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WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump is serving up revisionist history of his 2016 victory in Texas, telling Ohio voters Monday night that he won in a “landslide” despite “suppression polls” this time four years ago that showed a dead heat in Texas.
Neither claim is true.
Trump topped Hillary Clinton by a 9-point margin in Texas.
There’s no precise definition of “landslide,” but political scientists and campaign experts reserve the term for an overwhelming victory, particularly if the margin so exceeds expectations as to demoralize the losing side.
A 60% majority with a 20-point margin of victory would qualify. A bare majority with a single-digit margin of victory, like Trump’s 52-43 win in Texas, never does.
In fact, Trump’s win in Texas was among the worst showings for a GOP presidential nominee in Texas since 1976, when President Gerald Ford lost the state, and the White House, to Georgia Gov. Jimmy Carter, 48-51.
To be sure, a 9-point win is a comfortable margin, and one that any presidential candidate would love to have in a battleground state like Pennsylvania, Michigan or Wisconsin, all of which Trump carried by less than 1 percentage point.
But Texas had not been a battleground in decades.
Democrats had hoped to make it one this year. Former Vice President Joe Biden’s campaign made feints over the summer. But a 5-point lead in early July evaporated, and when the Democrat’s campaign discusses battleground states, Texas is a glaring omission — a disappointment to Texas Democrats who’d hoped to see a bigger investment from the top.
As for the polls, this time four years ago they were pretty spot-on in Texas.
Two polls in early September 2016 showed Trump ahead by 6 points. A poll released four years ago next Tuesday showed Trump ahead by 7. He dipped to low single digits in early October 2016 but surged again as Election Day neared, and by the end, his lead in the RealClearPolitics average was nearly 12 points.
In Ohio on Monday night, though, Trump used the misstatements to project confidence and ward off any despondence among supporters in the face of polls that continue to show Biden with a solid lead nationwide.
“Here’s the platform that they have, sleepy Joe Biden: no oil. no religion, no God, and no guns…. That doesn’t work well in Texas,” Trump said, launching into one of his standard campaign rally riffs, adding that even George Washington, with Abraham Lincoln as his running mate, would “lose very big” with such a platform.
“And then they say yeah, he’s doing okay, he’s 2 points up in Texas. They said it last time too — that Texas is even, four years ago,” Trump said in Ohio. “And everybody said no I think Trump is killing it. We’d have stadiums with 25, 30,000 people — much more, they couldn’t get in. We’d have 40, 50,000 people outside, and they’d say I was even. We won in a landslide. Just like we won this state, in a landslide.”
He actually won Ohio 51-43 — a slightly smaller margin than in Texas.
“You know the expression they use: Texas is in play. You know what `in play’ means: It could go either way. … The whole thing is crazy. It’s crazy. You know what they do? It’s suppression polls. They try and depress you” so Trump voters don’t bother casting a ballot, he asserted.
Republicans have no plausible path to the White House without Texas’ 38 electoral votes, given Democratic dominance in California and New York.
The Trump campaign has scoffed all year at the possibility that Biden would make any real effort in Texas, though the president hasn’t taken it for granted, making stops in Dallas and Midland-Odessa during the summer to shore up support.
Biden’s side identified 13 states it views as battlegrounds when it released a new tranche of ads Monday: “The campaign remains on television airwaves and digital platforms in a total of 13 states, including Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada, Ohio, Nebraska, and Minnesota.”
In general, a presidential candidate has to win by 15 or 20 percentage points to get bragging rights to a landslide, said Eric Ostermeier, a researcher at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs who writes the Smart Politics blog and tracks election history.
“It certainly strains the definition of ‘landslide’ to cast Trump’s 2016 win in Texas in that role,” he said by email.
Trump had a better margin in 35 other states, he noted, and his Texas win was 7 points smaller than Mitt Romney’s four years earlier – and the lowest for a Republican nominee since Bob Dole’s 5-point squeaker in 1996. (Despite support from deep red Texas, Romney and Dole lost.)
If the threshold were just 9 points in a presidential contest, Ostermeier counted 40 statewide landslides in 2012, 38 in 2008, 33 in 2004, and 30 in 2000.
“The definition would then basically lose any meaning,” he said.