Are Blowout Elections a Thing Of The Past?

Geoffrey Skelley: “The 2016 contest between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton was the eighth consecutive presidential race in which the national popular vote margin was smaller than 10 percentage points. That is, in every presidential election from 1988 to 2016, the difference between the vote shares of the Democratic and Republican nominees was in the single digits. That’s the longest stretch of such elections since the Civil War, surpassing a run of seven straight single-digit margins from 1876 to 1900.”

“In the recent string of close elections, there have been two in which the nominee who won the national popular vote didn’t win the Electoral College — 2000 and 2016. Before 2000, the last time a candidate had won the popular vote but not the Electoral College was in 1888.”

“Now, some might not consider a large single-digit margin — such as Barack Obama’s 7-point win in 2008 — to be ‘close.’ But it’s worth noting that out of 21 presidential elections from 1904 to 1984 — or the time between these two competitive periods — only nine had margins in the single digits. The other 12 were double-digit blowouts.”