The incumbent president was sure he was going to lose reelection.
Three long years had passed and hundreds of thousands of soldiers had died due to wounds or, more likely, infection and gangrene after being treated in ramshackle battlefield hospitals. The nation had grown weary of the war and all of the dislocations of food and commerce that went along with it.
Then came news Atlanta had fallen to Gen. Sherman’s troops on Sept. 2, 1864. Republican President Abraham Lincoln and voters in the North could finally see that his prosecution of the Civil War was going to succeed in saving the Union.
Lincoln won comfortably. He garnered 212 of the 233 electoral votes, all cast by the 24 states that remained in the Union.
Voters could vote early back in 1864 similar to today. And by mail. Hundreds of thousands of Union soldiers and veterans voted en masse for Lincoln and turned a tight election into a landslide.
Conversely in 1980, an incumbent president presided over a desultory economy and repeated embarrassing foreign policy disasters overseas. Somehow, the beleaguered president maintained a solid 8% lead in the Gallup Poll taken two weeks before the November election.
Ronald Reagan beat President Jimmy Carter 489-49 in the Electoral College in the largest electoral wipeout of an incumbent president in U.S. history.
What happened? How could a nation of 18.5 million people (North only) in 1864 and more than 226 million in 1980 essentially change their collective mind like a massive school of fish and switch their political preferences in tidal wave fashion?
Not everyone changed their mind overnight. Just a significant few ― but enough few to get their candidate over the 50%-plus-one majority hurdle in each state to garner their electoral votes.
It is basic math.
It doesn’t take a lot to turn a presidential election into an Electoral College rout. All it takes to win all of a state’s Electoral College votes (except in Nebraska and Maine) is to win the state by one measly vote. Donald Trump or Kamala Harris could win every state and D.C. by one vote and achieve the grand slam of winning the presidency by 538-0 in the Electoral College and by only 51 votes in the popular vote, as inconceivable as it sounds.
It is the way our founders decided to give control to the winning candidate and party so they could effectively govern “with a mandate” from the people.
Small deviations in voter turnout and performance versus projections based on polls can have devastating impacts on the outcome of an election.
Men represented 48% of the final count nationwide in 2020. Women represented 52%. Donald Trump won the male vote 53% to 45% over Joe Biden. Biden won the female vote 57-42 over Trump.
Any small change upward in the male turnout percentage of the final popular vote could turn a close race into a solid victory for Trump in 2024.
Any change upward in the female turnout percentage over 53% because more women put abortion rights above every other consideration could ensure a safe election for Harris to be the next president of the United States of America.
However, Harris is having a devil of a time getting white men, black men and Hispanic men to like her first and then vote for her. She has been a driving force in the emasculation of men in America along with her progressive Democratic socialist cohorts who have routinely tried to marginalize and ostracize men simply because they embody “toxic masculinity.”
Remember her unfounded attacks on Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch?
Every man does.
The Democrats know men don’t like her complete about-face on every issue ― they think she is dishonest. She reminds men of school teachers who used to get on them all the time for acting up in class. Her condescending nasal voice and incessant cackling come across as unserious to men. To many men, that is enough to disqualify her long before they get to her dangerous, extreme, uber-left-wing politics and policies.
Those same manly black, Hispanic and white men have seen Trump survive one bloody assassination attempt ― and one other attempt ― plus endure years of coordinated fabricated opposition by the media, lawyers, judges, Adam Schiff and Nancy Pelosi. They see a brave man willing to stand up to all of the injustice and oppression from the Government State and say to themselves: “If they can do that to him, they can do that to me one day!”
If men make up 49% of the final vote instead of 48%, 1.56 million more men will have cast their vote than in 2020. That is how close elections turn into blowouts.
