Biggest Landslides

Sorted by percentage

1: 1920: Warren Harding & Calvin Coolidge (R) vs James M Cox & FDR
      16,144,093 to 9,139,661 (7,004,432 differential)
      60.3% to 34.2% (26.1%)
      404 to 127 electors
      One of our most corrupt presidents and one of the most popular during his time in office.

2: 1924: Calvin Coolidge & Charles Dawes(R) v John W Davis & Charles W Bryan(D) v Robert La Follette (Progressive)
      15,723,789 to 8,386,242 to 4,831,706 (7,337,547 differential)
      54% to 28.8% (25.2%)
      382 to 136 to 13 electors
      Davis, a southern democrat and La Follete, a Wisconsin progressive, split the D vote, making the landslide appear larger than it really was.  Harding and Coolidge presided over the bubble that led to the great depression

3: 1936: FDR & John Nance Garner v Alf Landon and Frank Knox
      27,747,636 to 16,679,543 (11,068,093 differential)
      60.8% to 36.5% (24.3%)
      523 to 8 electors.
      FDR, his policies successful at beating back the depression, carried all but two states: VT and ME

4: 1972: Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew vs George McGovern & Sargent Shriver
     47,168,710 to 29,173,222 (17,995,480 difference)
     60.7% to 37.5% (23.2%)
     520 to 17 electors
     McGovern was forced to change VPs after the convention and Nixon ran a terribly dirty campaign, which included the watergate breakin.

5: 1964: LBJ & Hubert Humphrey vs Barry Goldwater & William Miller
      43,127,041 to 27,175,754 (15,951,287 difference)
      61.1% to 38.5% (22.6%)
      486 to 52 electors
      Goldwater made a lot of noise about using A-bombs against North Vietnam, which scared pretty much everybody.  He won only his home state Arizona and the deep south.

6: 1904: TR & Charles Fairbanks vs Alton Parker & Henry Davis
     7,630,457 to 5,083,880 (2,546,577 difference)
     56.4% to 37.6% (18.8%)
     336 to 140 electors
     Incumbent TR was successful in foreign affairs and trustbusting, and immensely popular.  He'd have easily won a third term but he elevated his protege, Taft, who turned against his successful policies.

7: 1984: Ronald Reagan & GHW Bush vs Walter Mondale & Geraldine Ferraro
      54,455,472 to 37,577,352 (16,878,120 difference)
      58.8% to 40.6% (18.2%)
      525 to 13 electors.
      Reagan touted his "Morning In America" as he presided over the end of the 10 year stagflation caused by the multiple OPEC oil embargoes.  Mondale won only his home state and DC

 8: 1932: FDR & John Nance Garner vs Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis
       22,821,277 to 15,761,254 (7,060,023 difference)
       57.4% to 39.7% (17.7%)
       472 to 59 electors
      Hoover presided over the start of the Great Depression and exacerbated it immensely with his misguided policies.

9: 1928: Herbert Hoover & Charles Curtis vs Al Smith and Joe Robinson
      21,427,123 to 15,015,464 (6,411,659 difference)
       58.2% to 40.8% (17.4%)
       444 to 87 electors
       Hoover, presiding over the continuing bubble, ran against Smith, the first Catholic to run for president.

10: 1832: Andrew Jackson & Martin van Buren vs Henry Clay & John Sergeant
      701,780 to 484,205 (217,575 difference)
       54.2% to 37.4% (16.8%)
       219 to 49 electors



127M people voted in the 2012 election.   Inexplicably, there are at least 50 million people who will vote for Trump, despite, or perhaps because of his open dishonesty and appalling behavior, or any Republican, no matter how grotesquely unqualified the candidate is.  At this moment, fivethirtyeight.com has Trump at 42.7% and Clinton at 49.2%, a 6.5% difference.  If these numbers hold and there are 130M votes cast, Trump will get 55.5M and Hillary 63.9M votes, an 8.4M vote difference.   It's a good attempt so far, but he's got to alienate a lot more voters to get the Yuugest landslide in history.  He is certainly giving it his best shot.



      
      

Seattle Minimum Wage

There's a widely held belief that the minimum wage hurts low wage employment.  There's basically no evidence of this.

Washington state has one of the highest minimum wages in the country and among the lowest unemployment.  The statewide was $9.19 in 2013 and rose to $9.47 at the start of 2015.

Seattle is one of several cities that's voted in a gradual rise to a $15 minimum wage.  Prior to 1Apr2015, it was the same as the state, $9.47.  On that date, it went up to $10 for small businesses and $11 for big ones.  1Jan2016, it went up a further dollar to $11 for small businesses and $12 for big ones (big is defined by 500 or more workers).

Conservatives insisted that this would surely cause a spike in unemployment.  And sure enough, they managed to find one.  The very conservative "American Enterprise Institute" put together BLS data that seemed to show it and conservatives and business columnists around the country jumped on board.  Here's one from Forbes.   Ooh, scary, 9 months (8 actually, but we all know conservatives aren't good with anything that involves numbers) of declining employment.

But wait:  here's the same data, charted out to August this year

 Note that the climb in unemployment seems to have ended, and by August (the latest that data has been compiled for, it was back down almost to the low.  Well then, couldn't it have been lower without the burden of the high minimum wage?  Perhaps, but notice that the biggest declines took place after the second hike, which was almost double the size of the first hike.  And mysteriously, the sharpest drop occurred after the statewide wage hike that took place that January.

But here's the regional data.  Seattle (population 630K) is the biggest city in King County (pop 2M), and the whole thing is in the Seattle Tacoma Bellevue Metropolitan Statistical Area (pop 3.7M)

The pattern is almost exactly the same, and the rest of the MSA only got the statewide wage hike, not the city one.  Note also that Seattle's unemployment is almost a point lower than the regional, despite the higher wage, and the difference seems to be the same, irrespective of what Seattle's minimum wage is.    From these data, we can't be exactly sure what's causing these fluctuations, but this is pretty good evidence that it's not the minimum wage.  It's plainly dominated by events that are taking place at a much larger scale than the city itself.  Seattle is the biggest employment hub in the region, but it's not a large enough share to have this universal effect.  And of the 5 minimum wage hikes captured in these graphs (1Jan2013, 1Jan2014, 1Jan2015, 1Apr 2015, 1Jan2016), only one of them correlates with climbing unemployment.

This author makes a pretty good case that the insistence is not, and never has been, about the minimum wage depressing employment, but about employers wanting to keep their workers a little bit scared and desperate.  Scared and desperate workers don't make waves, like demanding better wages or safer working conditions.