Don’t bet on those Trump ‘landslide’ predictions just yet 

The failed assassination attempt on former President Donald Trump has led to speculation that he is headed for a victory of “landslide” proportions in November. 

“The election, for all intents and purposes, appears to be over,” declared a commentary at the Spectator after Trump survived a shooting Saturday in western Pennsylvania. “Now more than ever, Trump is headed for a landslide victory in November.” 

Photographs of Trump bloodied and pumping his fist in the air “are already galvanizing Republican hopes that voters will further rally behind him for a landslide victory in November,” the French news service Agence-France Press reported Monday from Washington. 

Such conjecture is premature — even risky, given the prevailing volatile state of American politics. Other narrative-disrupting developments are not implausible, given the long history of October and November surprises in presidential campaigns of the past. Restraint is advisable in making predictions more than 100 days before an election. 

Still , even before Trump was targeted by a 20-year-old would-be assassin, forecasts of a “landslide” were in circulation, emanating from diverse sources in response to stark evidence of President Biden’s age-related infirmity. Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet, a Democrat, said in an interview on CNN last week that Trump “is on track, I think, to win this election, and maybe win it by a landslide and take with him the Senate and the House.” 

Billionaire investor Bill Ackman took to X late last month shortly after the 90-minute debate, which went dreadfully for the president, and declared, flatly, that Trump “is going to win in a landslide.” 

Even The New York Times noted in an analysis: “The word ‘landslide’ is now credibly being mentioned about Mr. Trump for the first time in his political career.” 

Credibly? Well, perhaps not. 

Ample reasons exist why a popular vote landslide is unlikely in 2024. Notable among those reasons is that the country is, and remains, sharply divided politically, which has led to a series of fairly close presidential elections and no true landslides in 40 years. Not since Ronald Reagan crushed Walter Mondale in a 49-state blowout in 1984 has a presidential candidate won election by at least 10 percentage points, the traditional standard for a landslide victory. Reagan won by 18 points. 

Many Americans, moreover, remain inclined — even keen — to vote against Trump in 2024. Before the attempted assassination, pollsters reported that the former president’s disapproval rating was above 50 percent, which certainly represents a constraint on building a popular-vote landslide. Another likely constraint is Trump’s choice for running mate, first-term Sen. JD Vance of Ohio. Vance is no moderate, and as such is unlikely to add substantially to Trump’s popular vote total.

In any event, summer can be a time when predictions or expectations of a “landslide” can take hold and multiply, only to fizzle in the weeks and months that follow.  

Four years ago, Trump’s ouster by landslide dimensions was much discussed by pundits. James Carville, a Democratic strategist, went on MSNBC in late June 2020 to declare Trump’s prospects for reelection so bleak that he ought to be advised to quit the campaign. Biden then led Trump by 10 points, according to polling averages compiled by RealClearPolitics.  

“There’s no chance he’s going to be reelected,” Carville asserted, adding that “somebody’s going to have to go tell this guy, ‘Look, you just can’t risk the humiliating defeat that’s going to come your way.’ ” The Republican Party, Carville said, “can’t continue in this direction. They have to think of something else.”

About the same time, Josh Kraushaar wrote in the National Journal that it was “more likely that Biden will win a landslide victory…than it is that Trump can mount a miraculous turnaround in just over four months.” Kraushaar’s commentary carried the headline, “Prepare for a Biden landslide.”

Biden defeated Trump in 2020 by 4.5 points — a clear victory, but hardly the landslide anticipated by pundits, or by late-campaign polls conducted for CNN and NBC News. They had pegged Biden’s lead at 12 and 10 points, respectively. 

Predictions of landslides were also frustrated in 2016, too, when Democrat Hillary Clinton was expected to defeat Trump handily. Jamelle Bouie wrote at Slate, “There is no horse race here. Clinton is far enough ahead, at a late enough stage in the election, that what we have is a horse running by itself, unperturbed but for the faint possibility of a comet hitting the track. Place your bets accordingly.” Clinton’s lead in the RealClearPolitics polling average was 5.4 points when Bouie’s commentary was posted in late summer 2016. 

In the meantime, Bret Stephens, then of the Wall Street Journal, said on MSNBC that “a lot of people have no idea that Trump is headed for a historic defeat.” Trump narrowly lost the popular vote in 2016 but won the Electoral College and the presidency. 

Pollster Elmo Roper announced in late summer 1948 that he would release no additional survey results about the race between President Harry Truman and Republican Thomas E. Dewey, so sure he was of Truman’s coming repudiation. Roper predicted Dewey would win “by a heavy margin,” saying opinion polling had “come of age and proved its accuracy and worth.” 

Those polls failed in epic fashion when Truman won a stunning upset. 

W. Joseph Campbell is professor emeritus of communication at American University in Washington, D.C. He has written seven solo-authored books including, most recently, “Lost in a Gallup: Polling Failure in U.S. Presidential Elections.”