Having lost the election, demoralized Democrats now argue their defeat wasn’t a landslide. Nice try. Their reaction is more than knee-jerk petulance; instead, it arises from fears of permanence. With Trump gaining momentum, even before his inauguration, Democrats rightfully fear that they could fare even worse in 2028 and beyond.
Before the election, the Democrats’ presidential complaint was the Electoral College. Certain they would win the popular vote, Tim Walz, speaking in October, voiced what other Democrats thought: “I think all of us know the electoral college needs to go.” On the night of November 5, their concern changed. Now Democrat apologists (CNN, NYT, LAT, and more) are all arguing to diminish Trump’s victory—and thereby his momentum.
While Democrats and their supporters’ need is understandable, Trump’s landslide gets bigger the more it is scrutinized.
Even on the surface, its particulars are impressive. Trump was the Republicans’ first presidential candidate to beat a Democrat in the popular vote in 20 years. He won more popular votes than any Republican presidential candidate in history. He won each of the contest’s seven swing states—and he came close to flipping several (NJ, VA, NM, NH, and MN) seemingly solid blue states. And he won the electoral vote 312-226.
Conversely, compared to Biden in 2020, Democrats’ popular vote percentage dropped in 50 of 51 states and the District of Columbia, going up only in Utah by a scant 0.2 percentage points.
Big as Trump’s win was on the surface, closer examination shows it was bigger still.
Trump’s victory came despite finishing behind Harris by over four million votes in California and New York combined and despite these states combining for 84 electoral votes. Dismissing the result in these two states, Trump won by five percentage points in the other 48 states and 312 to 142 in electoral votes. Take away the results of Massachusetts and Washington, and Trump won by almost seven percentage points in the popular vote and 312-121 in the electoral vote.
Basically, apart from the coasts, Trump won overwhelmingly: where 80 percent of the presidential electoral votes are, Trump won three-quarters of them.
Next, put these impressive numbers into the context of their occurrence.
Trump amassed these numbers while being enormously outraised and outspent. Harris had hundreds of millions more to fuel her campaign than Trump did. And she had to only focus on the seven swing states that everyone knew were the fulcrum of the contest. Yet, Trump still swept all seven—something that neither he nor Biden had been able to do in 2016 and 2020.
Trump also rang up his numbers despite eight years of unrelenting negativity from the establishment media. For almost a decade, there has been nothing approaching balanced coverage: regardless of his opponent—Hillary, Biden, and Harris—each received a strong establishment media tailwind. Yet despite this, Trump increased his general election popular vote percentage each time.
And that establishment media bias was never stronger than in the aftermath of Biden’s withdrawal.
For over 100 days, the establishment media gave Harris a pass: on press conferences, on interviews, on evading questions, on softball venues when she did appear, on often not answering questions in even these friendly confines, and on nonsensical responses when she did speak.
And Trump won despite having almost the entirety of America’s self-styled elite opposing him.
In academia, in Hollywood, in music, in sports, the coolest of the cool and the biggest of the big were overwhelmingly and vocally against him. Not surprisingly, in the face of all this opposition, Trump’s favorability rating was below Harris’s.
Yet, Trump still racked up his impressive numbers.
Despite every conceivable disadvantage, Trump beat not one, but two Democrat nominees to win the presidency. Outright - not only in electoral votes but by almost 2.5 million votes.
That is the definition of a landslide.
Of late, Americans have suffered a surfeit of Democrats and their apologists saying something isn’t true when it patently is—that Joe Biden was capable of being president, that the Democrat elite wasn’t deposing Joe Biden when they drove him from the ticket, that Kamala Harris was his qualified replacement, that Joe Biden wouldn’t pardon Hunter. The list is endless; it stretches back in time and extends uninterrupted into it. But nowhere is Democrat denial greater than in their attempt to deny Trump’s November presidential landslide.
Their reason is as obvious as the truth they are seeking to deny. They fear its repetition.
They worry that Republicans will continue Trump’s conservative populism, and they know that next time 2024’s overwhelming advantages will be gone. Bad as November’s landslide was, the ones Democrats potentially face going forward could be far worse.
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J.T. Young is the author of the new book, Unprecedented Assault: How Big Government Unleashed America’s Socialist Left, from RealClear Publishing, and has over three decades of experience working in Congress, the Department of Treasury, and OMB, and representing a Fortune 20 company.
