The narrowest of margins
How to think about Donald Trump's narrow, narrow victory
Thanks to your strong responses and encouragement as I’ve tried to use this newsletter to share some context and reflections in the last two weeks. I’m really gratified to see how the strong subscriber growth—this newsletter is going out to about 250 more of you than even last Friday’s—and I hope you won’t find that I abuse your attention. If you’re reading this for the first time, I hope you will subscribe here too:
The most important and least important headline of the weekend was that as the final votes of 2024 continue to be counted, Donald Trump slid beneath 50 percent of the popular vote. With about 152 million votes counted, and more still to come, Donald Trump is sitting just a tiny bit below 50 percent of that total.
At one level, the news doesn’t matter at all — Trump’s victory, with 312 electoral votes, remains firm and decisive. Trump’s victory appears set to remake the United States as perhaps no presidency since FDR has, with appointments, nominations, and government-destroying strategies that appear set to change the course of the United States for a generation—perhaps forever.
And yet, it’ll be a reshaping and a path that a majority of voters who showed up for the election victory actually opposed. For all the talk of the “country moving right,” by almost every vote tally the nation has voted more Democratic over the last generation than it has Republican. Here’s a stunning way to think about it: No American born after 1987 had ever voted in an election where the Republican won the popular vote. Now they have—but barely.
We often forget looking back that Big History hinges on much smaller margins and decisions than it seems. What often in the history books appear to be tidal waves are more often just tiny ripples—more the equivalent of the proverbial butterfly flapping its wings and starting a hurricane.
History is often a close-run thing.
We often recall the cataclysm of World War I began with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, but that world-remaking event hinged on much smaller details than we remember. A team of six would-be assassins stalked the presumptive heir to the Austro-Hungarian empire on June 28, 1914, as he visited provincial capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina; they at first didn’t have much luck. Earlier that morning, one of them had tried to throw a bomb at the archduke, but the timer on the explosive meant it exploded underneath the car behind him.
The narrow escape threw the day into turmoil and the traveling party then decided to visit the wounded at the hospital; it was on that journey that the archduke’s driver took a wrong turn and then, when attempting to reverse, stalled the car right alongside the next would-be assassin, who jumped on the running board and shot him. Think of how history would have been different had the driver simply not made the wrong turn.
In more recent times, both Gerald Ford and Ronald Reagan narrowly survived assassination attempts—Ford when an assassin carrying a gun aimed at point-blank range failed to chamber a round before firing, Reagan because the bullet that did hit him barely missed his heart.
Elections, which in America’s winner-take-all system, hinge on equally small shifts.
In North Carolina, the incumbent Democrat on a vital supreme court seat is currently winning by just about 20 votes in a race where more than 5,539,000 people cast ballots.
Donald Trump’s election the first time in 2016 was the result of just 80,000 votes across three states — just six-hundredths of one percent of the race’s 137 million votes. That time around, his winning margin was just 10,704 votes in Michigan, 46,765 in Pennsylvania, and 22,177 in Wisconsin. Had those votes shifted or had 80,001 more voters in those states turned out for Hillary, President Clinton would have likely filled out a more liberal Supreme Court during her term and Roe would still be the law of the land, probably for a generation.
The winning margin in the electoral college this time around appears like it’s going to be about 130,000 votes—so bigger than 2016, in one sense, but Trump’s popular vote victory will rank as one of the tightest in modern US history. We’re still waiting for final counts, but it appears Wisconsin’s margin will be a difference of about 16,000 votes shifting; Pennsylvania about 72,000 voters; Michigan about 41,000. Even as it is, in neither Wisconsin nor Michigan does Trump appear to win a majority of votes.
Put that margin up against the idea that nationally nearly five times as many Americans — 634,858 voters — voted for some guy named Chase Oliver, the Libertarian candidate for president. (Or heck: Both Jill Stein and RFK Jr. each tallied about 750,000 votes nationally.)
Or to put it another way, the electoral college in 2024 turned on voters equal to the population of Fargo, North Dakota, the nation’s 218th largest city.
Add up all the rest of the states that flipped from 2024 — Arizona, with a margin of about 93,500 votes, Nevada and its 23,000 vote margin, and Georgia, with its 58,400 vote-margin — and Kamala Harris only fell short of a “Biden-esque national landslide” by about 300,000 votes.
If, across those states voters equal roughly to the population of Greensboro, North Carolina, had turned out for Harris instead, Elon Musk would be sweating his future defense contracts and Pete Hegseth would be railing about Harris’s new Cabinet nominations from the anchor desk of Fox News, rather than talking about inheriting the leadership of the Pentagon.
Highlighting this narrow margin is not meant to add fuel to the fires of self-serving, anonymously-sourced “Kamala screwed up” tick-tocks. I still maintain this was a national rejection of a generation of Democratic politics — the mere fact that the Democratic nominee was thisclose to defeating a manifestly unqualified corrupt nominee like Trump is its own indictment of a generation of Democratic politics — but it’s hardly the national “landslide” rejection of Democratic policies that the Republicans will make it out to be.
But this is the way that history — and progress — is won and lost.
It’s worth remembering that many titanic recent elections are, examined up close, quite narrow. Gerald Ford’s popular vote loss in 1976 was just 1,683,000 votes, about the population then of Detroit, the nation’s fifth-largest city. Nixon lost to Kennedy by just 113,000 votes; in 1968, he turned around and won against Hubert Humphrey by just 500,000 votes, about seven-tenths of one percent of the national popular vote. Nixon was seen as a huge loser after 1960, and history remembers Humphrey today as a footnote; the trajectory and legacy of both men could have been very different.
And imagine how different our world would look today had just 538 more people voted for Al Gore in Florida in the 2000 election.
History is a close-run thing.
Little things make a big difference.
Showing up to participate matters.
That, to me, is the lesson we should be carrying forward this week.
GMG
PS: I hope to use this newsletter reliably to share history and context (and lots of book recommendations) about the time and challenge ahead. I hope you’ll consider sharing it with a couple people in your life who you think might find value in it: