Why are recent elections so close?

Politics & Elections
1

Although I am looking for a factual answer, I suppose this goes in the election section.

I was looking at election results since 1900, and when looking at the popular vote, there is a general trend that elections have been getting closer and closer.

Since there is always someone who wants to fight the initial premise, I will offer these statistics.

  1. Between 1900 and 1972, there five elections with more than a twenty point spread, since 1972 (52 years) there have been none.
  2. Between 1900 and 1984 there were eleven elections with more than a ten point spread, since then (40 years) there have been none.
  3. From 2000-2024, six of the seven elections had a spread of less than 5 points (I am counting this current one which I assume will be close). Compare that to 1900-1996, there were only 5 elections with a spread of less than five points.

So, why is there a trend of closer and closer elections? Better strategies on each side to maximize their voting percentage? Do primaries have a large effect?

2

People got more and more embittered. Politics became like a sports contest, where it was no longer about what was best for the country or oneself, but wanting to see Team Red own Team Blue or vice versa.

So in the past, you had many Reagan Democrats who would vote Republican or many moderate Republicans who might go for Carter or Clinton, but those days are over. People just got very hardened. Same reason why Ginsburg and Scalia were able to be approved to the Supreme Court by 97-0 votes in the Senate, but today it’s always like 55-45. On top of that, the two parties had a lot more areas of overlapping agreement back then than they do today. You’d never see a Cold War Republican embrace the Soviets the way Trump embraces Putin, for instance.

And hardening is a mutual thing. The more hardline and intense your opponent is, the more hardened you have to be yourself, as a defense response.

3

There are fewer and fewer swing voters.

In the 1960’s African Americans switched to the Democrats (and a lot new AA voters entered the electorate).

In the 1980s, Democratic working class voters switched to support Ronald Reagan, mostly on cultural issues.

I guess this is a kind a circluar answer, but it’s best I’ve got.

4

As Velocity said, it’s about polarization of the electorate. There used to be a good number of voters in both parties who would dare vote for a candidate in the other party if they thought they were the best choice. I think that’s pretty much gone now and very few voters cross the line.

The question is whether this change is permanent, or whether some day voting for the person will once again become more important than voting the party line. BTW, just voting the party line is a lot easier than doing research on the candidates. You can’t trust most of them to tell the truth anymore, if they ever did.

5

I think the ultimate reason is that, on the national level, each party has to appeal to its base as it’s number one priority. Sure, there are times when a party needs to expand its base, like the Democrats did in 1992 after losing the “Reagan Democrats” during the 80s, or what the Republicans did with Trump after the Obama years. But at a certain point, trying to expand the base by appealing to swing voters ends up costing the party more than helping the party. So we end up with a near 50/50 split, because there’s more risk vs. reward in trying to expand the base by appealing to swing voters vs. turning off your base is weighted more heavily to maintaining the base. As the bases become solidified, with fewer and fewer swing voters, we end up with a self reinforcing loop where national level candidates focus on appealing to the base because the numbers of swing voters decrease each cycle.

6

For completely different take that has zero to do with polarization, even the actual polarization we really have …

You can argue that the earlier large margins were indicative of sloppy campaigning. Whichever team lost by a hefty margin was effectively clueless during the campaign that the country was not buying what they were selling. And they were unable to detect that, or unwilling to act on the signals they were able to obtain. So they blundered blindly into a defeat that they could not see or avoid.

Fast forward to the ~1970s. This was the beginning of serious professional long term campaign staffs, serious internal polling for platform and advertising decision-making purposes, etc. And also the real beginning of a nationwide media audience rather than 50 or 500 local media audiences.

My conclusion: Since the e.g. 1970s campaigns from both parties got lots better at aiming what they were selling towards what the public was buying that year. With the result that lopsided losses no longer happened. Which has the matching result of also preventing lopsided wins for the other guy.


There is a chance, and IMO only a small chance, that we will see a blow-out this time. Because one party leader / leadership got too high on the drug of their own propaganda and went waay out on a limb selling something the public really truly wasn’t willing to buy.

7

I’m sure you’ll get many viewpoints on this and there are a number of possible contributors but one significant one is that aside from the ‘culture wars’ fire-stoking of abortion/guns/immigrants/bathrooms/transgender rights, there is really not a lot of daylight in the policy positions between the two mainstream parties. The Republican party has long ago given up any pretense of being “the party of fiscal responsibility” or advocating for small business, while the Democratic party makes mouth-noises about environmental issues and token efforts at transformation while still opening up leases for new oil and gas extraction and competing with the GOP in currying favor for corporate and ‘dark money’ campaign funds. Neither party is broadly willing to do anything substantive about social media threats to democracy and public discourse, dealing with ever-increasing deficit spending, preparing for a transition to any kind of “net zero” economy, supporting labor interests, dealing with crumbling infrastructure, or especially reimposing regulation over the financial sector and large pharmaceutical companies, much less moving to a single-payer type medical coverage or a plan to deal with demographic contraction while the largest generation we’ve ever had is rapidly moving into retirement age.

The actual diversity of opinions on most policy issues is scarcely represented which is why a non-Democrat and “King of Amendments” Bernie Sanders could make so much headway in shaking up the 2016 Democratic primaries against a center-right candidate like Hillary Clinton, while Donald Trump has repeatedly campaigned primarily on the above mentioned culture wars issues in a disturbingly fascistic manner in which he promises to change “things” while not actually demonstrating any kind of a plan and a history of not achieving even the simple things he has pledged to do. As a consequence, even though there are more people (even pro-capita) voting in the last couple of elections, the discriminators between the candidates, while stark in terms of the most vocal staking points, are not that great in terms of actual substantive policy. Add to that a sense of disaffection among rural and lower socioeconomic class voters feeling abandoned (by both parties, but especially the Democrats) for many voters the choice basically boils down to which candidate has a message that resonates emotionally, which engenders polarization and makes it really easy to exploit festering anxiety and resentment.

Stranger

8

Sure. Take McCain as an example in 2008. I still remember the time he told one lady at one of his rallies that Obama was a decent man, not the crazed Muslim / ineligible candidate because he was really African / etc. that even back then Trump was portraying him to be. There was an opportunity there (to appeal to the deplorables) that McCain (and subsequently Romney), refused to take. Trump in 2016 had no such scruples, but it’s always going to be something. The cause is the change in numbers of how large each base is. The effect is that the side losing the demographic contest has to change their strategy to change who their base is. But as long as neither side is losing due to the population of their base shrinking (the working class for Democrats in the ‘80s, the elderly Greatest Generation voters for Republicans at the end of the Bush Jr. years), there’s no need to try to change strategy. Best to focus on turning on turning out the base.

ETA. IMHO the specific change with the Trump takeover of the GOP was that Republicans replaced the elderly with the “crazies” that previously used vote Democratic. That’s why things are more toxic these days. The crazy (Tulsi Gabbard is a good example) is concentrated on one side where before it was more spread out.

9

Gerrymandering and the inadequacy of the electoral college.

10

I definitely agree this is part of it, but it seems a little strange that the hardening just so happened to happen exactly around 50%. Why not 45/55 or even 40/60?

11

If the results were so lopsided, the party that lost would have to adjust its message and policies, and so will the other one, etc., until they are both as optimal as possible, in terms of getting votes.

12

Because if the results were 45/55 or 40/60, the party on the losing side is going to be highly motivated to try a different strategy. After all, losing is losing, whether it’s 45/55 or 30/70. But once it’s 50/50, neither side is motivated to try to change strategy. Instead they’re incentivized to double down on their current strategy, to make sure their side of the 50 turns out in larger numbers than the other side’s 50.

ETA. This also means that a voter who for whatever reason is only somewhat dissatisfied with their party’s platform won’t have any motivation to switch over to the other side. They are, after all, only offering the same thing they did the time before and the time before that. It leads to a feedback cycle where both sides are locked in unless there’s a change in demographics that make one side’s base outnumber the other.

13

We’ve had the Electoral College for 236 years and in general it has resulted more often in more “landslide” elections even when the popular vote was only a few points of difference. There are major problems with the Electoral College, and particularly the way the system is ‘gamed’ to make a handful of states basically dictate the outcome of the election, but this is nothing new, at least since westward expansion (roughly the 1889–1890 admittance of the Dakotas, Montana, Washington, Idaho, and Wyoming; or for completion, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona in 1896–1912). The real problems with the Electoral College are the disproportionate representation and the “winner take all” nature of all but two states.

Gerrymandering (on the national scale) is certainly an issue with marginalizing the minority party vote by “packing and cracking” districts to be favorable, but then the main purpose of redistricting is ostensibly to create competitive races such that the margin between the two major parties is minimized under the thesis that competitiveness offers greater choice for voters. There is a general tension between making competitive races versus districts that are adequately representative of the spectrum of concerns and values, but again, when there is a general lack of policy differences and the main discriminator are emotionally-driven cultural beliefs it becomes easy to target voters based upon some narrow set of issues.

Stranger

14

I could have believed this until the era of Trump. I get the impression that someone like Trump and his MAGA faithful aren’t going to adjust their viewpoints or policies regardless of whether they lost 51-49 or 70-30. They are going to stick to their points no matter what. America could shift far to the left and they still wouldn’t budge.

The fact that Trump has been close in 3 straight presidential races is more luck and coincidence than any conscious attempt to change policy or approach, IMHO.

15

This is absolutely not true. Long before Trump started noodling about running for the Republican nomination, Newt Gingrich et al were priming a particular demographic of Americans to be upset about ‘cultural issues’ (with a subtext of racism and misogyny) spun out of the older “Southern Strategy”, and specifically as a response to the 1992 and 1996 elections which Bill Clinton carried by 6-8 percentage points in the popular vote and veritable blowouts (although not the landslides that Nixon carried in 1972 and that Reagan and GHW Bush had in the 1980/84/88 elections). Looking at Electoral College results you can see that the votes are almost neck-in-neck in the George W. Bush vs Gore (2000) and Kerry (2004) elections, and even though Barack Obama had a (Bill) Clinton style blowout in 2008 the 2012 election (where the GOP started leading with insinuations that Obama was non-Christian and all of the birther nonsense).

Gingrich has made a very lucrative post-Congressional career of going around telling GOP candidates how to carefully craft their language to dog whistle and provoke, and co-oping the very willing Robert Murdock and Fox News into becoming the GOP propaganda wing, specifically to attract older and marginalized people, many of them previously inconsistent or non-voters.
Trump’s particular distinction is that while Republicans were willing to hint and insinuate, Trump just “said the quiet part out loud”, and as much as that shocked a lot of conventional Republicans he demonstrated that there is a real appetite for bigotry and jingoism as long as you do it confidently and don’t apologize for anything. Doing that clearly picked up a lot of people who aren’t normally interested in politics, don’t make good critical judgements or understand civics and history, and are “low information” voters which are easily swayed by the rhetoric of fear, especially a fear of ‘replacement’. There is no luck or coincidence; it is the end result of a long game that the GOP has been playing for nigh on three decades; it just didn’t occur to them to be as blunt as Trump is about it.

Stranger

16

Trump isn’t going to change his stance on immigration, but he has been quite flexible on other issues, like abortion and marijuana, trying to get closer to the middle.

17

Up until the 1980s most people got their news from the Big Three nightly news broadcasts or a major city newspaper, which tended to be fairly neutral as they were trying for a large market share. Some people read the National Review or The Progressive for a more opinionated views, but this wasn’t common.

Starting the 90s people shifted to watching cable TV or getting their news from social media. So they get a much more biased viewpoint and are less likely to change their minds about any issue or candidate.

18

Right. But the reason the Republicans and Trump were willing to risk saying the quiet part out loud is because continuing on the same track they were on, relying on only the base that voted for McCain and Romney, would have likely led to ongoing further losses. So they rolled the dice with the strategy of saying the quiet part out loud. Before that, as you say, Gingrich started the whole thing going in response to Bill Clinton’s victories, once it became clear that sticking with the Bob Dole base of 1996 wasn’t going to cut it in 2000. The pressure to try a different strategy only happens when it’s clear that relying on the current base, no matter how faithful they are, isn’t going to cut it. The Republicans as they currently exist clearly think that the MAGA base is large enough to win with, so they have decided to stick with it rather than to trying to enlarge it by adopting different positions.

19

Between 1900 and 1972, both parties had liberal, moderate, and conservative wings. The bigoted South had repudiated the Republican Party after the Civil War and kept black voters from voting at all. They were far more conservative than anybody in the country today. They were against government assistance, against labor unions and labor generally, virulently isolationist, and everything else. From 1900 to 1928, Republicans won five of seven elections because there weren’t sufficient Democrats in the rest of the country. And they only lost those two because two Republicans (Taft and Roosevelt) split the vote against Wilson in 1912.

The Depression finished Republicans and FDR picked up huge numbers of voters who wanted all the things conservatives hated. Many of his programs, though, got derailed or watered-down by the Southerners in Congress. Truman’s close win in 1948 was a fluke. Eisenhower’s huge wins weren’t.

The parties shifted as of 1972. The liberal wing of the Republicans vanished and the conservative wing of the Democrats started its swift fade. Civil Rights made the South implacable enemies of the Northern Democrats. Nixon’s Southern Strategy welcomed them, effectively telling the South you can be as bigoted as you want as long as you vote for us. The South is now almost as solid red as it used to be solid blue. That means Democrats once again have to pick up votes in a fraction of the country.

They’ve done a good job of that. Since 1972, they’ve lost the popular vote only once, to war hero Bush in 2004. That’s a half century, an absolutely remarkable string, matched only by Republican domination after the Civil War.

If you went by popular vote, only 2000 was truly close. Clinton had 3 million more votes than Trump in 2016. Of course the Electoral College gives a large number of small states the power to overturn huge majorities in a few large states. That’s not due to gerrymandering, BTW. No gerrymandering at the state level. Only Congressional districts get gerrymandered for federal elections.

As stated by others, modern society effectively silos voters into hearing what they want to hear, magnified and propagandized. Once the country entered this condition, it became increasingly harder to break out of it. The randomness of local conditions puts the split as very close to 50/50 in a few states and it happens that these are sufficient to decide an election.

But it’s very possible that the outcomes this year won’t be as razor-thin as pollsters predict.

20

That should be 1992, making it only a little over 30 years, not a half century.