Chabria: The Trump landslide that wasn't

Nov. 21, 2024 3 AM PT

Hello and happy Thursday. There are 60 days until the inauguration, and today I’m wondering if size matters.

I’m referring, of course, to the size of Donald Trump’s win. The president-elect — and many in media — have billed it as a landslide. Trump and his team are calling it the kind of overwhelming result that empowers him to deliver on all of his campaign promises, from closing the Department of Education to deporting millions — a mandate to dismantle America as we know it.

But the numbers tell a different story.

“He of course wants to say he has a mandate, but it was an incredibly close election,” said Mindy Romero, director of the Center for Inclusive Democracy at the USC Price School of Public Policy.

Trump’s victory is not in doubt (this is not an election conspiracy column). He took the electoral college 312 to 226, a margin that does on its surface seem significant if not resounding.

But as more of the popular vote is counted, it turns out that Trump’s victory came with the slimmest of margins — a few hundred thousand votes in key places slid him into office. The Cook Political Report, considered to be the expert on these things, has Kamala Harris earning 48.24% of the popular vote as of Wednesday, compared with 49.89% for Trump. That’s a difference of about 2.5 million votes out of about 155 million counted.

“The idea that we are in a generation shift, a realignment, is a little bit of an over-read,” said data wizard Paul Mitchell, vice president of Political Data. “Some of it has been exaggerated.”

Romero points out that Republicans also won control of both houses of Congress, which gives Trump a “trifecta, and its power.” But Republicans did it with about 31% of eligible voters going for Trump. About 30% went for Harris. Though voter turnout was strong, an alarming 36% of eligible voters didn’t bother to cast a ballot, she said.

So it’s not quite the MAGA earthquake we’ve made it out to be.

What about California?

Of course, California is still counting its ballots — making us one of the slowest in the nation. That’s due in part to our careful checks and balances that ensure correct and fair tallies, including routine audits. But the slowness in counting our Golden State ballots helped contribute to that landslide narrative that is setting the tone for Trump’s policies.

But even here in bright blue California, there was undeniably a red ripple.

Of the ballots we have counted, we know that California seems to have had a slide to the right, like many other states. Even in Los Angeles, Republicans increased their share of the vote by more than 10 points — though that may decline in the final tally.

At the end of the day, Harris is likely to underperform in California, compared with Joe Biden in 2020. Romero said Harris now has about 58% of the California vote, a huge win, but also the lowest for a Democratic presidential candidate since 2004. Romero called that result “striking,” but also cautioned that we don’t have answers yet as to what it means.

Yes, it’s possible Trump fever has hit the West Coast. It’s also possible that people voted on the economy, rejecting the party in power rather than embracing MAGA.

“That’s the open question,” Romero said, and it will take time to answer.

The great unknowns

Mitchell adds that there was some “schizophrenia” in the results that makes it hard to know exactly what voters want moving forward. Proposition 36, the retrograde law-and-order ballot measure that will almost certainly lead to more incarceration for minor crimes, passed overwhelmingly — perhaps signaling that rightward lean. Ditto for the defeat of a rent control measure, and the downfall of a third proposition that would have raised the minimum wage.

But a few congressional seats flipped from Republican to Democratic — which makes Mitchell wonder if any rightward shift is a blip or overstated.

Before he makes pronouncements on this election, Mitchell said we need to figure out what are “temporary Trump effects” versus a more permanent conservative turn. “It gets a lot of clicks to say Democrats have to change everything or they are never going to win an election,” he said. “But that could be a huge mistake.”

Mitchell said that “the entertainment factor of Trump, the magnetism of Trump,” captured some voters, especially young men, and may account for at least some of the red ripple, here and across the country.

He points out that on election day, the top four podcasts were by conservative commentators: Joe Rogan, Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and the “Hawk Tuah Girl,” who came to fame based on an oral sex joke that went viral. That points to a huge push among the young male demographic to be both engaged and conservative.

Those popular podcasts promote a worldview that glorifies Trump’s crassness as bold and funny. But it may be a “nontransferable” charisma that fades after Trump’s final four years (if democracy holds).

Mitchell said we need to “bifurcate” our thinking on this election, and parse out what part of the electorate really wants conservative values, and what part are just Trump fans. It could be that another candidate, trying to run on the MAGA platform, may not have the same luck.

Mitchell said that in downstream races, MAGA candidates didn’t sweep. He points to the loss by Kari Lake to her Democratic opponent for a Senate seat in Arizona.

Trump may somehow be beloved for his antics, but could, say, JD Vance mime oral sex with a microphone and win, wonders Mitchell, citing an appearance in which Trump seemed to simulate that act on stage. “I don’t think so.”

Oh, please, let’s hope not.