- 365 Electoral Votes
- 52-46% of Popular Votes (the other 2% were split evenly between liberal third party candidates and conservative third party candidates). Subtracting 52-46=2 for math challenged folks.
He won. Fair (sort of) and square. Take out the crooked acorn votes and maybe a million or so go away. But he still won.
If you review the textbook evaluation of what constitutes a landslide:
In a presidential election, more than about 400 electoral votes constitutes a landslide, provided that it is accompanied by at least 55% of the popular vote.
If a candidate wins most states by a very narrow margin, that would be a broad geographical victory but not a landslide. George Bush in 1988 won 40 states with 426 electoral votes, but got only 54% of the popular vote. this was a near-landslide, but not an actual landslide, because his share of the popular vote indicates a wide but relatively shallow victory, rather than a wide and deep victory, which is the definition of a landslide.
Bill Clinton received 370 and 379 electoral votes, respectively, in the 1992 and 1996 elections, his wins were near-landslides because he never won a majority of the popular vote. He won 43% and 49% of the popular vote in 1992 and 1996, respectively, and a minority winner cannot be considered a landslide or near-landslide winner.
In a regular election, 60% of the vote is a landslide, since the winner would have received 150% of the votes that the loser received.
So, Obama won. Just not by a landslide. Mandate, probably. Nothing more. Clarity in thinking is always a good thing in times like these. Let's be sure we call it as it was. A Win. That's all. Sliding of any land will have to wait for 2012.
History is a good instructor in defining genuine landslides:
Presidential elections in the United States are indirect; they are not determined by the "popular vote", but by the Electoral College. Each state is allocated as many "electors" as it has Senators and Representatives in the United States Congress, and, at present, all states but Nebraska and Maine hold a "winner take all" vote, in which the winner of a state wins all electoral votes the state is eligible to cast.
For this reason, many presidential victories appear to be huge landslide victories when examining the electoral vote, but much less so when examining the popular vote; for example, in the 1984 election, Ronald Reagan won 97.5% of the electoral vote but 58.8% of the popular vote.
Popular votes
* Theodore Roosevelt's 56.4% to Alton B. Parker's 37.6% in the 1904 presidential election
* Warren Harding's 60.3% to James Cox's 34.1% in the 1920 presidential election
* Franklin D. Roosevelt's 60.8% to Alf Landon's 36.5% in the 1936 presidential election
* Lyndon Johnson's 61.1% to Barry Goldwater's 38.5% in the 1964 presidential election
* Richard Nixon's 60.7% to George McGovern's 37.5% in the 1972 presidential election
* Ronald Reagan's 58.8% to Walter Mondale's 40.6% in the 1984 presidential election
Just calling a thing a landslide doesn't make it one.
He just WON.
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