Ben Lowry: It is now clear that Donald Trump only scraped his presidential election victory

Three weeks ago, early on the Wednesday morning, results were coming through in the US presidential election.

It was only a few hours before that voting had finished across America, on the evening of Tuesday November 5, yet it was already clear that Donald J Trump had defied the opinion polls and won re-election to the White House.

placeholder image — Donald Trump at his election night victory rally in West Palm Beach, Florida three weeks ago on November 6. His win was so unexpected that it was wrongly dubbed a landslide. In fact he won by one of the narrowest margins of any president since 1972, and with the vote not yet fully counted is only 1.6% ahead of of Kamala Harris (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

I was in the swing state of Arizona that night, and they did say that the counting of votes there might not be completed for a fortnight. In fact the certification of results in Arizona was only done on Monday (Mr Trump, the Republican Party candidate, won there easily in the end, by a margin of more than 5% over his Democratic Party challenger Kamala Harris).

Votes continue to be counted in other western parts of the US including California, but it doesn’t matter too much – Mr Trump’s victory has long since been assured. And yet, it does still matter.

The scale of his victory is important for understanding American public opinion, and for assessing whether Mr Trump has a clear mandate for the more radical changes that he is planning, such as deporting illegal immigrants from the US, and abandoning Ukraine to Vladimir Putin.

As of last night, with more than 99% of votes across the US now counted, Mr Trump was on 76,876,907 votes (49.86% of the total) while Ms Harris was on 74,392,514 votes (48.25% of the total). That is a wafer thin margin of 1.6%, far narrower than it seemed on the Friday of election week, when with 89% of all American votes counted Mr Trump was five million votes ahead of Ms Harris, a 3% margin. I knew, however, to watch out for this changing because the same happened four years ago. Joe Biden’s victory over Donald Trump was, in the end, almost 5% – much bigger than it seemed on election night.

This is because the Democrats do far better on the west coast of America, always winning the states of Washington, Oregon and California with ease (and indeed Hawaii, in the Pacific). These votes are last to be counted. Given that California, which in recent elections has voted almost 60% in favour of Democratic presidential candidates, is by far America’s most populous state it has an outsize influence in the overall breakdown of votes cast across the nation.

For comparison with this year’s election result, I have been looking at the all 14 presidential election results in the contests in my lifetime, the first of which was the 1972 race. Mr Trump has had one of the narrowest victories.

There are three main ways to assess the scale of victory in an American presidential election.

You can rank presidents by who got the highest percentage of the overall American votes (the so-called popular vote).

Or you can rank them by who had the biggest success in the state-by-state ‘electoral college’, which is made up of 538 votes that are allocated by state, depending on how many representatives each state has in the US Houses or Congress.

Finally, you can rank US presidential election results by the margin of vote that the winner got over the runner-up.

Typically the best way to rank an election is the percentage of the vote. Thus Richard Nixon got more support than any other president in my lifetime, when as the Republican Party candidate he won a mammoth 61% of the ballots cast in 1972 (against the Democratic Party candidate George McGovern).

The next highest percentage vote achieved by a post 1972 president was Ronald Reagan, also a Republican, against the Democrat Walter Mondale in 1984 (incidentally the first election that I remember). President Reagan collected just shy of the watershed figure of 60%, reaching 59% of the vote.

Those two elections were also the only ones out of the 14 in which a president won overwhelmingly in the electoral college, with both men winning all but one of the 50 US states. Mr Trump’s victory within the electoral college this year was a large one, when he won a hefty 312 out of the possible 538 votes. But even so, it was in the bottom six of the 14 presidential electoral college results.

By this first standard – the percentage of the overall vote – Mr Trump is one of only five presidents in my lifetime to have failed to get half the overall votes. It seems that he is going to end up with aforementioned 49.9% of the popular vote, thus a whisker shy of half of all votes, that crucial psychological milestone when you can say that more than half of Americans supported you. But the position is worse for Mr Trump even than that ‘bottom five’ of the popular vote or ‘bottom six’ of the electoral college rankings suggest, because two of the other times when a candidate got under 50% of the vote it was because they were in a three-way contest. That candidate was Bill Clinton, who as the Democratic contender in 1992 and 1996 was up against not just the Republican candidates, President George HW Bush and Senator Bob Dole, but also a popular independent Ross Perot. Thus it was much harder for Mr Clinton to reach the 50% level (something he nonetheless almost did in 1996).

The best way to measure scale of victory, therefore, is the percentage margin by which the winner defeated the loser in what is always ultimately a two-party race. Mr Clinton was between 6% and 9% ahead of his rivals.

Mr Trump’s margin of victory of 1.6% puts him in the bottom three post 1972 margins. In fact, there have been only two worse winning margins. George Bush Junior who actually lost the popular vote by 0.5% in 2000 to Al Gore but won the presidency on the electoral college and … Donald Trump himself. Who lost the popular vote by 2.1% to Hillary Clinton in 2016 but who also won it on the college.

That is what was expected to happen this year. That Mr Trump would lose the popular vote but win on the college. This did not happen, he won the overall vote tally as well as the college.

I wrote about the possibility of this happening before the election, saying that she was as little as 1% ahead in running averages of the most recent 20 polls that I was keeping (‘Why I think Donald Trump is marginal favourite to win,’ October 19) and also writing that if the polls underestimated Mr Trump as they had done in 2016 and 2020 he would win the college and might even win the popular vote. On the eve of the election I explained why I still thought he was favourite (‘Kamala Harris is getting some good poll numbers but the core data still favours Donald Trump’, November 4).

The worldwide surprise when he did indeed win the popular vote and all seven swing states meant that his victory was decisive, and unexpected, but was wrongly reported as a landslide – which it wasn’t at all.

Here are the margins of victory by which presidents have won since 1972, from biggest to smallest:

1. 1972 Richard Nixon 23.2% vote margin lead (over George McGovern)

2. 1984 Ronald Regan 18.2% (over Walter Mondale)

3. 1980 Reagan 9.7% (over Jimmy Carter)

4. 1996 Bill Clinton 8.5% (over Bob Dole)

5. 1988 George Bush Sr 7.8% (over Mike Dukakis)

6. 2008 Barack Obama 7.2% (over John McCain)

7. 1992 Bill Clinton 5.6% (over George Bush Sr)

8. 2020 Joe Biden 4.5% (over Donald Trump)

9. 2012 Barack Obama 3.9% (over Mitt Romney)

10. 2004 George Bush Jr 2.4% (over John Kerry)

11. 1976 Jimmy Carter 2.1% (over Gerald Ford)