Margins Matter: Landslides Are the Last Defense Against Authoritarians

In this era, close elections are suicide for Democrats.

Illustration by Riley Levine

There’s a strange kind of political amnesia that sets in every election cycle. People convince themselves that the way things feel in the moment is the way they’ve always been, or that a string of bad breaks means the system is permanently rigged against them. It’s human nature to turn frustration into fatalism, especially when it comes to politics. But fatalism is a lousy strategy.

After my first lecture this semester, a student stopped me and asked, “How do we win next year and in 2028?” I said, “What do you mean by we?” Because you never know. It was the first day of class and even though Fullerton is a college town and one of the bluer pockets in Orange County, “we” can mean a lot of things. He clarified: “I mean Democrats. We never win.” I reminded him that in California, Democrats actually win all the time. This is a state where the GOP has been reduced to fighting over scraps in local races and complaining about gas prices. But I knew what he meant. He wasn’t talking about Sacramento or the state legislature. He meant the national picture, where — right now in 2025 — we have a Republican president, a Republican-controlled House, and a Senate the GOP effectively runs through raw numbers. As of today, Republicans hold 219 House seats to 212 for Democrats (with a few vacancies cycling), and a 53–47 advantage in the Senate (two independents caucus with Democrats).

I told him Democrats have to overwhelm the system with votes. We can’t just “squeak by” anymore. His response? “That’s bullshit. Republicans always win close elections, so why can’t we?” His frustration took me back to an old Breakfast Club interview with Tom Steyer. I remember because Steyer gave a version of the same advice I’d just given my student: Overwhelm the system with votes. Charlamagne tha God — Lenard McKelvey, to be exact — pushed back almost word-for-word like my student: We shouldn’t have to win by a lot. If we win, we win.

Here’s the problem: Politics doesn’t work like that anymore. And it hasn’t for a while. I always come back with the same response: do you want to argue about how things should be, or how they are? Because arguing about how things should be sends you down the primrose path to nowhere. When I was younger, I thought Halle Berry or Toni Braxton should go on a date with me — while I was a broke college student living off Top Ramen, potatoes from the 99 Cents Only Stores, and Flavor Aid (not Kool-Aid; I didn’t have that kind of money). I also thought it would be nice if my landlady accepted Hallmark cards — and by Hallmark cards I mean Tender Thoughts cards from the discount rack — instead of rent. Turns out landlords speak in dollars, not cursive fonts. Spoiler: none of that ever happened. Because that’s not how the world works. The same is true in politics. Pretending close wins are enough in today’s climate is like mailing your landlord a “Thinking of You” card and expecting the eviction notice not to come.

The bottom line is simple: Landslides send a clear message that narrow wins do not. In healthier political eras, even close elections created enough shared reality for both sides to move forward, but not now. I am not a fan of George W. Bush — his Iraq War record speaks for itself — but even Bush understood he wasn’t popular. After his shady win in 2000, effectively delivered by the Supreme Court, he knew he had to throw Democrats a few bones if he wanted to govern. He signed No Child Left Behind in January 2002 with Ted Kennedy literally at his side. Many Democrats hated the law itself, but the optics of Kennedy standing there showed Bush understood the value of bipartisan symbolism and the importance of looking like he was governing for more than just his own base. He created the Medicare prescription drug benefit in 2003, the largest expansion of Medicare since its creation. He even flirted with immigration reform under the banner of “compassionate conservatism,” although that collapsed under pressure from his right wing.

Bush was dishonest about WMDs and reckless abroad, but politically he understood the math. A narrow win was not a blank check; it was a fragile license to govern that required visible gestures toward the other side. And when he ran for reelection in 2004, although the election was close, he won it on the merits — not via Supreme Court machinations. That legitimacy mattered.

Contrast that with Donald Trump. Throughout 2019 and into 2020, whenever reelection came up, Trump insisted the only way he could lose was if the election was “rigged.” The point wasn’t accuracy; it was pre-delegitimization. By the time votes were cast, Republican voters were primed to treat any loss as fraud. That message — if Democrats win, it was stolen — was repeated ad nauseam in rallies, interviews, and social posts. It worked exactly as intended: when he lost in 2020, his base treated it as a theological impossibility.

And let’s be clear about 2020: Joe Biden didn’t squeak by. He flipped Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin, and won the popular vote by more than seven million. What confused MAGA voters on election night was the red mirage/blue shift — the expected pattern where in-person votes (counted first) lean Republican, while mail/early votes (counted later) lean Democratic. Nonpartisan groups and analysts warned for weeks that this would happen. It wasn’t a conspiracy; it was math and timing. But MAGA rhetoric treated the late-counted ballots as suspicious by definition, collapsing into logical fallacies to manufacture doubt. They leaned on post hoc ergo propter hoc — the idea that because Biden’s numbers rose after Trump’s early lead, it must mean fraud, when in reality it was simply the order of vote counting. And they spun a cartoonish version of reductio ad absurdum — arguing that if Biden could make up ground in multiple states, then he must have cheated everywhere, as if the very possibility of winning in more than one place was absurd on its face. In other words, they replaced logic with slogans and expected people to treat the bumper stickers as proof.

Now imagine if Kamala Harris had pulled off a narrow win in 2024 by the same margins Trump once did. She would have taken the W, sure, but she would also have recognized — without illusions — that a large chunk of the country probably loathed her. She would have governed with that reality in mind. What she never would have done is cling to power after a rejection or cheer a “victory” stolen on her behalf. Why? Because authoritarian appetites are a prerequisite for that kind of behavior, and that road runs straight through Trump.

Which brings us to maps and power. Trump and Republican leaders didn’t just reject outcomes; they set about hard-wiring minority rule through redistricting and election law. Texas is a textbook case. In 2021, the Justice Department sued Texas, accusing its redistricting plans of violating the Voting Rights Act by diluting the political power of Black and Latino voters. Fast-forward to 2025: Republicans advanced a mid-decade congressional map, pushed by Trump and designed to net as many as five additional House seats, with Governor Greg Abbott signaling his approval even before the ink dried. Lawsuits from groups like the NAACP followed immediately. These maneuvers live in the gray zone carved out when the Supreme Court declared federal courts powerless over partisan gerrymandering. In other words: They’re gaming the system — and bragging about it.

And it’s not just Texas. The broader GOP project in this decade has been to weaponize map-drawing and rule-changing. Even in 2021, voting-rights lawyers warned that a wave of maps and new laws would shrink the electorate and redraw districts to insulate Republicans from actual public opinion. The strategy is no secret—it’s public — and, as The Hill reported, it’s deliberate.

This is precisely why close elections are suicide for Democrats: When one party treats any loss as illegitimate and then engineers the terrain to minimize your votes, the only antidote is overwhelming turnout that breaks the margins where lies can live. Landslides don’t cure polarization, but they starve disinformation of oxygen.

And here’s where political apathy becomes the silent killer. I had a friend tell me right after the 2024 election, “Just because I didn’t vote doesn’t mean I wanted Trump to win.” Maybe not, but what it did mean is you didn’t care who won. You essentially said, “If Trump wins, I’m fine with it.” That’s not neutrality; it’s consent through indifference. Voter apathy is how democracies rot. And the psychology behind it is complex: some people disengage because their one vote feels insignificant, some think all politicians are crooks, and some are seduced by grifters who treat protest votes like moral high ground. In 2024, we saw this in Michigan voters, who lashed out at Harris as if she were worse than Trump. The irony is that everything Harris warned would happen under Trump—mass deportations, judicial overreach, authoritarian power grabs—has already come true.

This is the difference between Democrats and the cult of MAGA. I don’t believe every Republican is full-fledged MAGA, but there are far too many who are willing to look the other way at racism, xenophobia, and authoritarianism because none of it has landed on their doorstep yet. The Republican Party has purged itself of diversity of thought. Democrats, by contrast, house people like Joe Manchin and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the same tent. That means a lot of us won’t get everything we want, but that’s what pluralism looks like in real life. Coalitions are messy on purpose.

And it was always thus. During the civil rights movement, plenty of Black activists openly disliked Democratic officials and were furious with half-measures. Yet progress came from building pressure and working with imperfect allies to bend flawed institutions toward justice. There’s a deep historical record of the uneasy alliance between African Americans and the Democratic Party — a relationship that advanced concrete wins without pretending the party was above critique.

Unfortunately, too many people today don’t understand how power works. And they’re not helped by a mainstream media that swapped transparency for profit years ago. Both-sidesism is a business model, not a principle. It cashes in on conflict while pretending to be balanced. But when one side plays by rules and the other plays by ruthlessness, this faux balance simply launders bad faith. Treating the arsonist and the firefighter as equally flawed doesn’t make you neutral; it makes you complicit.

Which loops me back to my student. He wanted to believe that close wins should be enough, that fairness should be the default, that a W is a W. I get it. I once believed some lovely nonsense too — like Halle Berry texting me while I seasoned potatoes from the 99 Cents Only Stores and sipped Flavor Aid — but adulthood is where your preferences meet reality. In American politics circa 2025, reality is this: Democrats cannot afford to win small. The only way to preserve legitimacy in a world where one side pre-delegitimizes losing is to bury them in votes. That’s not about being “nice”; it’s about hardening democracy against sabotage.

We’ve also seen how this works in practice. In 2020, the red mirage evaporated as the count proceeded exactly as experts predicted — early and mail ballots (often cast by Democrats) came in later, shifting outcomes toward the true totals. The answer to that cynical narrative was not a new clever argument; it was more ballots. The answer in 2026 and 2028 is the same: more ballots.

If you want to argue about how things should be, you’ll always have company. There’s an endless market for dreams. But if you want to win — and then govern — you have to play the board the way it’s set up, not the way you wish it looked. That means overwhelming turnout, relentless organizing, map fights where we can win them, and a coalition mature enough to live with compromise without confusing it for surrender. The other side has told us, repeatedly, what language they understand. It isn’t reason. It isn’t grace. It’s margin. Overwhelm them.

Kristoffer Ealy is a political science professor who teaches at California State University Fullerton. He writes The Thinking Class Substack is the author of the upcoming book, Political Illiteracy: Learning the Wrong Lessons. Read the original column here.

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