I never expect Trump to speak the truth. When he does, perhaps by accident, it's a shock.
But I haven't been at all shocked to hear Trump spout a lie: that he defeated Harris in a landslide victory that gives him a powerful mandate from the American people to do whatever he damn well wants, no matter how odious, unlawful, or unconstitutional.
Here's a screenshot by someone I follow on Blue Sky and X (I'm weaning myself from X after Elon Musk became a shameless promoter of MAGA falsehoods) which shows a graphic that was on Chris Hayes' MSNBC show today.
You can see that Trump's popular vote margin of victory was smaller than every presidential election since 2000, aside from Al Gore's very narrow margin of 0.5% in 2000. And California has many more votes to count, so Trump's 2024 margin likely will shrink to 1.6% or 1.5% (currently it is 1.65%, which rounds to 1.7%).
Notably, Trump's popular vote margin in his 2024 presidential win is lower than Hillary Clinton's popular vote margin in her 2016 presidential loss. And it likely will end up being about a third of the popular vote margin enjoyed by Joe Biden in 2020.
Regarding how many votes enabled Trump to win the Blue Wall states in 2024, another person I follow on Blue Sky has the answer: 230,000. Which is 00.15% of the approximate 153 million votes cast in the election. So a shift from Trump to Harris in the Blue Wall states of about 1/7 of a percent would have meant that Kamala Harris would be announcing her cabinet picks, not Donald Trump.
Of course, in 2000 George Bush won the presidency on the basis of just 537 votes in Florida, aided by an extremely contentious and legally dubious ruling by the conservatives on the Supreme Court. But that was enough for him to become the undisputed president of the United States after Al Gore conceded to Bush.
Likewise, Trump was the legitimate victor in the 2024 election. All I'm saying is that Trump's margin of victory in both the popular vote and the electoral college wasn't hugely impressive by historical standards. Here's how CNN described Trump's mediocre electoral college margin.
In terms of the Electoral College, Trump won 312 electoral votes. It’s a solid win, but in the lower half of US presidential elections.
It was a better showing than either his or Joe Biden’s 306 electoral votes in 2016 and 2020, respectively. It also outperformed both of George W. Bush’s electoral victories in 2000 and 2004. But it was far short of Barack Obama’s 365 electoral votes in 2008 and 332 in 2012.
Bill Clinton never reached 50% in the popular vote because both of his presidential elections featured a strong third-party candidate in Ross Perot. But Clinton did run away with the Electoral College vote, winning 370 electoral votes in 1992 and 379 in 1996.
Even those strong victories are dwarfed by Ronald Reagan’s 1984 win, a true landslide. Reagan lost only Washington, DC, and Minnesota, the home state of his Democratic rival, Walter Mondale, thereby securing 525 electoral votes and more than 58% of the popular vote.
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