Several electors tried to vote against their state’s pledged candidate in 2016, resulting in six faithless votes. This included two votes from Texas that were cast for third party candidates in an attempt to prevent the presidency of Donald Trump, whom the electors considered “unfit” for the office. One elector from Washington State, pledged to Hillary Clinton, voted instead for the activist Faith Spotted Eagle, as a protest against Clinton’s support of a crude oil drilling project called the Dakota Access Pipeline. (Two oddities I’d like to note: (1) Clinton and Spotted Eagle were the first two women in history to have electoral votes cast for them as presidential candidates in a US general election (in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro received 13 electoral votes as a vice-presidential candidate); (2) the faithless elector voted for someone named “Faith.”)
At any rate, the way it currently works is, each state awards a number of electoral votes based on its representatives in the two houses of Congress. Every state has two senators and at least one member of the House of Representatives, giving every state at least three electoral votes. The remaining electoral votes are proportional to population, which is how the number of seats in the House are allocated. In 1929, a federal statute was passed, providing that the House would have a total of no more than 435 seats, some of which would be reallocated as needed to accommodate shifts in the population distribution. But this attempt to stabilise the total number of representatives has led to considerable disparities in how many people each Congressional district represents. This, along with the fact that every state—regardless of population—has two senators and at least one House member, creates further disparities. Less populous states essentially have a bigger “say”, per capita, in who becomes president. This is not necessarily bad, as it’s meant to prevent the bigger states from overwhelming the will of the smaller ones, or the “tyranny of the majority” as John Adams, Alexis de Tocqueville, and others have called it. But there are downsides as well.
Most states have a “winner-take-all” system, which means they give all of the state’s electoral votes to the candidate who wins the popular vote in the state. Maine and Nebraska use a hybrid approach. They award all but two of their electoral votes proportionally to the number of districts the candidate won, while awarding the other two on a winner-take-all basis. Since these votes all go to the winner regardless of the margin of victory, a very populous state with a large number of electoral votes could have a very low turnout one year, compared to a state with a lower population and fewer electoral votes, leading to the result that a candidate receives more electoral votes based on fewer actual votes cast for him/her. Alternatively, a group of smaller states, with their naturally smaller popular vote counts, could have their already inflated electoral votes add up to be more than a large state with a large popular vote turnout, also resulting in a split between the popular vote and electoral vote.
The federal capital district, the District of Columbia (Washington DC), which has no senators and only one non voting delegate in the House, gets to cast three electoral votes, awarded in a winner-take-all fashion.
Bottom line is, not every electoral vote carries with it the imprimatur of an equal number of actual voters. This fact distorts the way we view the results. Even in Ronald Reagan’s famous trouncing of Walter Mondale in 1984, the spread was 58 per cent–40 per cent. That’s certainly enormous, but not quite the dramatic humiliation suggested by the electoral vote count (525 to 13) or the number of states won (49 to 1). But at least with margins like that, it made sense to attribute it to a major popular mood, but THIS year?
This year was an unremarkable showing of the same phenomenon we have seen for decades: a country locked in an intense, high stress, but essentially deadlocked political contest. Staunch Democrats and Republicans voted the party line, including many who are frustrated enough with their own side to “hold their nose” and vote for a candidate they dislike, because the other one is almost viscerally unacceptable to them at this point.
In recent years, most states have become entrenched “red” (Republican)** or “blue” (Democratic).** As such, their support is considered already sewn up and they are either written off or taken for granted by candidates. This leaves the states whose residents don’t have a predictable party preference, known as “swing” states and “swing” voters. That’s where the candidates lavish most of their attention and campaign efforts. These swing voters effectively decide the election, as they did this year. But even the swing voters were very closely divided. Trump won every swing state, but he won all but one of them by a hair’s breadth.
Under these circumstances, so much of the shock, the soul-searching, the grandstanding, the broad proclamations, and the incessant, fevered analysis, just seem unwarranted. I am not dismissing all of it, of course. There are good reasons for examining how people voted and why. I have done some of this myself. But the extent and intensity of—not to mention the tendency to endow it with very deep implications—probably ought to be attributed to the media’s hunger for hype and/or the human tendency to see deeper patterns and meaning. Election watchers keep falling prey to this tendency. They ignore the real, if somewhat boring, patterns of history—from the recent past and the more distant past—and let their own overestimation of the current moment’s significance blind them to its realities.
**Sidenote: the “red” and “blue” designations for Republicans and Democrats, respectively, come from the contentious election of 2000, when the electoral maps—which happened to be coded this way by the news media that year—were constantly analysed on television news programmes for more than a month, as the historically close vote was counted, recounted and finally decided after the US Supreme Court made a ruling on certain legal issues. This arrangement stuck. It wasn’t always this way. The same colours, derived from the red, white and blue American flag, were typically used, but which colour was assigned to which party used to be randomly chosen. In 1980, for example, the news outlets were using blue for Republicans. Ronald Reagan won so overwhelmingly that journalist David Brinkly said the map resembled a “swimming pool.”
The author is a lawyer, writer and editor based in Manhattan, New York