The 2024 presidential election was close, not a landslide

Was the 2024 presidential election close?

It certainly didn't feel that way on election night and in the days immediately after. It became clear that President-elect Donald Trump was on pace to win relatively early in the evening. Interactive maps of election results showed the entire country shifting right. By Thursday, Trump had won 51 percent of the votes that had been counted thus far, more than 3 percentage points ahead of Vice President Kamala Harris. Headlines declared that Trump's victory was "resounding" and a "rout." His allies proclaimed it was a "decisive win" and claimed a mandate.

But ballots were still being counted. As we've gotten more data and had the time to put the 2024 election in perspective, the truth has become clear: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was close. With more ballots counted, Trump's national popular vote lead is down to 1.6 points, and Harris could have won if she had done just a couple of points better in just a few states. Any argument that the 2024 election was a "landslide" is misleading. It relies on a combination of recency bias and using the wrong measuring sticks.

The right way to measure an election's closeness

Let's go through those measuring sticks one at a time. The most obvious one pointing to a Trump landslide is the margin in the Electoral College. After months of punditry about how the 2024 election could be one of the closest elections of all time, Trump ended up winning all seven major swing states, which came as a surprise to many Americans (although it shouldn't have been, since we and many other analysts cautioned that a sweep was a possible, even likely, outcome). Assuming there are no faithless electors, that will give Trump a healthy 312-226 electoral-vote margin when the Electoral College convenes on Dec. 17.

But because of its winner-take-all nature, the Electoral College isn't a good measure of closeness. Imagine an election where one candidate wins every state and district 50.1 percent to 49.9 percent. That candidate would romp to a 538-0 victory in the Electoral College, but that election was obviously still very close. The same principle was at play in the 2024 election: Trump won six of the seven major swing states (Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) by 3.2 points or less. And he won Wisconsin by just 0.9 points, Michigan by just 1.4 points and Pennsylvania by just 1.7 points.

That's important because if Harris had won those three states (plus all the states and districts she actually did win), she would have gotten exactly 270 Electoral College votes. From this way of thinking about the election, you can see that Pennsylvania was the decisive state in the 2024 campaign — what we at 538 call the "tipping-point state."

In other words, if Harris had done just 1.8 points better across the board — or even just in those three states (although that's not usually how elections work) — she would be the president-elect right now.

Trump's win in historical context

That's a pretty close election by any standard — but we can see just how close it is by putting that number into historical context. There have been 20 presidential elections since the end of World War II, and in only six of them was the tipping-point state decided by a smaller margin than Pennsylvania was decided by this year.

Granted, two of those elections were 2016 and 2020: In both of those years, the tipping-point state was Wisconsin and was decided by less than 1 point. In that sense, it's understandable that 2024 felt like a big win for Trump: It was relatively big for him. But it certainly wasn't big if you take the historical long view, or even the medium view: In the two presidential elections before Trump came on the scene, former President Barack Obama won Colorado (the tipping-point state in both 2008 and 2012) by much bigger margins than Trump won Pennsylvania by this year.

And in fact, the same is true if you look at the Electoral College margin, Trump's main claim to landslide status. His likely 86-electoral-vote margin over Harris is larger than the 77 electoral votes he won by in 2016 or the 74 electoral votes that President Joe Biden won by in 2020. But it's smaller than the 126 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2012 and the 192 electoral votes that Obama won by in 2008. And once again, it is only the 14th-biggest Electoral College victory since the end of World War II.

Another way to assess the closeness of an election is, of course, the national popular vote. While the popular vote doesn't affect who actually wins the election, it can be relevant in discussions of how big of a mandate the winner has to govern. By this measure as well, 2024 was a historically close election. Since the end of World War II, only three elections had popular-vote margins smaller than Trump's current 1.6-point lead: 1960, 1968 and 2000.

Trump has a couple of rebuttals to this. The first is that he is only the second Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote since 1988 (the other was then-President George W. Bush in 2004). In an era in which the American electorate is typically slightly Democratic-leaning, that is an impressive accomplishment — but it doesn't make the 2024 election a "landslide" in absolute terms.

The second is that his 1.6-point popular-vote win represents a 6.1-point shift toward Republicans from the 2020 election. That's certainly a notable shift in only four years; the country hasn't changed its mind so quickly since racing 9.7 points to the left between Bush's 2004 win and Obama's 2008 win. But most of that movement is because Biden set a relatively high bar for Democrats by winning the 2020 popular vote by 4.5 points; if Biden had won by just, say, 1 point instead, the shift toward Trump wouldn't stand out.

High expectations for Democrats in the popular vote, along with the widely circulated maps showing big swings toward Trump in virtually every county in the country, may have played a big role in setting those early narratives that Trump had notched an overwhelming win. Another was probably the media's repeated warnings before the election that it might take days to project a winner. While that very easily could have come to pass, we may have overemphasized the point. It was also always possible that a winner would be projected on election night, which is of course what happened.

After it took until the Saturday after Election Day for media outlets to project that Biden had won the 2020 election, the relatively early projection in 2024 (ABC News projected him as the winner at 5:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday) probably made Trump's win seem more decisive. But once again, that's recency bias at play. The 2024 election actually took longer to project than all but three presidential elections since 1976. Apart from the interminable 2000 (when the race came down to a recount in Florida that didn't end until Dec. 12) and 2020 elections, only 2004 kept us in more suspense.

All in all, the idea that Trump won an overwhelming victory in 2024 is less grounded in the data and more based on a sense of surprise relative to (perhaps miscalibrated) expectations.

Why perceptions of the 2024 election matter

The debate over the closeness of the 2024 election may seem academic — Trump won; who cares if it was a landslide or not? — but it could have a very real impact on the ambitiousness of Trump's second term. Boasting about the scope of his win, Trump claimed in his victory speech that "America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate" to govern — a narrative that caught on in the media and with many voters, too. In a mid-November poll from HarrisX/Harvard University, 71 percent of registered voters said that Trump had a mandate to govern, including 50 percent who said he had a "strong mandate."

Trump is just the latest in a long line of presidents-elect trying to convert electoral success into political capital to pass their agendas. There's just one problem: Political scientists who have studied the idea of presidential mandates generally agree that they're made up. It's basically impossible to ascertain what voters had in mind when they went to the ballot box and whether a candidate's win was an explicit endorsement for a specific policy or approach to governing.

And according to research by 538 contributor Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, there is no relationship between how often a president-elect claims a mandate and how big their victory was. In fact, Azari even found that presidents are more likely to claim mandates when they are in a politically weak position, as a sort of act of desperation to claim that their policies have public support.

But research has also found that, much like Tinker Bell, mandates can exist if enough people believe that they do. According to political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson, when there is a media consensus that an election carries a mandate, Congress responds by passing major legislation. Azari and Peterson have further found that politicians themselves, like Trump, can push Congress to action as well, simply by insisting that they have a mandate. And per Azari, when a president-elect insists that he has a mandate, it is often accompanied by major expansions of presidential power.

In other words, regardless of how close the 2024 election was in reality, Trump's claims to a mandate suggest that Republicans are planning to govern like they won in a landslide.