Decryption | The myth of an electoral “tidal wave”

(New York) Get out of this body, Sean Spicer!

Last Friday, the next White House spokesperson, Karoline Leavitt, seemed to take herself for the man who played, at the start of Donald Trump’s first term as president, the role that is destined for him today.

For the record: the day after the investiture ceremony of the 45^e president, who had attracted a crowd smaller than that of Barack Obama eight years earlier, Sean Spicer had declared, in front of incredulous journalists: “This is the largest crowd that has ever attended an inauguration ceremony, period final. »

To justify this statement, which everyone knew was false, Kellyanne Conway, then presidential advisor, subsequently declared that Sean Spicer had relied on “alternative facts”.

Karoline Leavitt used the same process last week by denouncing articles published by the New York Times and Politico. They contested the idea that Donald Trump won an electoral “tidal wave” or a “resounding” victory on November 5.

“New alert for fake news,” wrote on X the woman who will become, at 27, the youngest presidential spokesperson in history. “Here are the ridiculous headlines from Politico and New York Times This morning. Fake news is trying to downplay President Trump’s massive and historic victory to try to delegitimize his mandate before he is even sworn in again. »

However, as remarkable as it was for a former president rejected by the electorate four years earlier, Donald Trump’s victory was not “massive”. The most astonishing thing is not that the president-elect and his allies tried to pretend otherwise, but that the media waited nearly three weeks before correcting their own story.

Several leading media, including the New York Timesthe Washington Post and the Associated Press, in fact used the term “resounding” to describe Donald Trump’s triumph, while others spoke of a “dazzling” or “crushing” victory, as Politico recalls in its article¹.

In reality, Donald Trump’s victory is one of the narrowest in American history.

Everything is relative

The gap between myth and reality is largely due to the slow counting of votes in several states, including California. During the 2018 midterm elections, the same phenomenon pushed the media to initially downplay a “blue wave” which would allow the Democrats to achieve a net gain of 41 seats in the House of Representatives.

However, after the almost complete counting of the vote, the portrait that emerges does not only put the scale of Donald Trump’s victory into perspective. It also allows us to see the spectacular collapse of the Democratic vote.

The following is not to call into question Donald Trump’s electoral achievements in 2024. The president-elect improved on his 2020 performance in almost every county in the United States. He also made gains among black and Latino men, as well as among young people.

But the fact is that his margin of victory, expected to be about 1.6 percent of the vote, is less than that of every winning president since 1888, except John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard Nixon in 1968. Added to this is the fact that Donald Trump will not be able to boast of having won the majority of votes cast, unlike his most recent predecessors, from George Bush in 2004 to Joe Biden in 2020 through Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012 (according to the most recent count from the Cook Political Report, he collected 49.86% of the vote against 48.26% for Kamala Harris).

Donald Trump can certainly congratulate himself on having won a greater number of electoral votes than Joe Biden, i.e. 312 out of 538, against 306. But his margin of around 232,000 votes in the three most important key states – Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin – will be slightly lower than what Joe Biden obtained in the same places during his 2020 victory. A victory that no one called an electoral “tidal wave”.

No consolation for Democrats

This term has, however, found itself in the mouths of many allies of Donald Trump, with other superlatives of the same character. Why take note of it or even be upset about it? Notably because these alternative facts recur in the declarations of members of the president-designate’s entourage to justify his most controversial appointments or projects.

“President Trump was re-elected thanks to a resounding mandate from the American people to change the status quo in Washington,” Karoline Leavitt wrote on X last week.

Donald Trump and his entourage would not be the first to exaggerate the scope of a mandate, an error for which more than one president had to pay the price in the midterm elections.

The Democrats, for their part, cannot console themselves by citing a “close” defeat. They owe their inability to win even the popular vote to this spectacular collapse of their support in states where neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump really campaigned.

In total, Kamala Harris received 7.1 million fewer votes than Joe Biden in 2020, the result of large numbers of Democratic voters deciding to stay home or, to a lesser extent, support Donald Trump or another candidate. In New York City alone, she obtained 570,000 fewer votes than Joe Biden, while Donald Trump won more than 90,000 more than in 2020. The same phenomenon was reproduced in several other large cities American, including Los Angeles and Chicago.

Kamala Harris also received fewer votes than Joe Biden in several large cities in key states, including Philadelphia and Detroit.

No alternative facts can shield Democrats from reality, any more than Republicans, for that matter.

1. Read the Politico article