The 7 Biggest Landslides in US Presidential History

On November 22, 1963, as the nation was still reeling from the shocking assassination of President John F. Kennedy in Dallas, Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy’s vice president, took the oath of office on Air Force One with JFK's grieving widow by his side.

When most historians write about Johnson, they focus on his controversial handling of the Vietnam War or his progressive civil rights agenda, but all of that came later, says historian and journalist Jonathan Darman.

“If you think about the situation in late 1963 to mid-1964, the dominant image of Johnson Is someone who was a calming presence in this country after the trauma of the assassination,” says Darman, author of Landslide: LBJ and Reagan at the Dawn of a New America. “There was a collective sense of relief in the country that he was able to step into the office and be a figure of comfort and stability.”

The economy was strong in 1964 and the conflict in Vietnam was still in the back pages of the newspaper. The only thing that could have defeated Johnson in 1964 was a really compelling Republican opponent. Instead, the Republicans nominated Senator Barry Goldwater, a conservative hardliner.

“Extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice,” declared Goldwater at the Republican National Convention.

Goldwater didn’t address civil rights, the most important issue of the day, but lectured his audiences about the sanctity of private property, minimal government, and law and order.

“[Goldwater’s campaign] was almost designed to alienate voters,” says historian and author David Pietrusza.

Johnson cruised to a convincing landslide victory, winning 486 electoral votes to Goldwater’s 52, an electoral margin of victory of 80.6 percentage points.

The 1864 election was held during some of the fiercest fighting of the Civil War with only the 25 states of the Union casting ballots. The presidential race became a national referendum on the war, with incumbent Abraham Lincoln promising to fight on, and Democratic challenger George McClellan saying it was time to make peace with the Confederacy.

In the 1860 election, Lincoln ran as a Republican, but four years later he cobbled together a coalition of pro-war Republicans and pro-war Democrats form the National Union party. Its slogan was “Don’t change horses in the middle of a stream,” referring to the dangers of switching Union leadership in the middle of a war.

McClellan, a Union general, wasn’t actually a peace candidate, but that’s what the Democratic party chose as its platform. If the Union had continued to lose important battles to the Confederacy—as it did throughout the summer of 1864—McClellan and the Democrats may have won in a landslide. But when General Sherman took Atlanta in September, the tide of the war turned and the Republicans rode the good news into election day.

Lincoln won 212 electoral votes to McClellan’s 12, a margin of victory of 81.6 percentage points.

The economic and political situation in 1980 was the polar opposite of 1964. In 1964, the economy was roaring and the nation voted for LBJ, the candidate who would ensure calm and continuity. In 1980, the nation was mired in a deep economic recession and 100 Americans were being held hostage in Iran with no resolution in sight. Voters were ready for a change in the White House.

“Distaste for the Carter presidency mounts and mounts in 1979 and 1980,” says Darman. “Reagan’s landslide victory in 1980 was in a lot of ways a consensus rejection of Carter more than it was a consensus affirmation of the Reagan program.”

Ronald Reagan was no stranger to American voters in 1980. He was first elected governor of California in 1966 and ran a close Republican primary campaign against Gerald Ford in 1976. Darman says that by 1980, Reagan was “the dominant figure of the American right.”

Still, some voters going into the 1980 election thought Reagan’s brand of conservatism was too extreme. But after some strong debate performances, Reagan made a case that he was a “credible, plausible, moderate-enough alternative to Carter,” says Darman.

Reagan ended up trouncing the beleaguered Jimmy Carter by 81.8 percentage points, 489 electoral votes to 49.

Thomas Jefferson had every reason to be confident going into his reelection campaign in 1804. The young nation was prospering and at peace, and Jefferson’s political rivals, the Federalists, were in disarray. Jefferson was bold enough to predict that his Democratic-Republicans would only lose four states in 1804. They ended up taking all but two.

Another boon for Jefferson was a change of running mate. In 1800, Jefferson shared the ticket with Aaron Burr, but Burr lost favor with the Democratic-Republicans after he refused to bow out of a four-way electoral stalemate in 1800. In 1804, Jefferson dropped Burr and replaced him with New York governor George Clinton.

The Federalists briefly considered nominating Burr as their own candidate in 1804, but went with Charles Cotesworth Pinckney of South Carolina instead. Presidential candidates didn’t openly campaign back then, but the Federalists tried to attack Jefferson on the foolishness of the Louisiana Purchase and his affairs with his enslaved mistress, Sally Hemings.

Jefferson ran on his record and coasted to a landslide victory, taking 162 electoral votes to Pinckney’s 14, a margin of victory of 84 percentage points.

The 1804 election was the first to be held after the ratification of the 12th Amendment, which changed the electoral process so that each elector cast two separate votes: one for president and another for vice president.

More than 50 years after the Watergate scandal and Richard Nixon’s disgraced White House resignation, it’s easy to forget that Nixon was once an incredibly popular president. Nixon’s landslide victory in 1972 remains the largest popular vote margin in American electoral history, whipping his opponent George McGovern by nearly 18 million votes.

The 1972 election was the first held after the ratification of the 26th Amendment, which lowered the voting age from 21 to 18. Young male voters, in particular, had good reason to vote for Nixon, who promised to end the Vietnam draft by December 1972. The president had already recalled 500,000 troops from Vietnam by 1972, which did much to quell anti-war protests.

Nixon’s opponents, the Democrats, were still reeling from the disastrous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, in which anti-war protestors clashed violently with police. In 1972, the fractured Democratic party chose Senator George McGovern from South Dakota, who ran as an anti-war candidate.

The Nixon campaign attacked McGovern as a left-wing extremist, and the McGovern campaign suffered a crippling setback when it was revealed that his running mate underwent electroshock therapy for depression.

On election day, not only did Nixon win a commanding 520 electoral votes to McGovern’s 17 (a margin of 93.5 percentage points), but Nixon became the first Republican candidate to win every state in the South, historically a Democratic stronghold.

In 1984, President Ronald Reagan’s reelection team ran a brilliant campaign ad called “Morning in America.”

“Voters understood it instantly,” says Darman. “This idea that the U.S. had gone through several traumatic presidencies stretching back to Kennedy. And now, after the turbulent decades of 1960s and 1970s, Reagan’s leadership had brought the nation new strength and stability.”

In his first term in office, Reagan proved his critics wrong by presenting a “workable conservatism,” says Darman, that was pro-business and pro free market, while pushing for lower taxes, smaller government and an assertive Cold War stance.

The Democrats nominated Walter Mondale, who served as vice president under Carter. In turn, Mondale chose congresswoman Geraldine Ferraro as his running mate, the very first woman on a major-party American presidential ticket.

Mondale briefly had Reagan on the ropes after a weak debate performance—at the time, Reagan was 73, the oldest person to be nominated for president—but in the end the Mondale campaign failed to provide a compelling alternative to Reagan’s conservative vision.

Reagan improved on his impressive 1980 showing, absolutely crushing Mondale 525 electoral votes to 13. In 1984, Reagan took every state except Minnesota and the District of Columbia for an electoral margin of victory of 95.2 percentage points.

Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected president a record four times—this was before the 22nd Amendment established term limits—and none of the races were terribly competitive. Even his smallest margin of victory in the electoral college was still 62.8 percentage points in 1944. His largest margin of victory—the greatest landslide in American presidential history—came in 1936 when he won by 97 percentage points.

The 1936 election was, in part, a referendum on FDR’s sweeping New Deal legislation. But the New Deal wasn’t an unqualified success in 1936, says Pietrusza, author of Roosevelt Sweeps Nation: FDR’s 1936 Landslide and the Triumph of the Liberal Ideal. Unemployment was still high and the Supreme Court had struck down New Deal programs like the National Industrial Recovery Act and the Agricultural Adjustment Act.

Pietrusza credits Roosevelt’s success to his political savvy. FDR was adept at reading the shifting political winds. He was quick to switch sides on an issue when it started to prove unpopular. For example, FDR started out as a supporter of Woodrow Wilson’s League of Nations, but became a staunch isolationist by the 1930s. FDR was originally against some of his own trademark programs, like Social Security and tax reform, but changed his mind when they gained popularity.

“Roosevelt was a politician,” says Pietrusza, “and he was very, very good at it.”

Another reason for FDR’s dominating performance in the 1936 was the weakness of his opponent, Republican governor Alf Landon of Kansas.

“Landon had been a big fish in a small pond in Kansas,” says Pietrusza, “but he turns out to be an abysmal speaker and really shoots himself in the foot on Social Security.”

As the United States was still pulling itself out of the Great Depression, voters overwhelmingly chose to stick with FDR. Roosevelt won every state except for Vermont and Maine, collecting 523 electoral votes to Landon’s eight.