It seems that 49-state or 500-electoral vote landslide victories are gone for good, a relic of the 1900s.
The past six presidential elections haven’t exactly been blowouts and we’re a deeply divided electorate. The losing side still seems nearly guaranteed to carry at least 10 states or 100 electoral votes.
I picked 45 states or 450 electoral votes as a somewhat arbitrary cutoff. Do you think we will ever see an utterly crushing, lopsided blowout again, or are those days gone forever?
IF the economy were ever to return to normalcy with near full employment, AND there wasn’t a third party contender, then I could see a POTUS get reelected with a huge landslide majority.
But 45 states? Doubtful. For one thing, there are states like California, Mass, Vermont, New Jersey, Maryland, etc that are going to be a lock for Democrats no matter what and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. Same thing goes for Republicans in North/South Dakota, Utah, Idaho, most of the south, etc., etc…
So even if a candidate won with 60% of the popular vote, I see it difficult for any of either side to get more than 40 states.
Anything is possible. The political landscape could change dramatically, given sufficient time. I don’t think it’s going to happen any time soon, though.
It’s unlikely that it’ll ever happen, but if it does, it’ll be because of how divided we are now, not despite it. The natural state of affairs in a system like ours is to have two parties, both competitive. If one party starts to become too dominant, the other party will give way on its platform to appeal more to the voters. In the past, this occasionally failed to happen for an election or two, because the flow of information was slow: It took a long time for the parties to realize that they were losing power and to adapt. Nowadays, though, we’re so hyper-polled that any party should realize its problems long before it ever got to the point of a 45-state landslide.
The one thing that could make such a landslide possible today would be a party that became so entrenched in its beliefs that, even with all of the data available showing that they were on the wrong side of the voters, they still refused to change their platform. Even that wouldn’t last long: A party that won’t adapt will instead be replaced. But that’s a slow enough process that it could allow for an election first.
I wish there was a “Yes” option that didn’t have a time frame on it.
I believe that an election like that would be a possible outcome if we were in the middle of the right kind of crisis. Something like WWII, that would give us a strong incentive to keep the same commander in chief, without also creating a strong opposition movement. So I’d say it’s a 5% chance of it happening at virtually any time, but only in those very unlikely circumstances.
Exactly my thought.
The country will be around for a long time and there’s plenty of opportunity for a sea change in politics between now and then. One wildly popular candidate, one wildly unpopular candidate on the other side, and good/bad times could push us to 45-state territory. Or if one political party fractures and we get a landslide where the votes go 50-30-20 in most states.
Or, in the distant future, after the US absorbs Canada and Mexico and a 45 state majority is easy because we have 87 states 
I think Reagan won only 58% of the popular vote in 1984 and still carried 49 states.
But…I wonder how he got Illinois, California, Massachusetts, Vermont, Democratic strongholds etc. to vote for him.
I could see it happening in a couple cycles down the line as a lot of baby boomers die off and if there was a tea-party darling third party candidate to split votes.
But consider he was already wildly popular, had been governor of California, and Mondale had all the Charisma of a wet sponge, and it’s not surprising Reagan did so well.
IL and CA have become Democratic strongholds fairly recently. Both voted for HW Bush (the first time), voted for Reagan twice, voted for Ford, voted for Nixon ('68 & '72), and California even voted for Nixon over Kennedy (IL famously went Kennedy). From Eisenhower until Clinton, Lyndon Johnson was the only time both states went to the Democratic candidate.
The Republican candidate won Vermont in every presidential election from 1860 to 1988 with the exception of LBJ’s landslide in 1964. Why wouldn’t it have voted for Reagan? The Democrats won California one time between 1952 and 1988 (again LBJ). The real question is what changed those once-swing states or reliably Republican states to the solid Democrat column.
I figure we’ll get some landslides in the future, but those will be the results of shifts in voting patterns that are probably impossible for us to predict from our vantage point in the present.
1984 was 30 years ago. Different time, different people. Look at how Virginia, a red state in most POTUS elections for decades has shifted blue.
My post was about now and the future. I simply don’t see a candidate getting more than 40 states any time soon.
Of course another thing along those lines is that back before direct primaries, the party bosses could run whoever they wanted. Some of the historic landslides are simply the result of the other party picking a real stinker. These days, in order for someone to get past the primaries, that means they at least have a certain amount of support among the party faithful that votes in the primaries.
Primaries may not necessarily produce candidates any more likely to win (sometimes the opposite), but it does tend to weed out any candidates who would just be utterly obliterated in the general.
What if one candidate did something grossly disgustingly wrong, illegal or shockingly disturbing less than one month out from the election?
I’m thinking something along the lines of going out plastered, getting stopped, pissing all over a cop car then vomiting on a female officer.
Or maybe a video emerging three weeks before an election of goat felching and then raping an 18 year old male college student basketball star that he’d drugged on some date rape drug or something.
What would happen then?
The way we’ve historically seen these types of elections is when an incumbent has run for reelection and the voters are mostly happy with him. The reason we aren’t seeing such huge landslides isn’t because the country is divided, but because there hasn’t been a President worth reelecting in awhile.
If the next President does well, he or she will win 40 states when it comes time to face the voters again.
Romney could have done all of those things in 2012 and still won Wyoming, Utah, North and South Dakota, Alabama, Kentucky, Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Idaho.
I think a landslide is possible, but will be due to catastrophic events. Johnson won a landslide soon after the Kennedy assassination(with the help of a so so Republican candidate). Others have pointed to the death of social conservatism as a possible way to gain a landslide, another would be catastrophic economic event. Another financial or economic collapse could see a near blowout for one side or the other(see the New Deal and its political consequences). It doesn’t take that many voters to change sides, all it takes it for a few percent of them to do so and a further few percent to stay at home disheartened.
It could happen, but only with a Republican candidate against an inferior opponent. I see no circumstance that would allow a Democrat to win OK, KS, NE, SD, ND, MT, or UT. Thus a 45 state Democratic win is impossible. If the Democrats nominate someone who is perceived to be the second coming of Mike Dukakis, then the reverse is possible.
One of these things is not like the others. Did you perhaps mean to say Wyoming instead of Montana? It would take either a very good year for Democrats or Schweitzer running, but Montana is definitely winnable.