In response to President-elect Donald Trump’s remarks that he earned a “landslide victory” in the 2024 election, some social users have claimed his margin in the national popular vote is the “5th smallest in American history.”
Internet personality Majid Padellan, known as “Brooklyn Dad Defiant” on social media, tweeted the claim to his 1.2 million followers on X: “Donald trump just claimed to have won ‘in a landside.’ His 1.7% margin of victory was the 5th smallest in American history,” he said. Padellan posted the same message verbatim to his Bluesky social media account.
The Facebook account “Occupy Democrats,” which has more than 10 million followers on the platform, posted a graphic quoting Padellan’s claim.
These claims are false. While Trump’s popular vote percentage margin in 2024 falls in the smallest quintile of U.S. presidential elections—and was, at 1.47 percent, even smaller than claimed—the claim that it was the fifth-smallest ignores that five candidates have been elected president without winning the popular vote. Taking those into account, Trump’s popular-vote margin ranks as the 11th smallest.
Using election results collected by the American Presidency Project—a product of the University of California–Santa Barbara that contains election data for every U.S. presidential election from 1789 to 2020—here is a list of presidential elections where the winning candidate had the most narrow popular vote percentage margin.
In the five elections in which the winning presidential candidate lost the national popular vote, three were decided by the Electoral College and two decided by the House of Representatives after no single candidate clinched a majority of electors. The 1824 election recorded the starkest negative margin, in part because that election featured four major candidates, none of whom received more than 45 percent in the national popular vote.
Even if you were to exclude elections in which the winner lost the national popular vote, Trump’s performance in 2024 would be the sixth-most narrow margin, though only a hair greater—close to one one-hundreth of a percentage point, to be exact—than the popular vote margin James K. Polk came away with in the 1844 election.
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