Lawrence O’Donnell: ‘If You Hear Anyone Call This Election a Landslide, Please Stop Listening to that Person About Elections’

EXCERPT:

O’DONNELL: “If you hear anyone calling this election a landslide, please stop listening to that person about elections at least. We have seen landslides in this country and they don’t look like this election. Bill Clinton’s re-election was never in doubt In 1996 He won with 49.2 percent of the vote against Bob Dole’s 40.1 percent of the vote and Ross Perot's 8.4 percent of the vote. Bill Clinton won by 9 points and no one called that a landslide because it wasn't. The last landslide we had was Ronald Reagan re-election in 1984 where he won 49 states in the Electoral College, with only the state of Minnesota voting for Walter Mondale, who was from Minnesota. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18 points. That’s what a landslide looks like. There were two landslides before Reagan and the television age. Richard Nixon in his re-election campaign in 1972 won 49 states, with only Massachusetts voting against him. Nixon beat George McGovern by 23 points, But in both of those Republican landslides, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, the Democrats still easily controlled the House of Representatives. President Lyndon Johnson won a landslide victory in 1964 after the assassination of President Kennedy elevated Vice President Johnson to the presidency. In the 1964 election, the Democrats won 97 seats in the House, 97 more seats in the House, and they added 12 seats in the Senate. That’s what they added to their margins. And no one thought that was really remarkable because the Democrats had been accustomed to having huge margins in the House and in the Senate, just huge margins."