Landslide Election / Real Life

Yes, every party but one lost all their seats. Yes, this election in fact existed. And no, it was not rigged.

Landslide Elections are not at all uncommon in Real Life; the examples can go on and on.

To be included on this page, the following conditions should be satisfied:

• There must be a margin of victory of at least 10%.
• If the elected leadership is not elected directly from a vote count, a landslide only qualifies if a simultaneous popular vote landslide also occurs. This rule applies to:
  • The President of the United States, elected via Electoral College votes.
  • The Prime Minister of any country (or any of their subnational counterparts) who is the leader of the party with the most FPTP-only seats in their legislature.
• Examples must be categorized by the country, state, or province in which the election took place.
• In cases of dominant-party states, only particularly large landslides even by its standards or a landslide by a member of the minority party are allowed.
• No general examples.

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The Election Was Just for Show

The election was held in a state where the elections are just for show, serving to confirm that 'the people' support the incumbent despot (or despots). Seen in many generally authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, whether old or still existing, which still have elections. See also People's Republic of Tyranny and President for Life.

• A prime example is North Korea, which has elections every five years (four years at the local level), always with only one person on the ballot chosen by the ruling party. There are technically options to vote against the chosen candidates but doing so is hardly confidential and will almost certainly land whoever does it in deep trouble (Demoted to Extra at best). The system existed in the Soviet Union, and other existing dictatorships still use it. Others require that the government approve a list of candidates for election. Naturally, they approve a majority from their party, with a minority of opposition candidates to look good. These of course are obedient stooges if they're smart.
• After Napoléon Bonaparte's coup of 18 Brumaire, the newly-formed Consulate had a Senate Conservateur to vote on his decrees. The vote for making Napoleon Emperor was in the high 90% range. Napoleon maintained an incredible control on the mass media of the day so his Cult of Personality was already in full swing.
• Singapore, all the way. The People's Action Party (PAP) remains the most trusted party in the nation's whole history, which is not surprising if you consider that it's the one party most citizens have some knowledge of and the government punishes any political dissidents with bankruptcy. As such, it continues to win a supermajority of seats in parliament.
• One of the most famous (and most over-the-top) examples was the 2002 Presidential referendum in Iraq, which boasted 100% voter turnout, and in which every single voter marked "Yes" to allowing Saddam Hussein to continue as Iraq's leader for seven more years.
• In 1927, Charles D.B. King put Hussein's rigged election to shame, when he claimed to receive 234,000 votes in the Liberian presidential election. The number of registered voters was less than 15,000. With a margin of victory at least 1460%, the Guinness Book of World Records gives it the title of World's Most Fraudulent Election. At the time, the True Whig Party was a virtual dictatorship, never losing an election from 1878 to 1980, when a coup toppled the government.
• Many people suspect this to be the cause of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's massive victory in the Iranian presidential election of 2009. There have been allegations of widespread fraud and intimidation against voters opposed to him.
• Venezuela:
  • Venezuela's Constitutional Assembly Election of 2017. Not only did this election see an insanely low turnout and see all its seats stacked with government loyalists, but there have been reports that the number of votes cast in the election is even lower than the officially reported figures. The creation and election of this assembly have been widely condemned as a blatant and shameless consolidation of power by the government against the will of the Venezuelan public.
  • The 2018 presidential election was little better. To start, the Democratic Unity Roundtable (MUD) alliance that successfully and fairly took control of the National Assembly in 2015 did not trust and boycotted the election. And yet, despite this, the vast majority of polls showed incumbent Nicolás Maduro still losing to his most popular opponent still running in the election. And what was the (likely suspect) result? The lowest turnout to date for a presidential election and Maduro (supposedly) winning 67.8% to his closest opponents' 20.9% and 10.8%. If correct, this result overperformed even the most generous outlier poll by 12% and his closest opponents were overestimated by about 5% each. Naturally, nobody but Maduro's similarly authoritarian and/or socialist allies considered this result legitimate, and this led to National Assembly leader Juan Guaidó countering by declaring himself Interim President using powers delegated in the Venezuela Constitution to the leader of the National Assembly, triggering a presidential crisis in a last-ditch effort to topple Maduro from his (now widely recognized as illegitimate) position.
  • Yet again was this the case with the 2020 National Assembly election. The biggest red flag for the fairness of the election came with the Venezuela Supreme Tribunal of Justice hijacking the process by which National Electoral Council members are appointed. This action, which is supposed to be the purview of the National Assembly that was then controlled by the opposition, was slammed as a particularly ham-fisted move to ensure a rigged election in the Maduro Regime's favor. As a result, the opposition parties would boycott the election that the PSUV unsurprisingly went on to win and held their own protest vote that reported far higher turnout than the official election.
• From 1917 to 1976, the victors in Mexican presidential elections were always elected with over eighty percent of the popular vote, with a few instances where the percentage was more of 100%. While at first it could be chalked up to the sheer popularity of the Mexican Revolution, the successful establishment of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a series of prosperous governments, this later had more to do with grotesque levels of electoral intervention, which led Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa to dub Mexico as the "perfect dictatorship".
  • In the case of the 1976 election, the PRI candidate, José López Portillo, was the only name in the ballot, with the only opposition being the fringe Communist candidate Valentín Campa, whose party was then banned from participating.
• In the 2013 Azerbaijani elections, a smartphone app showed that Ilham Aliyev won with 72.76% while the nearest opposing candidate, Jamil Hasanli, tallied just 7.4%. Problem was, the app was released a day early and nobody had voted yet...
• In the November 1933 German elections the single N.S.D.A.P. list won 92.11% of the vote (of course, it helps that they had already banned all other political parties). When Germany was still a multi-party state, at their absolute height they never secured a majority, only a plurality of 44%.
  • In 1936, the Nazi list won 98.80%.
  • A cartoonish example with the Anschluss referendum, where, in addition to the Nazis receiving 99.7% of the vote, the "Yes" bubble on the ballot paper was twice the size of the "No" bubble.◊ Not surprisingly, Jews and political opponents of the Nazis were barred from voting. Even after this, votes were taken in public under the watchful eye of the Gestapo, intimidating anyone else into voting for the annexation who might have been opposed.
  • Later historians also pointed out the Nazi Party was losing popularity after their peak in March 1933 (open and democratic) elections, which motivated Hitler to seize power as much as they can before they will face embarrassing defeat. Essentially, it was a Race Against the Clock.
• The 1969 Act of Free Choice, which was the vote for whether West Papua should be independent or part of Indonesia, consisted in the choosing by Indonesian General Sarwo Edhi Wibowo by 1,025 voters out of the 800,000 inhabitants, who then publicly and unanimously voted for being attached to Indonesia.
  • American diplomats suspected Indonesia couldn't have won a regular vote but considered it more important to placate an American ally.
• In modern Russia, Vladimir Putin's election landslides are criticized for being shams. While candidates other than Putin are allowed on the ballot, the election authority often disqualifies any credible challengers, leaving only fringe candidates, and state media, which Putin dominates, coddles him and ramps up positive coverage around elections.
• In 1815 France, during the post-Napoleonic Restoration, the reactionary Ultraroyalists won 350 out of 400 seats in the lower house, which was nicknamed the Chambre introuvable (Unobtainable Chamber), partly because of the highly-restrictive censitary suffrage imposed and especially the wild White Terror, with verdets killing Bonapartists and Republicans. Proving themselves "more royalist than the king"^note  This expression was used by the king himself to describe them. and advocating an integral restoration with such extremist proposals as having military provost-marshal courts for dissidents or bringing back hanging as opposed to the guillotine, Louis XVIII had to dissolve them the next year, obtaining a more moderate lower house with which he could work.
  • They came back with a vengeance on 1824 in the Chambre retrouvée (Recovered Chamber), where they had 487 deputies out of 500. The House of Peers became the place where the most extremist bills could be prevented or merely delayed, such as the bill making sacrilege a capital offense.
• The 2017 Catalonian independence referendum was supported by ninety percent of voters, which amounted for a turnout of around forty percent, as the whole affair was about "ratifying" the local government's intention to declare its secession from Spain. The Madrid government handled things as well as you can imagine.
  • There have been reports of irregularities.
• From the end of the Reconstruction to the Civil Rights Movement in The '60s, the Deep South was known as the "Solid South", where Democratic officials maintained themselves in power through brutal repression, depriving Blacks of the franchise by exploiting loopholes such as literacy tests and poll taxes while exempting all but the poorest Whites by Grandfather Clauses until these were declared unconstitutional on 1915. In these conditions, Democratic candidates enjoyed such dominance (outside of some former Unionist outposts where the Republican party was competitive) their primary was often the only real competition.
• On 1965, the elections for Rhodesia saw Ian Smith's Rhodesian Front get the entirety of the 50 constituency seats.^note In the Rhodesian electoral system, out of the 65 seats of the Legislative Assembly, 50 were for constituencies, for which the mainly White "A" roll was favored, while the 15 others were for districts, where the mostly Black "B" roll was favored), leaving the 15 other seats to the Black opposition to the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI)
• The 1970 Democratic Republic of the Congo presidential election had Joseph Mobutu (who had seized power in Military Coup five years earlier) win the presidental election with over 10.1 million yes votes for his presidency and only 157 no votes against it. Mobutu ran unopposed (since his party, the MPR, was the only party allowed to nominate candidates) and the voting was not secret, with the voters casting a green ballot as a "yes" vote and red ballot as a "no" vote. The election also had 30 000 more votes than registered voters, leading to a voter turnout of 100.3%.

The Candidate Is Too Radical

A party normally in strong contention nominates a more radical or philosophically principled candidate, whose proposals are too far out of the mainstream to garner much public support. He is then thoroughly clobbered by a more pragmatic opponent. Sometimes, however, this defeat is instrumental in securing a victory in some future election; the idealist candidate 'rallies the troops' and gets them excited about politics again.

• In the 1964 U.S. presidential election, the Republican Party nominated the outspoken conservative Barry Goldwater for president, instead of the easy-going moderate Nelson Rockefeller. Goldwater won only six states out of fifty (five of these states were in the Deep South), and President Lyndon Johnson won 61% of the popular vote, still the highest popular percentage won in a contested election. (Goldwater carried his home state of Arizona by exactly 1%, 4,782 votes.) Johnson's biographer Robert Caro says that this is likely the single best election performance in the history of modern democracy.
  
  It probably helped that Lyndon Johnson had recently signed into law the Civil Rights Act of 1964 which that guaranteed legal equality to blacks, gaining much favor even among moderate Republicans. Goldwater had voted against the Act because he genuinely believed it wasn't within the remit of the federal government, which earned accusations of using "states' rights" as a cover for racism. His alienation of moderate Republicans and off the cuff statements such as threatening to "lob one [nuclear bomb] into the men's room at the Kremlin" didn't help. It allowed Johnson to successfully paint him as a dangerous loony who would start a third world war with the famous "Daisy" ad, and incredibly effective parodies of Goldwater's campaign slogan, "In your heart, you know he's right" which was twisted into "In your guts, you know he's nuts", "In your heart, you know he might" and "In your heart, you know he's too far right" ^note Incidentally, the Johnson campaign also partly contributed to painting the Eisenhower years as an era of Victorian-like social mores and Apartheid-style racial segregation, an image these never have fully shaken off. While very conservative compared to the 60s and 70s, the 1950s were remarkably similar to the 1980s/very early 1990s in terms of social mores (it was also the beginning of the notably liberal "Warren Court"), segregation was undeniably on its way out, and Ike himself stood on the sidelines during the 1964 campaign, as he found many of Goldwater's policies repellent—Goldwater had also criticized Eisenhower's economic policies as a "five-and-dime New Deal")
  
  It also helped that Johnson had been president for less than a year after John F. Kennedy was killed, and the electorate mostly wasn't ready to elect a new man when they hadn't even broken in the current one.
• In the UK, Labour's campaign in 1983 was infamously poor. Sixty-nine-year-old Michael Foot — a solid Labour man, but generally perceived as an out-of-touch Oxford don — had narrowly beaten the popular former Chancellor Denis Healey to become the leader of the party in 1980, and attempted to appease the left wing of the party by promising in the election manifesto to dismantle the UK's nuclear arsenal, leave the EEC (after campaigning to stay in it during the 1975 referendum), and renationalize several heavy industries. Labour MP Gerald Kaufman later described the manifesto as "the longest suicide note in history".
  
  It should be noted that for the duration of the previous parliament, Conservative PM Margaret Thatcher had been unpopular and Labour enjoyed a massive poll lead up until The Falklands War, economic growth was just beginning to improve from the '70s-era stagnation and unemployment was still very high. But Labour had barely recovered from the 1981 split when some members of Labour's right-wing left and went on to found the Social Democratic Party. In the elections, Labour won 27.6% of the vote, while an alliance between the Social Democrats and Liberals won 25.4%. In terms of absolute numbers, the SDP-Liberal Alliance came within 700,000 votes of Labour's total, but the UK's first-past-the-post electoral system ensured that the party only had one-tenth as many seats, because SDP candidates tended to come a close second in the polls.
• France in 2002: Far-right politician Jean-Marie Le Pen managed to get second place in the first run of the presidential election, behind the incumbent conservative president Jacques Chirac, but ahead of Prime Minister Lionel Jospin (he fell to third place due to massive abstention, vote-splitting on the left among various parties, and being perceived as "soft on crime"). The runoff was therefore a contest between a moderate conservative and consummate politician frequently accused of corruption scandals and a far-right nationalist accused of xenophobia. As a result, nearly every non-far-right voter decided to vote for Chirac, who got re-elected with 82% of the votes.
  
  Still, some French voters weren't happy about the choice offered. This was famously epitomized by a pre-election poster of Chirac with the caption "vote for the crook, not the fascist" («Votez pour l'escroc, pas pour le facho» in French.)
  • History repeated itself with Le Pen's daughter, Marine, in the 2017 election. She advanced to the second round after various other candidates fell short — Socialist candidate Benoît Hamon was hamstrung by incumbent François Hollande's unpopularity and proved to be a generally poor campaigner, Republican candidate François Fillon was the early favorite until a scandal wrecked his chances, and Indomitable France candidate Jean-Luc Mélenchon had a late surge in support, but ultimately not enough to make it to the run-off. Le Pen was resoundingly defeated by the much more moderate independent candidate Emmanuel Macron in the second round by a nearly 2-to-1 margin (Macron got 66.1%, Le Pen got 33.9%). While she managed to make her party appear somewhat more respectable since her father retired, her anti-Muslim and anti-European Union rhetoric ultimately drove a lot of supporters of the other main parties to Macron.
  • For an encore, the 2022 election saw a rematch between Macron and Le Pen. Though Macron had become viewed as increasingly unpopular and ineffectual, and Le Pen had further moderated her political views, the end result was Macron winning re-election — the first French president to do so since Chirac in 2002 — with 58.6% of the vote compared to 41.4% for Le Pen; a closer result than five years prior, but still the most decisive victory under the current French presidential election system outside of 2002 and 2017.
• The same thing happened in Romania in 2000: as a result of the then-ruling right-wing coalition collapsing and popular disillusionment, the choice came down to either Ion Iliescu, who had already served as president (1989–96) after Ceaușescu was overthrown and remains (to say the least) very controversial over his involvement in the Mineriads, and Corneliu Vadim Tudor, an infamous far-right politician known for ultranationalism, xenophobia, irredentism (his party is the only one that still advocates reunification with Moldova), and populist anti-Semitic, anti-Roma, and anti-Hungarian rhetoric. Predictably, Iliescu defeated Tudor by a 66.8%–33.2% majority, although the election was notable for having a very low turnout.
• In the US, Herbert Hoover won his first election in 1928 by an overwhelming margin against Democratic candidate Al Smith, winning all but eight states and taking even more electoral votes than his two predecessors did in their own landslide elections. Smith wasn't a bad candidate per se but had two major problems. Firstly, many of his policies (including ending Prohibition, reducing racial segregation, and extending suffrage to younger voters) were a little too far ahead of their time, and secondly, he was a Catholic at a time when anti-Catholic sentiment in the U.S. was so prevalent that many voters genuinely thought Smith would hand control of the country over to the Vatican if he were elected.
• Going into the 2000 Canadian election, many felt that Jean Chrétien's two-term Liberal government had a serious chance of being unseated by the new Canadian Alliance, which was looking to establish itself as the successor to the dying Progressive Conservatives as the party of the right. However, the Alliance sabotaged its chances in part by replacing Preston Manning (the leader of its precursor, the Reform Party) with Stockwell Day, whose arch-conservative views — including being a vocal proponent of Young-Earth Creationism and just as vocally denouncing same-sex marriage and adoption — did not go over well at all with the electorate. The Alliance actually gained six seats over the previous election, but mostly at the expense of the Progressive Conservatives and Bloc Québécois, with the Liberals winning an even more decisive majority than in the previous election in 1997.
• A variation happened to the Labour Party in the 1935 UK general election. After Ramsay MacDonald jumped ship to form the National Government prior to the 1931 election, and subsequent leader Arthur Henderson lasted only a few months before being forced to resign after suffering a thumping defeat in his own constituency and failing to be re-elected, the party chose George Lansbury, a then-72-year-old strict Christian pacifist, as its leader. Lansbury's views would have been out of step with most of the population no matter when he was elected, but when faced with the rise of Nazism and Fascism on the continent his views crossed the line from being perhaps eccentric to appearing flat-out delusional. With the party's internal polls showing that they were likely to lose almost all their remaining MPs in the forthcoming election if Lansbury remained in power, his shadow cabinet mutinied on him, leading to his resignation, and interim leader Clement Attlee performing a minor miracle in actually managing to significantly increase Labour's vote and seat count, even if the end result was another colossal defeat, with barely a third the number of seats of the National Government.
• New Jersey’s Eleventh Congressional district had for a long time been represented by the moderate Republican Rodney Frelinghuysen, a member of a famous political dynasty in the state. In 2016, Donald Trump only narrowly won the district and for the 2018 midterms, the 73-year-old Frelinghuysen decided to call it quits. Democrats quickly coalesced around Navy veteran and lawyer Mikie Sherrill, but Republicans had a more difficult time trying to find a successor. Eventually, they settled on state assemblyman Jay Webber. Unfortunately for the GOP, turns out they were running a candidate more suited for any Deep South state than New Jersey: Webber was a staunch social conservative who opposed abortion and LGBT rights, which are overwhelmingly popular even in the redder areas of the Garden State. Sherrill blew out Webber in the house race, winning by a whopping 15 points.
• In a repeat of the 1983 election, the Conservatives won the 2019 snap elections, allowing Prime Minister Boris Johnson to finally enact Brexit. Normally, Johnson's pro-Brexit stance might have been a liability given the declining popularity of Brexit. However, this didn't matter when his opponent and leader of the Labour Party was Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed left-wing socialist whose anti-EU history proved to be an awkward fit for a pro-EU party.^note While he's not admitted so publicly, it's widely suspected that this is because Corbyn himself is pro-Brexit and anti-EU (seeing the European Union as too conservative and capitalist). Although Corbyn and Labour came close to winning the 2017 snap elections that yielded a hung parliament for Conservatives, this had more to do with the blunders of Johnson's predecessor Theresa May. In response, Johnson avoided May's worst mistakes and promised to get Brexit done, hoping to capitalize on voter fatigue regarding the Brexit debate. Despite the public seeing the election as a de facto second referendum on Brexit, Labour under Corbyn refused to run an aggressively anti-Brexit campaign, resulting in pro-Brexit supporters rallying around the Tories but anti-Brexit voters having no single obvious party to back. Also not helping matters is how Corbyn had been dogged by past controversies like his support for the Irish Republican Army and allegations of anti-Semitism in Labour under his leadership.^note  Corbyn's supporters denied such accusations while pointing out the hypocrisy of such allegation considering Johnson's long record of bigoted statements like claiming Muslim women look like bank robbers and letterboxes. Subsequently, Corbyn's indecisive Brexit stance and past controversies allowed detractors to smear him as an untrustworthy and dangerous radical incapable of handling Britain's problems; by election time, while Johnson had an approval rating of minus 12, Corbyn had an approval rating of minus 40.
  
  On election night, Labour lost 60 out of 262 seats and suffered the worst election defeat in over 84 years. Motivated by Brexit, voters in traditionally pro-Labour constituencies in Northern England dubbed the "Red Wall" voted Conservative for the first time in decades. At the same time, Labour lost votes in the urban constituencies that would've voted for a more anti-Brexit Labour. To add insult to injury, Labour is the only major party to see their share of the vote decrease while the other parties saw their shares increase. To support the conclusion that Labour's wishy-washy ambivalence about Brexit should get a significant part of the blame, just over 50% of votes went to either Labour or to smaller, actively anti-Brexit parties; however, those votes were often split among 2 or even 3 candidates per constituency and thus easy wins were handed to the Conservative candidates.^note The one exception is in Scotland, where both the Tories and Labour were nearly wiped out; the very aggressively anti-Brexit (and pro-independence from the UK) Scottish National Party won 48 out of Scotland's 59 seats in the House of Commons, with only 6 seats for the Tories and just 1 for Labour. In response, Corbyn resigned from the leadership of the party.
• The 2008 U.S. Senate election in Montana provides an unusual example. With Democratic incumbent Max Baucus widely seen as a lock for reelection, the Republican primary was a largely overlooked affair which wound up being won by longtime perennial candidate Bob Kelleher in an upset. Kelleher was an unorthodox candidate, to say the least; having previously challenged Baucus on the Green party ticket, he was actually to the left of his Democratic opponent, as well as many of his more liberal colleagues, in several areas (most notably, he wanted to merge the executive and legislative branches into a parliamentary system akin to that of the United Kingdom). This left Kelleher without much of a base, and Baucus wound up getting 72 percent of the vote and winning every single county in the state, including ones that were normally Republican strongholds, by a wide margin.
• In the 1972 election, Richard Nixon framed his challenger George McGovern and the Democrats as the party of "acid, amnesty, and abortion" — riddled with the excesses of the 60s' counterculture that wanted immorality to run amok everywhere and combined with the Democratic Party's handling of the unpopular Vietnam War — compared to the GOP that supported the Good Old Ways of the flag, faith, and family values. Although it was Thomas Eagleton who quipped the quote, Nixon used it as part of his "Southern Strategy" to court the conservative "silent majority" of white Northerners and Southerners, who had consistently supported Democrats since the 1930s, by appealing to their backlash against the antiwar and the civil rights movements. Not helping McGovern were the clusterfuck that were the 1972 Democratic primaries,^note which was basically a four-way Mexican standoff between McGovern, George Wallace, Ed Muskie, and Hubert Humphrey; Humphrey even contested the California primary results McGovern's ineffectual campaigning and ultra-liberal policy stances that alienated powerful Democrats^note such as withdrawing from Vietnam altogether in exchange for the return of American POWs, amnesty for draft dodgers, drastic cuts to defense spending, and guaranteed minimum income for the poor, the protracted infighting amongst the Democrats during the primaries, and the revelation that his initial pick for VP (again, Eagleton) had mental health issues. Eagleton was quickly replaced with JFK's brother-in-law Sargent Shriver, but it also undermined McGovern's candidacy. Not only did Nixon win by taking 60.7% of the popular vote and 520 electoral votes^note Nixon was originally pledged 521 electoral votes, but a faithless elector in Virginia voted for the Libertarian Party ticket of John Hospers and Theodora Nathan instead. Many states now have laws to deter this, something the Supreme Court upheld in the 2020 Chiafalo v. Washington decision, but he became the first Republican to sweep the South, which had been solidly Democratic since the Civil War. Since then, the South remains a GOP fiefdom with a few exceptions.
• Why did incumbent Georgia governor Brian Kemp beat his opponent, former Sen. David Perdue (who was endorsed by former president Donald Trump), by a much larger margin of 52 points in the 2022 GOP primary? Well you can blame it on Perdue's ties to the controversial Trump. Many Georgia Republicans hate Trump for his fixation on losing the 2020 election and subsequent voter fraud conspiracy theories, which they blame for depressing Republican turnout and alienating moderate voters in the 2021 Senate runoff elections, resulting in a Democratic victory and subsequent control over the US Senate. Kemp also outfoxed Perdue by courting some of the latter's past supporters and the GOP establishment to his camp, who poured in millions. Trump's anemic support for Perdue was another factor as despite being awash with money in his PAC, he came off as The Scrooge by spending little on ads and hoarding most of it to himself. Many have noted that this was a sign that Trump's status as the GOP's kingmaker is starting to wane.
  • Related to this was the Georgia Secretary of State primary. Despite polls suggesting a tight race between incumbent Brad Raffensperger and Donald Trump-backed challenger Jody Hice, Raffensperger won by a 19 point margin, thereby avoiding a runoff. This could be linked to Hice's lack of name recognition beyond his Congressional district, his support to overturn the state's 2020 election results,^note including a taped call where Raffensperger ignored Trump's mafia-like demand to unlawfully fudge the vote tally and Democrats cross-voting^note Georgia allows voters to cast their ballot for any party's primary so Hice won't be elected.
• In the 2022 Pennsylvania gubernatorial election, why did then-state attorney general and Democratic candidate Josh Shapiro bag 56.5% of the vote over that of Republican Doug Mastriano's 41.7%? Pennsylvania was a key swing state of 2020, and it quickly became apparent that Mastriano really wasn't calibrated to win it, believing all that he had to do to win was to turn out his supporters. Mastriano ignored reaching out to moderates, who loathed his backing of Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election and his own refusal to dial down his far-right rhetoric, which included overt usage of anti-Semitic tropes against Shapiro (who is Jewish) and support for extremist groups such as QAnon. This in turn led to Republican fundraising groups shunning him in favor of more electable candidates elsewhere. That Mastriano didn't interview with mainstream media under the belief that it was "biased" nor did he air TV ads until a month before the election essentially allowed Shapiro to portray Mastriano as someone whose rhetoric was out-of-touch with the average Pennsylvanian.
• Similar to Josh Shapiro, incumbent Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer's 2022 victory over Republican challenger Tudor Dixon^note who was nominated after a clown-car GOP primary that resulted in several candidates being disqualified for submitting fake signatures to get on the ballot can be attributed to Donald Trump's endorsement of Dixon and his past efforts to overturn the state's 2020 election results, which alienated moderates. This, combined with a foiled kidnapping attempt of Whitmer by far-right militias in 2020 and public opposition to the controversial Dobbs SCOTUS decision^note which reversed Roe v. Wade and stated abortion is not a right ensured Whitmer's win. GOP donors shunning Dixon and Whitmer's TV ads attacking her opposition to abortion didn't help either. Whitmer's victory also had a coattail effect as not only did Democrats gain control of the state legislature for the first time since 1984, but voters also enshrined abortion rights in the state constitution.
  • Simultaneously, incumbent secretary of state Jocelyn Benson won by a 14% margin over Republican challenger Kristina Karamo thanks to the latter's support for conspiracy theories such as QAnon, support of controversial policy stances, and believing the 2020 election was "fraudulently stolen" from Donald Trump, who is loathed in Michigan. Not helping Karamo was a 2021 court filing which revealed that she attempted to kill herself and her daughters in a car crash when her ex-husband sought parenting time following their divorce in 2014, which made voters feel she was unhinged.
• First Polish presidential election. In first run on first place was Lech Wałęsa leader of Solidarity Movement, while his competitor was Stanisław "Stan" Tymiński, a man from nowhere, who earlier was a leader of Libertarian Party of CANADA. He tried to show himself as "man outside of system" and Self-Made Man, which made him hated by most of political scene and didn’t gave him popularity as most of people supporting reforms voted for Wałęsa, while people against it decided to skip second run as both candidats weren’t liked by them. This led to Wałęsa victory with 74.25% of votes along with lesser turnout than in first run.

The Opponent Is Too Popular

One candidate is so strong and so popular (sometimes because of a war effort) that the opposition has no chance whatsoever, even though said opposition would probably win against a generic candidate. Often, the main opposition will decline to run against the candidate or even support it, leaving minor parties to try (and fail) to win.

• Irish politics does this quite often; there's sometimes wide-ranging support for presidential candidates which leaves the election unopposed. The last time this happened was in 2004, where Mary McAleese ran with full backing from Fianna Fail (her old party) and Fine Gael.
  • This can happen in almost any republic with a Parliamentary system (i.e., where the President is head of state — basically an elected constitutional monarch — the American system is different).
• During its first 20 years of existence, Israel's elections consistently yielded left-wing landslide majorities, with the right only managing to scrape a third of the votes (and therefore seats, since Israel's voting system, is proportional to each party's vote share rather than district-based). The left and right blocs only managed to be even starting from the 1973 elections.
  • The situation in the '70s and '80s count as well, in a sense; Israel had a "soft" two-party system, with each bloc having one major party having 40 to 50 seats (out of 120 in the entire Knesset) - the Alignment for the left and the Likud for the right - and several minor parties, each with a single-digit number of seats. This was only broken in the 90's - once direct elections for Prime Minister were introduced in 1996, the former logic of voting for the major parties so the President would appoint their leaders to form the government was thrown out of the window and was gone for good when the Prime Ministership reverted to being a presidentially-appointed post in 2003.
• George Washington was both elected and re-elected unanimously as the first president of the United States, in 1789 (Congress hadn't yet convened, so it took until the beginning of the next year to hold the election) and 1792; and James Monroe was almost-unanimously re-elected as the fifth president in 1820. Both ran unopposed for president (though, in Washington's case, the vice-presidential election was contested the second time around, with George Clinton running against incumbent John Adams and losing 50–77). Washington was the only president in US history to be elected unanimously; and William Plumer, the one elector who voted against Monroe the second time, only did so because he believed Washington should retain that singular honor.^note  Or so the popular story goes. In fact, Plumer was one of the comparatively few dissenters to the Monroe-inspired "Era of Good Feelings" in that he wasn't a fan of Monroe's policies. Washington himself could have run for more than two terms, and probably have won as many elections as he liked –- it wasn't like the commanding general of the army that won America its independence was ever going to lose –- but he specifically chose not to, for fear that he would turn the presidency into a de facto monarchy. His precedent stood for almost a century and a half: although supporters of Ulysses S. Grant tried to renominate him for a third time in 1880, he declined; and although Theodore Roosevelt ran for a third term in 1912, he lost: it wasn't until 1940 that a president — Teddy's cousin Franklin D. Roosevelt — successfully ran for, and was elected to, a third term. FDR then won a fourth term in 1944 but died a few months later. In 1947, Congress passed the Twenty-Second Amendment to the United States Constitution, and the states ratified it in 1951: this amendment prohibited all future presidents from running for more than two complete terms.^note  Technically, it does allow a president to run for reelection twice, but only if he previously served as president for less than two years (ie as a vice president who became president to fill the vacancy of a dead, removed or resigned president). Since the Twenty-Fifth Amendment specifies that anybody below the vice president in the line of succession would become "acting president" (which has the same powers as president but is a legally distinct office), in the unlikely event that this provision ever comes into play (in the first 233 years of the US Constitution there's never been a simultaneous vacancy of both president and vice president) it's likely that this two year rule wouldn't apply to an "acting president".
• The 1864 American presidential election contest between Abraham Lincoln and Democratic candidate George B. McClellan was never really going to be a fair fight considering how the Democratic vote at the time was concentrated in the southern states... which were at the time claiming not to be part of the country, with The American Civil War being fought to bring them back. Lincoln had recently turned the tide of the conflict thanks to the timely installation of a new commanding general (and future landslide winner) Ulysses S. Grant; McClellan's main claim to fame was having previously proved hopelessly incompetent in Grant's position earlier in the war, and his policy of wanting to continue the war was actually at odds with the rest of the Democratic Party, whose positions were regarded as either naïve — in the case of the "Peace Democrat" faction, who wanted to bring the war to an end and let the Confederate states rejoin, slavery intact — or outright treasonous — in the case of the "Copperhead" faction, who thought it best just to let the Confederacy become its own nation and try to re-establish a peaceful relationship with them — by the rest of the nation. Not surprisingly, Lincoln completely crushed McClellan, who only won three states, namely New Jersey (his home state), Delaware (by just six hundred votes), and Kentucky (which had attempted to secede and join the Confederacy but eventually stopped short of doing so).
• American president Calvin Coolidge's run for a full term of his own after succeeding the deceased Warren G. Harding ended up with him winning nearly as big of a landslide as Harding did four years prior, largely due to his popularity and the booming economy. This was all the more impressive considering that the liberal faction of the party^note  The Republicans underwent a major shift toward conservatism during the Harding and Coolidge era, which was subsequently solidified by Barry Goldwater's run in 1964. split off and nominated Robert LaFollette as a third-party candidate. However, the loss of votes due to LaFollette's candidacy was more than made up for by the utter fiasco that was the Democratic nomination that year, which took place over the course of a month, saw the front-runners practically falling over themselves to gain the support of the Ku Klux Klan, and after well over a dozen candidates withdrew due to lack of interest and/or support over the 103 ballots taken, the party settled on John W. Davis, who got the nomination mostly because hardly anyone had heard of him, meaning he had no enemies in the party. Coolidge easily thrashed both Davis and LaFollette in the election, with the Democrats earning their lowest-ever popular vote in the post-Civil War era.
• Franklin D. Roosevelt won his first two elections in 1932 and 1936 with political landslides because let's face it, Roosevelt was and still is very popular. In 1932, his predecessor Herbert Hoover had the misfortune of having had the Great Depression happen on his watch and start within a year of his inauguration, meaning that he had had most of his term to fix it, but nothing he did seemed to make anything any better with the predictable result that everyone but the most doctrinaire Republican turned to his opponent to fix things. In 1936, the Great Depression was still in full swing and FDR ran on a 'we got you Social Security, now let me do the rest' campaign, and simply crushed Alf Landon, who only managed to win two small, then-usually-Republican states, Maine and Vermont. Even Landon's home state, Kansas, voted against him. Roosevelt's 1936 victory remains the biggest non-unanimous one of any president, taking 98.49% of the electoral vote. Notably, a magazine named The Literary Digest actually predicted a Landon landslide after conducting a straw poll;^note  The magazine polled its own readership, which skewed towards the upper class and Landon, and didn't try to correct for it. it ceased publication shortly after the election. This also ended Maine's status as a "bellwether state" in presidential politics (the saying went, "As Maine goes, so goes the nation"; Maine's September gubernatorial elections had usually predicted which party would win the November presidential election since 1832), leading FDR's campaign manager James Farley to quip "As Maine goes, so goes Vermont."
• Richard Nixon's 1972 re-election was primarily because many, many Americans still supported The Vietnam War and his election team engaged in some of the dirtiest politics known to man. It's suggested that Nixon was an idiot (or, more accurately, paranoid, see his page for more info) for breaking into the Watergate because he was so popular he could've won this election without the dirty tricks. The only state to vote against him, Massachusetts, famously produced "Don't blame me, I'm from Massachusetts" bumper stickers during the height of the Watergate scandal.
  • A strong case could be made for the Republicans' dirty tricks actually being responsible for the Democratic disaster described below. Republican skullduggery was at least partially responsible for ending the campaigns of Hubert Humphrey and Ed Muskie, either of whom may have fared better against Nixon in the general election, while the most conservative of the Democratic candidates, Alabama Governor George Wallace, had his campaign come to a violent end on May 15, 1972 when he was shot and left paralyzed from the waist down in a failed assassination attempt in Maryland the day before that state's primary.
  • There was also an almost perfect storm of catastrophe for the Democratic candidate, George McGovern. He didn't clinch the nomination until the convention because the second-place finisher Hubert Humphrey contested the California primary results.^note  Humphrey actually beat McGovern in total primary votes, but this meant nothing because, in 1972, most states didn't have primaries and operated on a caucus system. The fight to win the nomination itself consumed so much attention that his campaign team didn't pick a VP candidate until the convention's second day. They had more than half a dozen people turn the slot down (and one Jimmy Carter actually leading a last-minute "Anybody but McGovern" push while simultaneously campaigning to become McGovern's running mate) before they essentially picked Thomas Eagleton at random. The balloting for President and Vice President took so long that by the time McGovern delivered his acceptance speech, the only U.S. media market where it was still Prime Time was Guam. And, finally, it was revealed that Eagleton had a history of mental health problems, involving institutionalization and electric shock therapy, and McGovern had to dump him, by which time the only replacement he could get was Sargent Shriver, a man whose extensive record of public service did not include any prior elected office. Basically, the last good day of the campaign for McGovern was the California primary. It was all downhill from there. (You can read an excellent—if biased^note  Absurdly, extremely, unabashedly biased. —account of McGovern's campaign in Hunter S. Thompson's seminal Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72.)
• Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election yielded him 525 out of 538 electoral votes, the most taken by any US presidential candidate ever, and as a percentage of the Electoral College has not been equaled or surpassed by any president since and only three previously (George Washington in both of his elections, and James Monroe and Franklin Roosevelt in their second elections). He won about 59% of the popular vote and every state with the sole exception of Mondale's native state Minnesota, and even then only lost that state by a little over 3,000 votes. After winning, he famously declared it to be "Morning in America." In this case, Reagan took credit for economic recovery following the stagflation of the 70s. Real gross domestic product (GDP) showed steady increases and unemployment was decreasing. The voters probably hoped for more growth in voting for him. And unlike Nixon's victory over McGovern, Democratic candidate Walter Mondale didn't even run that bad of a campaign (at worst, he was hurt by his association with Jimmy Carter's unpopular administration, and by admitting early in his campaign that he would raise taxes); Reagan was just that insanely popular.
• Ron DeSantis was reelected governor of Florida in 2022 against Charlie Crist by more than 19 points in what was supposed to be a swing state. Not only was the reelection win considered a significant improvement for DeSantis from the 0.5 point margin that won his first gubernatorial term, but it was also the largest statewide win since 1982, the first time a gubernatorial election in Florida had a margin of victory of over a million votes and the largest for a Republican since 1868. Even better for DeSantis is that he flipped the Democratic stronghold of Miami-Dade County and won 58% of Latino voters, who historically leaned Democratic in most races. Some pundits have cited DeSantis' win to his opposition to strict COVID-19 restrictions, which helped the economy and energized Republican turnout. It also helped DeSantis that Charlie Crist, who served as governor from 2007 to 2011, was a Republican turned independent turned Democrat, demotivating many Democrats who felt like they would effectively be forced to vote between two Republicans. Because of DeSantis's massive win, some have speculated that Florida will turn from a traditional swing-state into a solidly Republican state; while DeSantis began to be mentioned as a potential presidential candidate for 2024. ^note (At one point, Crist tried to make an issue of that speculation by attempting to get DeSantis to pledge that he would not run in 2024)
  • While the media narrative around the election credited only DeSantis with a landslide win, in fact nearly every Republican candidate for statewide office performed just as well — U.S. House candidates won by 15.6 points, Sen. Marco Rubio was reelected by 16 points, CFO Jimmy Patronis was reelected by 19 points, non-incumbent agriculture secretary candidate Wilton Simpson won by 18.6 points and Attorney General Ashley Moody was reelected by 21 points and actually outperformed DeSantis by 2 points. While a coattail effect is a possibility, it's more likely Florida voters have drifted more toward the GOP, a trend that predates DeSantis becoming governor.
• Across the pond from the United States, the United Kingdom's general election in 1931 is a good example of this. Shortly before the election, the former Labour Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald had formed a National Government, which was composed of the Conservative Party, just over half of the Liberal Party, and a handful of a rogue but largely popular Labour MPs. It was created with the goal of leading the UK through the Great Depression, and when the country went to the polls in 1931, its candidates won 556 of 615 seats in the Commons and an overall majority of 497. The Conservative Party alone won 473 seats (a majority of 331), and 55% of the vote — the only time a single party has won more than half the popular vote under universal suffrage. Labour, the only real opposition party, suffered the worst election defeat for a major party in history too, losing over 80% (225) of the seats it held at dissolution; had it not been for a three-way split in the Liberal Party (between the National Government faction, the main Liberal group, and a third faction led by David Lloyd George) Labour would have achieved the rare dishonor of going all the way from the ruling government to third-party status. Incredibly, only two years earlier, the Conservative leader and former Prime Minister (now de facto Deputy, or even arguably Co-, PM under Macdonald), Stanley Baldwin, had led his party into an election that saw more than a third of his parliamentary party wiped out. Four years later it was re-elected, this time with Baldwin becoming PM, and won the second-largest majority in history despite losing 100 seats. It wasn't until 1945 when the National Government had disintegrated to the point where it was almost exclusively made up of the by-then-unpopular Conservative Party, that it lost power.
• "Hurricane" Hazel McCallion, mayor of Mississauga, Ontario, squeaked into office in 1978 by narrowly defeating Ron Searle, and stayed there until retiring in 2014 (by then, she was 93 years old!). She was so popular that for the last few elections she didn't even bother campaigning, instead, taking a vacation during that time; she was generally elected with 80–90% of the vote. To date, no real competitor has ever come up.
  • Fun fact? Hazel was only the third mayor of Mississauga since its consolidation in 1974.
  • Famous for working 12–14-hour days into her 90s, having an almost perfect memory for stuff that happened decades ago, and pulling out the occasional snarky quip. Gets hit by a pickup truck at the age of 82, back to work in a few days, when asked about the accident says "I'm fine. The truck had to go in for repairs."
• A similar case with U.S. Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska, who won his first election (in 1970) by a comfortable margin, and then proceeded to win every election with over 60% of the vote, most of them with over 70%. This was attributed partly due to the state's conservative bent and partly due to Stevens being extremely effective at bringing in "pork";^note Basically, monetary projects diverted to a particular constituency, such as Alaska in Stevens' case. he wouldn't be dethroned until 2008 (and only then because he had just been convicted of federal corruption charges, later vacated due to prosecutorial misconduct), and died in a plane crash less than 2 years after.
• Some German Presidents (Theodor Heuss in his second election, Richard von Weizsäcker in both of them, especially the latter). They got more than 80% of the electors.
• In the 1848 French presidential election, Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte got 74% of the vote because the royalists thought he would restore order, his progressive economic views won over workers,^note  He legalized unions in 1867. and the farmers knew he was the Bonaparte's nephew.^note  Some even thought he was Napoleon himself.
• Similarly, in 1968 De Gaulle dissolved the National Assembly and called snap legislative elections, in the aftermath of the May 1968 revolt. The right-wing parties managed to win 396 out of 487 total seats.
• The 2014 Nevada election for Governor. The popular incumbent, Brian Sandoval, faced zero effective opposition in the Republican primary, while on the Democratic side, basically, everybody with any sort of name recognition sat out the election; the result was a clown-car primary where "None of the Above" got the most votes;^note This meant nothing, as under Nevada law the second-place candidate wins the election if NOTA comes first. in the end, Sandoval would go on to crush Democratic nominee Bob Goodman, winning 70.5% of the vote.
• In Pierre Trudeau's first election in 1968, his charisma and ability to win over both English and French-speaking voters, along with his following in the footsteps of the already popular Lester Pearson, proved too much for his opponents to overcome. After his Liberals lost the majority in 1979 to the Conservatives led by Joe Clark, he then steamrollered Clark the following year when his government was toppled by a vote of no-confidence.
• Charlie Baker of Massachusetts was first elected in 2014 during a Republican wave year. Unfortunately, he had to defend his seat again in 2018, when a massive anti-Donald Trump wave crested over the country, and certainly, he was bound to lose in a state that the president lost by 26 points, right? Nope, because the moderate Baker was actually the most popular governor in the country, and not only did he win, he did so by an absolute landslide 33% margin.
• A similar situation happened two years later in Vermont, where, despite the state being strongly Democratic on a federal level and giving Joe Biden his best result of any state in the concurrent 2020 presidential election, incumbent moderate Republican governor Phil Scott, who had similar levels of popularity to Baker, won reelection by a whopping 41% victory margin, the highest for the state in decades.
  • The same scenario happened again in 2022 when Phil Scott was reelected by similarly impressive 43% margin, the biggest in the gubernatorial win since 1996. As for how it happened, Scott kept his popularity streak among voters by sticking to his socially liberal yet fiscally conservative positions. It also helped that Scott supported abortion rights and denounced Donald Trump, thus sparing him from the backlash to both Trump and the Dobbs decision, which overturned abortion rights.
• The 2020 South Korean legislative election gave the center-left Democratic Party (led by Prime Minister Lee Hae-chan) an outright majority of 180 seats (out of 300) in the National Assembly, the largest since the country became a multi-party democracy in 1987.^note The few majority governments had, at most, 153 seats. This, as a result of the Lee government's handling of the coronavirus crisis, becoming the first of several "COVID referendums" that would define elections worldwide during the year.
• The 2020 New Zealand general election. Due to Jacinda Ardern's high personal popularity (mostly because of her incredibly successful handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic in New Zealand, but also because of her response to the 2019 Christchurch attacks), she led the Labour Party to an astounding victory. Her party won 49 percent of the vote and 64 out of the 120 seats in the New Zealand Parliament on election day (and it would later go up to 65 seats as more results came in), which is the first time since New Zealand adopted the Mixed Member Proportional voting system in 1996 that a party had won an outright majority. By contrast, the National Party (due to a year-long leadership crisis, their perceived undermining of the government's pandemic response, and their hard-right turn under firebrand Judith Collins) crashed to just 27 percent of the vote and 35 seats (their worst result in nearly 2 decades) and New Zealand First nosedived down to 2.6 percent and lost all their seats in Parliament due to the 5 percent threshold.
• Thomas Jefferson won the 1804 United States Presidential election by a huge margin over Charles Cotesworth Pinckney due to Jefferson's policies being popular with the electorate and the Federalist Party being in disarray following the death of Alexander Hamilton in his duel with Aaron Burr. Jefferson won the electoral vote 162-14 and, while only a handful of states had a popular vote at the time, his 45.6% margin of victory remains the largest in a contested Presidential election.
• Theodore Roosevelt had quickly proven himself popular during his presidency and when he ran for a full term in 1904, he had the vast support of the American people. His opponent Alton B. Parker didn't differ too much when it came to issues, so the election mostly came down to the personalities of the candidates. Parker, who was seen as boring and stiff, couldn't stand a chance against Roosevelt's popularity and charisma. Roosevelt swept the popular vote by a margin of 18.8%, the largest since James Monroe's uncontested election in 1820.
• The 2021 Western Australian state election in spades. Similarly to Jacinda Ardern and Lee Hae-chan, Premier Mark McGowan's popularity surged thanks to his successful handling of the COVID-19 Pandemic in Western Australia. Combined with the effects of hugely popular state COVID policies (Including the politically controversial/divisive "Fortress WA" controlled border policy), the public perception that WA Labor had stood up to the politically powerful Eastern States in terms of economic and political policy and WA Labor capitalizing on several major blunders by the opposing Liberal party, such as a controversial change in election strategy 16 days before polling day to a "don't let them win too much" strategy without a signature policy, a tone-deaf and divisive green energy policy plank that alienated voters in several coal mining electorates and a particularly disastrous budget costings press conference where the party didn't even calculate their own policy costings, the result of the election was never really in doubt (rape allegations against federal Attorney-General Christian Porter shortly before the election, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison's response, didn't help, either).
  
  Labor won 53 of the 59 seats in the Lower House, reducing the Liberal Party to just two seats (putting them in third place behind the Nationals). Labor also won a majority in the Upper House as well, leading to a double majority government, which is very rare in Western Australia due to the Upper House voting system favoring regional voters. In a sign of how decisive this landslide was, ABC election analyst Antony Green called the election for Labor a mere 45 minutes after the polls closed.
• Barbadian prime minister Mia Mottley called a snap election for January 2022, fresh off her finally achieving Barbadians' long-time goal of abandoning the monarchy of the United Kingdom as their head of state. This is despite Mottley having two more years of her first term left, and her Barbados Labour Party already controlling literally every legislative seat but one due to a previous all-seat landslide in 2018. Again, the Barbados Labour Party won every seat in the legislature, albeit with a slightly reduced (but still absurdly large) popular vote share of 69%.
• In late 2021, the Left Bloc (BE) and Communists (CDU) in Portugal helped the right-wing parties defeat a budget proposed by the much larger but minority-governing social-democratic party, the Socialist Party (PS). The PS had previously relied on the BE and CDU to pass their budget, and this budget failure meant an election was on the horizon, which was held in January 2022. The election saw a landslide victory for the PS, winning a majority government with a 12-point lead over their nearest rival, the centre-right Social Democratic Party (PSD). Majority governments are a difficult task, as Portugal uses a more proportional election system; PS only won one majority previously and all the other majorities were PSD. Much of this landslide was attributed to a majority of BE and CDU voters defecting to the PS out of spite over BE and CDU betraying the only party that that would help them govern.
• In the 2022 Ontario election, Doug Ford's Progressive Conservatives (PCs) won not only a solid majority government, but also a double-digit popular vote lead (that the polls actually underestimated until the day before the election) over its closest rival, the New Democratic Party. How? The PCs attracted a very wide base of voters by their extensive use of micro-targeted promises to more personally connect to them, chipping away at voters from its rivals. It did not hurt that the competing NDP's reputation of having a legacy of defeats and their other rival (the Liberals) remained apparently unfocused. This rival disarray discouraged anti-Ford voters, leaving lower turnout across the board and making Ford's task easier. Ford and the PCs also avoided excessive media appearances to reduce the gaffes available for rivals to use as ammunition against them.
  Labour unions and blue-collar workers, mayors and front-line workers, drivers and transit riders, seniors and young families, and newcomers looking for work in the Ontario Dream; urban, suburban, and rural communities in every region of Ontario. You know, never in my lifetime has a party appealed to so many people, and never in my lifetime has it been more important for a party to represent all of Ontario.
  — Doug Ford
• In the 2022 Quebec election, François Legault and his party, the CAQ, remained umblemished after their decent response to the COVID pandemic and their ability to bury Quebec's notorious federalists vs. sovereigntists debate for a long while to focus on seemingly more productive issues. There was no appetite to oust the CAQ, leading to the CAQ gaining several seats and maintaining a 25% lead over its rivals.
• The 1988 Senate race in Nebraska would see Bob Kerrey, a popular businessman and former Governor who had lost his lower right leg in action in Vietnam, win the first of his two terms in the Senate over Republican incumbent David Karnes by a 57%-42%. Kerrey's popularity from his term as Governor was often cited as one of the major factors, along with the fact that Karnes had been appointed to the Senate seat vacated when previous Democratic Senator Ed Zorinsky died in March 1987 from a heart attack.
• The 2000 Polish presidental elecions were the only Polish presidental elections won in first run with 54.90% for re-election of Aleksander Kwaśniewski, who despise controversies he made by being drunk remained beloved leader while his rivals were discredited (see “The Ruling Party Screwed Things Up”) to the point that second place had only 17.30% of votes.

The Party Is Divided

The main opposition party disintegrates due to internal dissension and a general lack of organization and purpose. One party will win all the major elections until a viable replacement for the opposition can be found.

• The American Federalist Party collapsed shortly after their fifth consecutive loss in 1816; James Monroe won the 1820 presidential election essentially without opposition, winning 231 of 232 electoral votes. Eventually, the Federalists were replaced by the Whigs, who themselves collapsed a few decades later and were replaced by the modern Republicans.
• In Canada, when the Progressive Conservatives wound up so hated they got reduced to only two seats in 1993 and died off. The Liberals had little trouble holding power for the rest of The '90s. At one point, their official opposition was the Bloc Québécois, a party whose main goal is to have Québec secede from Canada.
  • Not unexpected. Canada slipped into a recession in late 1989 alongside most of the world ... only that Canada had already spent the mid-1980s in a financial crisis. Unemployment in Canada had risen to unprecedented levels and the governing Progressive Conservatives were accused of failing to do anything about it. While the United States economy had started recovering by 1993, in Canada the recession lasted until 1995.
  • Another thing that didn't help the PCs' case was the infamous face ad, which, to many people, appeared to be mocking Chrétien for his Bell's palsy. It didn't go over very well with the voters.
• In the 1919 French legislative election, the Bloc National won 433 seats out of 613 because of the Red Scare and the fact the left, then dominated by the SFIO (French Section of the Workers' International), failed to respond to accusations of being Bolsheviks properly and to reach an agreement with the Socialists and ended up isolating the Radicals, basically opening themselves up to a much worse onslaught from the right.
• In Alberta, the Progressive Conservative Party's government collapsed in 2015 due to vote splitting among conservative voters. Conservative voters were divided into two camps: the traditionally governing Progressive Conservatives, and the protest Wildrose Party. The opposing New Democratic Party as a result won 52 out of 87 seats (62%) in the Alberta Legislature, gaining 40.6% of the popular vote. Meanwhile, the Progressive Conservatives only got 27.8% and the Wildrose Party got 24.2%. After this colossal defeat, the Wildrose and Progressive Conservative parties merged into the United Conservative Party, solving the vote splitting problem just in time for the 2019 election, where they handily defeated the New Democratic government.
• The 2022 Danish election can count. Incumbent Social Democrat prime minister Mette Frederiksen called the election while facing a scandal in which her government killed off every farmed mink in the country during the COVID pandemic, with one of her major parliamentary allies threatening to turn on Frederiksen's government if Frederiksen did not call an election soon. During the campaign, Frederiksen campaigned on national unity, even offering to allow right-leaning legislators to join with her to make a unity government. This approach led to much infighting among the supporters of the country's right-wing parties over whether to take up Frederiksen's offer or go their own way. The leading opposition party Venstre lost 44% of its seats amidst the infighting, while the Social Democrats themselves coasted by to pick up two extra seats. Since the Social Democrats' previous left-leaning bloc kept a majority of one seat, the succeeding government formation was completely at Frederiksen's mercy.

The Ruling Party Screwed Things Up

The party which has been governing for the past few years has been doing a spectacularly cruddy job, or at least many people believe that they have. In an election that most people think is long-overdue, the electorate decides to "Throw the Bums Out" in a big way.

• The Canadian federal election of 1984 saw a crushing defeat of the Liberals, who had been in power for every year but one since 1963, by the Progressive Conservatives, who accused the Liberals of corruption, incompetence, and spendthrift irresponsibility at a time Canada was in a recession. Evidently, the voters agreed. This is the last time a Canadian party received an absolute majority of the vote.
  • The Liberals would get their revenge in 1993. Brian Mulroney, the winner of the 1984 election, wound up so hated that the PCs themselves got curb stomped. Due to yet another recession which hit Canada particularly badly and an attack ad that appeared to mock Jean Chrétien's facial paralysis, the PCs' vote share dropped by 27% and the party reduced from 156 seats in the House of Commons to two, eventually resulting in the end of the PC party as they merged with the Canadian Reform Alliance Party in 2003 under a new name (the Conservative Party). It was one of the worst defeats of a sitting government in the Western world.
• The New Zealand general election of 1990 saw the National Party win 67 of the 97 seats in Parliament and kick the Labour Party out of government over its sweeping neoliberal reforms ("Rogernomics"; the nickname cites then–Finance minister Roger Douglas) of the past six years.
  • And then when the new National government decided to continue the reforms ("Ruthanasia", after that Finance minister, Ruth Richardson), New Zealanders lost trust in the two-party system and ended up 'screaming' in a 1992 indicative referendum on the voting system — 85% voted to ditch the existing First-Past-the-Post voting system, and 70% nominated the Mixed-Member Proportional system as its replacement.
• After 18 years in government, in the 1997 British general election, the Conservatives received a massive 'don't let the door hit your arse on the way out' notice.
  • Another landslide victory for an incoming government can also be found in 1924. The Conservatives returned to power at the expense of the Liberals once again.
  • Also, an interesting note, if the Tories in 1997 had lost just 10 more seats, it would have been the worst result achieved by a ruling party in 165 years. John Major very narrowly avoided his name being recorded forever in British political history for all the wrong reasons.
  • The 1918 election was marked by severe discontent with the Liberals, affected by the unpopularity of World War I and their handling of The Irish Question, leading to a split in the party: David Lloyd George's Liberals lost around 150 seats (he remained PM because of an agreement with the Tories) while Herbert Henry Asquith's faction lost all but 36 seats.
• The 1945 UK general election probably fits here. Many saw Winston Churchill as a great wartime leader,^note Despite what the Nostalgia Filter might suggest, though, he was arguably more popular with civilians than with the military. but voters were skeptical of his ability to govern in peacetime; not least because his policies were really no different from those of Conservative governments of the 1930s that had delivered high unemployment and economic depression.^note And many people would have remembered the misery of those returning from the First World War to find themselves unemployed, homeless, and living in poverty. Labour's promise of measures to tackle unemployment, viz. the creation of a welfare state and the construction of decent housing ("a land fit for heroes"), proved enormously popular.
• The 1975 election in Australia was triggered in very controversial circumstances. An unpopular Labor government had to deal with the right-wing parties taking control of the Senate and blocking the budget. Governor-General Sir John Kerr broke with protocol by firing Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, installing opposition leader Malcolm Fraser in his place, and calling an election. Massive demonstrations sprung up in Australia in protest of the ousting of an elected government and as a result, when the election was held a month later... Fraser won the largest landslide in Australian history. Labor's error in judgment had been to assume that voters were so angry they would easily return them to power. But the 'silent majority' of Australian voters had turned against Labor, fed up with economic problems and numerous scandals that had happened in the past three years.
  • When governments lose office in Australia, they tend to lose on a big seat swing. See the ALP in 2013, 1996, and 1949 and the Coalition in 2007 and 1983. Moreover, the narrowness of Gough Whitlam's victory in 1972 was largely because a big swing to the ALP had already taken place in 1969.
• The French legislative election in 1993. By this time, President Mitterrand had been in power for twelve years but his Socialist Party had been weakened by a recession, a split with the centrist UDF party, various scandals, defeats in local elections and a rivalry between Lionel Jospin and Laurent Fabius for succeeding Mitterrand (who had been diagnosed with terminal cancer). The Socialists were completely steamrollered, with their vote share dropping from 34% to 17% in the first round, and their number of seats reduced from 260 to 53. Among the Socialists who lost their seats were Jospin, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, and François Hollande.
  • The Socialists actually received the most votes of any party on the second round. But the other two major parties, the RPR and UDF, had a pact not to run their candidates against each other in the second round. The RPR and UDF took 55% of the vote between them; the Socialists took 31%.
  • The Socialists managed another one in 2012, where they won 280 seats and a total of 57% of the vote alongside allied parties, their best result since being established as a party.
• Special mention goes to the 2009 Japanese general election, where the incumbent Liberal Democrats were utterly crushed by the opposition Democrats. It merits mention that until this point, the LDP had ruled Japan for an almost straight 54 years, except for an 11-month period from 1993 to 1994.
  • And then, in 2012, the LDP came back to retake the majority in a landslide themselves.
• And of course, the US presidential election of 1932. The Great Depression was going on, millions of Americans were out of work, and Herbert Hoover had failed to stop it. He received a massive 'don't let the door hit your ass on the way out' notice. The election saw a national swing of 35.17% to the Democratic Party and marked the first of four landslide victories for Franklin D. Roosevelt. Just to rub it in, during the election campaign a man wrote him a letter saying "vote for Roosevelt and make it unanimous".
  • Voters held a grudge against Republicans for the next three cycles, where they saw heavy losses in Congress. In 1932 they lost a near-record of 101 seats in the House, and by 1936 saw their share of seats in the House and Senate fall to 20% and 18% respectively.
• In Canada during 1935, R.B. Bennett was widely blamed for having absolutely no idea how to fix the Depression, and the belief that he was unsympathetic to the plight of average Canadians was all but ensured when he infamously unleashed the Royal Canadian Mounted Police on the "On-to-Ottawa" trekkers who planned to confront Bennett in Ottawa over his handling of the Depression at Regina on Canada Day, 1935. He proceeded to lead the Conservatives into an utter thrashing, going from 137 all the way to 39 seats in Parliament and giving Liberal's control of the federal government until the late '50s.
• The 2011 Irish general election resulted in ruling party Fianna Fáil being knocked down from 77 TDs (of 166) to 20 after a really deep recession had shattered confidence in the economy and the party. In Dublin, they dropped from 17 seats to just one seat.
  • And bear in mind that since the country's first election, Fianna Fáil had won elections fourteen out of twenty-six times on its own and another five times as part of a coalition. That's right, they pissed people off who'd been voting for them for nearly a century (the first election was in 1927). And their previous voting percentage was 41.6% — after the election, it was 17%. Yeah, the Irish people were pissed.
• Within Quebec, the 2011 federal election proved to be this for the NDP. While the governing Conservatives won a healthy but hardly spectacular (in normal circumstances) majority in Canada as a whole,^note  They had been governing since 2006 with minority standing. the race in Quebec was really between the sovereigntist (read: nationalist/separatist) Bloc Quebecois and the soft-federalist New Democratic Party (both parties are leftish and vaguely social-democratic; what distinguishes them in Quebec is their position on sovereignty). Before the election, the Bloc had previously had 47 of 75 seats from Quebec (two-thirds). After the election, the Bloc had four of 75—the remaining 43 all went to the New Democrats. The NDP also took seven of fourteen Liberal seats in Quebec, and five of ten Conservative ones, for a total of 59 seats—just under 80%. Yeah, it was that kind of election.
  • One Quebec riding, Berthier-Maskinongé, was deemed so pro-Bloc that the NDP only run a token candidate in it. The candidate was a 24-year-old pub manager with almost no political experience and who did not even live in the riding. She did not campaign and cast an early absentee ballot so she could spend election day on vacation in Las Vegas (she had bought the airplane tickets before the election was called and did not see a reason to change her plans). When she actually won the seat, everyone was dumbfounded and the NDP leadership publicly promised that they would make sure that she took her new duties seriously...which she did so well she was re-elected in 2015 based on her genuine popularity with the people of Berthier-Maskinongé.^note We should note that although 2015 was a disappointing year for the NDP in Canada generally, the Liberal wave that struck the rest of the country was less pronounced in Quebec and the NDP remains the major left-wing federal party there; that said, people in Brosseau's riding really do like her, apparently.
• Perhaps the most internationally-famous example is the first multi-racial parliamentary election in South Africa in 1994, in which around 80% of the population was entitled to vote for the first time ever (and another 11% for the first time on the same terms as white people), with the end of apartheid, and every election post-apartheid since. The African National Congress — the party led by Nelson Mandela — won 252 of 400 seats and 62.65% of the popular vote and the National Party, which had governed for 46 years without interruption, retained only 82 of the 232 seats it was notionally defending with 21 of 103 incumbent National legislators losing their seats. Unsurprisingly, there was very little opposition to the ANC from the major parties, and the outcome of the election was a foregone conclusion from the start of the campaign. The ANC has consistently won over 60% of the vote at every election since, winning larger majorities in 1999 and 2004, and only losing seats for the first time in 2009 (but still finishing with more seats than the party had in '94) before losing a few more in 2014. The Democratic Alliance, the closest thing South Africa has to a serious opposition party, won 22% of the vote in its best result in 2015.
• The 2011 Southern Sudanese independence referendum was a variant of this. Ninety-nine percent of the voters went for independence, and really, considering what the northern state had been doing to the South,^note  Including literal slave raids. you can't blame 'em.
• Spanish politics tends to work like this, with power alternating between the Spanish Socialist Workers' Party (PSOE) and the People's Party not because the opposition party has a particularly good candidate, but because voters are so fed up with the party in power. The Socialists, who had won four straight elections since 1982, were finally defeated in 1996 because of corruption scandals as well as a crisis which had put lots of people out of work, though a Scare Campaign successfully erased the PP's lead in opinion polls and only got a narrow victory with less than 500.000 votes instead. The People's Party took power and was re-elected in 2000, but lost the election of 2004 just a few days after the March 11 bombings in Madrid due to its insistence in blaming the attack on the Basque terrorist group ETA instead of Al Qaeda, a move that was interpreted by many as an intention to mislead for a political gain. The Socialists regained power and were re-elected in 2008... and lost the next election in 2011 quite miserably because of another economic crisis that put millions out of work.
  • Until 2015, when general upset with both PP's austerity measures and corruption scandals and PSOE's corruption scandals destroyed that, leaving a parliament divided among PP, PSOE, and two new parties: Podemos (alt-left) and Ciudadanos (center-right). In the resulting mess, there was no way to invest a Prime Minister and elections were slated to June 2016, where even if the PP got more seats at the parliament the mess continued with no way to form a government and yet another round of elections in December 2016 (a year after the everything started) looming in the horizon, with early polls suggesting a similar result. Things changed in October when Mariano Rajoy was invested Prime Minister again thanks to PSOE's abstention after their Secretary-General Pedro Sánchez resigned. ^note Or, more accurately, when party bigwigs made him resign.
• The Saar referendum in 1935, where the Saar, an industrial coal-producing nation of Germany that had been run by the French since the Treaty of Versailles, decided its future. This was the only time the Nazi Party was ever given something close to a democratic endorsement: 90% of Saarlanders voted to return to Germany (and in this case, it was more to do with loyalty to Germany than necessarily Hitler).
• In the Australian state of Queensland, the 2012 election saw the Australian Labor Party reduced from 51 seats (out of 87) to only seven, with a 14% swing against them in the two-party-preferred vote. The Liberal National Party won a whopping 78 seats, and Katter's Australian Party won two seats; when one LNP member defected to the KAP and predicted (incorrectly) that more would follow, there was even speculation KAP could replace Labor as the official state opposition. However, just three years later there was another 14% vote swing back to Labor, giving them a plurality of seats and putting them back in power.
• The Hungarian election of 2010. The Socialist Party was thrown out of government because of its handling of the economic crisis. Fidesz, the opposition, got 53% of the votes in the PR list and won outright in 119/176 of the single-member constituencies (which requires a majority on a 50% turnout). Fidesz managed to get a supermajority of 68% of the seats, but some have pointed out that had the Hungarian system been purely first-past-the-post, Fidesz would have got over 90% of the seats.
• Ironically, while he's nowadays considered as one of the lowest-regarded U.S. Presidents ever, Warren G. Harding won the 1920 election by a huge landslide: campaigning on a "return to normalcy" after the unpopular U.S. intervention in World War I, the post-war recession, the bungling of the League of Nations treaty, and just the plain hatred of Woodrow Wilson at the time, Harding carried over 400 electoral votes and 60.3% of the popular vote against James Cox's 34%, the highest percentage margin in American presidential elections to date, not counting several elections held before every state used a popular vote.^note Interestingly, Cox's running mate, Franklin D. Roosevelt, came to power in another landslide, 12 years later.
• In 2003, Democratic California Governor Gray Davis was recalled with 55% of the vote, due in part to his perceived botched handling of the California energy crisis. Tripling vehicle license fees probably didn't help his cause either. In a state as heavily Democratic as California, that takes a special kind of skill.
• In 1997, an alliance of small right-wing parties called the Solidarity Electoral Action (AWS) took power in Poland, in coalition with the liberal Freedom Union (UW). The government became hugely unpopular, and four years later was completely wiped out: the two parties won 9% of the vote between them, and lost all their seats, while the opposition Democratic Left Alliance (SLD) won 41% of the vote and 216 seats, the largest number of seats a Polish party then managed.
  • Ironically, the SLD was itself wiped out four years later, going from 41% to 11%.
• One of the most prominent examples of How the Mighty Have Fallen in American politics (at least in the 2010s) is New Jersey Governor Chris Christie. First elected in 2009, then riding handily to re-election as a very popular Republican Governor in an otherwise Democratic state in 2013 due to his reputation as a warrior against corruption (among other things), many believed he was a serious contender for the Republican nomination in 2016. However, his fortunes quickly took a nosedive in the Bridgegate scandal, where people in his government closed down lanes on the George Washington Bridge between Fort Lee and New York City, something widely believed to have been done as retribution against Fort Lee's mayor's refusal to endorse Chris Christie. With this scandal tanking his chances to earn the presidential nomination or even a position in Donald Trump's cabinet despite supporting him loyally, his last few years as New Jersey governor were marked with a seeming apathy for actually governing the state, most epitomized with the time he was infamously caught on a state beach that was closed to the public due to a state government shutdown. This all led to Chris Christie leaving office as the least popular governor in the entire country, and the attempted Republican successor Kim Guadagno, Christie’s own lieutenant governor, stood no chance, losing to Democrat Phil Murphy 56–42, with the networks called the governorship for Murphy with the first batch of votes released that night.
• The French government's controversial handling of the COVID crisis led the ruling "Republique en Marche" party (already splintering over the "yellow jackets" protests) to lose about half of their mayoralties in the 2020 municipal elections, while the far-right National Rally, the center-right Les Republicains, and the far-left Frane Insoumise also lost several seats. On the other hand, the Socialists, and particularly the Greens made several gains.
• The Chilean referendum of October 2020 ended with a whopping 82 percent of the electorate choosing to change the country's Constitution, which was redacted during the military regime era (1980) had become quite unpopular upon the October 2019 riots. Over 7 million people cast their ballots, the highest in the nation's history (it was also the first time since voluntary voting was enacted in 2012 where turnout exceeded 50 percent of those eligible)
• The 2018 Mexican election: after losing faith in the mayor parties^note  The center-left-right-and-everything-in-between PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) and the center-right PAN (National Action Party) after the governments of Felipe Calderon and Enrique Pena Nieto ended with a massive crime crisis in the druglord-dominated Northern states and a stagnant economy, the people decided to support perennial candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador. His initial lead was so big that the other parties discussed including a run-off in case he didn't reach 50% of the vote to stop him from getting the presidency. Yet, when the election came, he got 53% of the votes winning every state except for Guanajuato.^note  This just means he got first place in almost every state, but since Mexico doesn't have an electoral college, all that matters is the national percentage. Not only did he get more than twice as many votes as the first runner-up (Ricardo Anaya's 22%), he managed to get an outright majority, which no president had done for more than thirty years. And he did it in a four-way race.^note  For all practical purposes, it was a three-way race. Nobody actually expected the fourth place, Jaime Rodríguez "El Bronco", to actually have a chance.
• In Alberta, the Progressive Conservative Party had royally screwed things up by 2015, especially with the shenanigans of Alison Redford, and the New Democratic Party won 52 out of 87 seats (62%) in the Alberta Legislature. The NDP then proceeded to institute a carbon tax that hit individuals more than industry and align themselves with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau (whose name was mud in Alberta), amongst other things. Then, in 2019, the United Conservative Party won 63 seats, which is over 72%. Besides getting walloped, the NDP got another humiliation—the first party in Alberta history to have been in power for only one term, while all others have held power for more than a decade—winning landslide victories most of the time.
• Amusingly, Alberta had the only all-NDP government in Canada from 2016 to 2019 (after the 2017 British Columbia general election, the NDP assumed government in coalition with the Green Party). In 2016, the then-other NDP government (in Manitoba) was nuked by the Progressive Conservatives — who also won Manitoba's first popular-vote majority since 1915 (and tied with the Liberals' win that year for winning 40 seats^note  However, the 1915 results had the Liberals winning 40 out of 47 seats, versus the 2016 Conservatives' 40 out of 57. ). The proximate cause of the NDP faceplant was dissatisfaction with what people saw as unrestrained deficit spending and having raised the provincial sales tax by a percentage point in 2013 without a public referendum, as they had promised. A 2014 revolt against then-Premier Greg Selinger by five cabinet ministers couldn't have helped.
• Another Canadian example: the 1987 New Brunswick election had the 39-member-strong Conservative government fall to the Liberals... who won just over 60% of the popular vote and all 58 seats in the province. Former Premier Richard Hatfield had been popular and won four terms, but he was beset by scandals in his fifth term including abuse of the provincial government's plane and accusations of illegal drug use.
• The 2019 Hong Kong District Council elections. While District Council elections have traditionally favored the Pro-Beijing camp due to its low-profile nature, this time it was widely seen as a referendum on the five-month-long protests triggered by the controversial mainland China extradition bill. The pro-democratic camp won 388 out of 452 directly-elected seats, giving them control of 17 out of 18 district councils, even sweeping two of them (Wong Tai Sin and Tai Po). The result was such a major blow to the Chinese Communist Party, which had not anticipated defeat, that the director of the Central Government Liaison Office in Hong Kong was removed just a little over a month after the election.
• The 1983 Argentine presidential elections took place at the end of the Proceso de Reorganizacion Nacional (National Reorganization Process) dictatorship, marred by economic depression and the Falklands War fiasco. As the right-wing parties^note Francisco Manrique's conservative Federal Party (Partido Federal) and Alvaro Alsogaray's liberal Democratic Centre Union (Union de Centro Democratico) became discredited by their ties to the regime, the race focused on Raul Alfonsin, of the center-left Radical Civic Union (Union Civica Radical), who ran on a platform of reconciliation and the procurement of the military junta, while the Justicialist Party (Partido Justicialista) tried to balance the still-squabbling factions of the Peronist movement by nominating Italo Luder as its Presidential candidate and Deolindo Bittel as his VP,^note While not a member of the anti-Communist "Triple-A", Luder took a hard line against the guerrillas and the Marxists. On the other hand, Bittel was a key human rights advocate during the Proceso. Talk about a mismatched ticket... but at the same time, it also pledged to recognize the junta's self-amnesty law, and the lighting up of a cardboard coffin symbolizing the UCR was seen as a sign of unnecessary aggression. Alfonsin handily won 52-40 and the Justicialistas faced their first electoral defeat ever (they had been outlawed between 1955 and 1972).
• The 2001 British Columbia general election had the BC Liberals win 77 out of 79 seats, decisively unseating the incumbent BC NDP majority government. The BC Liberals would continue to win majorities for 16 years afterward. This came after the NDP premier Glen Clark was beset by scandals such as the Fast Ferries Scandal^note  where Clark's government tried to stimulate the province's shipbuilding industry by constructing three major ferries; the project's costs ballooned out of control and the ferries themselves fell short of their initially expected capabilities and a police raid on Clark's house over an alleged bribery scandal, leading to his resignation before the election. His successors within the party could not reinvigorate the NDP's image quickly enough to avoid losing nearly all their seats.
• In Antigua and Barbuda, their Labour Party is a walking Landslide Election waiting to happen. They almost always win national elections, often with large seat landslides backed up by popular vote landslides of at least 15 points. However, they have been defeated three times (in 1971, 2004, and 2009), twice by landslides:
  • By 1971, the Antigua Trades and Labour Union (a major base of support for the Labour Party) had splintered into two over leader Vere Bird's complacency after 20 years in power. One faction remained loyal to Labour, while another formed the opposing Progressive Labour Movement. In 1971, the PLM challenged the Labour Party. Labour lost all but four out of 17 seats to the PLM, with Vere Bird himself even losing his own seat; a seat loss that would not be replicated until 2004. It was also Labour's worst popular vote loss in history, with the PLM trouncing them by a margin of almost 20%.
  • In 2004, the Labour Party was dogged by controversies over their 1999 re-election and a healthcare corruption scandal, and were defeated by the anti-corruption opposition, the United Progressive Party. The UPP won 70% of the seats in the legislature and outdid Labour in the popular vote by a 13.5% margin.
• The 2014 Indian general election was marked by a landslide of 336 seats in India's Parliament for the right-wing Bhartiya Janata Party (BJP) and its coalition, as they routed the ruling Indian National Congress (INC) by a huge margin. In contrast, this was the worst-ever performance for the INC, which had dominated India's politics since 1947. They won only 44 seats, with its wider alliance winning a total of just 59 seats, meaning there was no official opposition party (as there is a minimum threshold of 55 seats for a party to be qualified as the opposition). The BJP's leader Narendra Modi portrayed himself as someone who lived modestly compared to the INC's Rahul Gandhi, who was lampooned for being an out-of-touch Spoiled Brat. Rising inflation, poor farmers being Driven to Suicide due to high debts, and a series of corruption scandals (notably the wasteful spending on the 2010 Commonwealth Games, improper allocation of the nation's coal deposits to private entities, and crooked officials selling 2G cellphone network licenses to preferred carriers in exchange for bribes) also soured the INC's image as well. Later on, the BJP gained 20 more seats in the 2019 election thanks to Modi's enduring popularity with the voters.
• With a loss of 198 seats in the 1977 Indian general election, the Indian National Congress was routed by the newly-formed Janata Party gaining 260 seats. The Janata Party was a loose coalition of opposition parties with varying ideologies. Voters were unhappy with incumbent prime minister Indira Gandhi imposing draconian measures to muzzle the opposition via censorship and imprisoning people who opposed her after she declared a national emergency. Not helping matters was a controversial forced sterilization program designed to curb the rapid population growth. Congress also lost control of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populated state and a key stronghold.
  • Congress made a roaring comeback in 1980 by winning 60% of the seats in India's Parliament and a margin of 22%. This could be attributed to the infighting within the incumbent Janata Party and Indira Gandhi's effective campaigning.

The Voters Take a Third Option

A major party winds up getting split between two factions, allowing another party to come up the middle and win easily. It may or may not overlap with the party disintegration variant, above.

• The US presidential election of 1912 had the Republicans split between the conservative wing, led by William Howard Taft, and the liberal wing, led by Theodore Roosevelt. After losing the Republican primary, Roosevelt founded his own party called the Progressive Party. The resulting split of Republican voters allowed Democrat Woodrow Wilson to come up the middle and win 40 states and 435 electoral votes. Taft may have lost to Wilson regardless, as he was unpopular and widely regarded as ineffectual, but in turn, Roosevelt might have easily won had Taft been out of the equation.
• The UK election in 1983 (already mentioned above) also counts as this; looking beyond the unpopular leader, Labour, and the Left in general, were undergoing a lot of factionalization at the time. Several members of Labour's moderate wing broke off to form the Social Democratic Party, which formed an alliance with the older Liberal Party (and later merged to form the Liberal Democrats). Though the Conservatives won fewer votes in 1983 than in 1979, Labour lost far more votes to the SDP-Liberal Alliance.
• In a repeat of the 1983 election, the Conservatives won the 2019 election largely because of a split opposition vote, this time over Brexit. Whereas Conservatives ran on a pro-Brexit platform as evident by their slogan "Get Brexit Done", Labour didn't pursue an aggressively anti-Brexit campaign partly because of their leader Jeremy Corbyn's anti-EU views. Furthermore, whereas the Brexit Party decided not to run in Conservative strongholds to avoid splitting the pro-Brexit vote, this didn't happen with the other anti-Brexit parties in Labour strongholds. Subsequently, while nearly all Brexit supporters rallied around the Tories, there was no clear party for the Brexit opponents to rally behind. Post-election analysis showed that just over 50% of votes went to either Labour or to smaller anti-Brexit parties; however, those votes were often split among 2 or even 3 candidates per constituency, and thus easy wins were handed to the Conservative candidates.
• As pointed out above, Jospin flunked out in the first round of French presidential elections in 2002 because too many of his supporters split and voted for other left-wing parties instead of supporting him.
• 2018 in Quebec was the funeral of the province's infamous national sovereignty vs. federalism debate that fuelled the two hitherto primary parties of the Liberals (federalists) and the PQ (pro-independence) for the past several decades. The CAQ managed to come up the middle by presenting a third option to remain Quebec nationalist but not focus on the question of independence for now, basically opening the doors for both dissatisfied PQ and Liberal voters to vote for the CAQ instead. This third option allowed the CAQ to take advantage of both the governing Liberals' austerity controversies and the wane of the PQ's independence agenda.

The Candidate Had a Shady History

One candidate self-sabotage, be it from personal baggage, scandal, criminal proceedings, or a huge gaffe, handing victory to the opposition.

• In 1991, Louisiana voters also found themselves in a mess after incumbent governor Buddy Roemer placed third in the first round (largely due to a faltering government and a poorly-handled party switch), and the final decision came down to Edwin Edwards, a three-term governor (who lost the previous election to Roemer) constantly accused of corruption but minority-friendly, and David Duke, a far-right Nazi-sympathizing former Grand Wizard of the KKK. The outcome proved rather predictable: almost everybody closed ranks behind Edwards (he was endorsed locally by his former rivals Roemer and David Treen, and nationally by George H. W. Bush) and he went on to crush Duke by a 61%–39% landslide. As in France later, bumper stickers expressing the importance of supporting Edwards appeared, two of the most popular being "Vote for the crook. It's important." and "Vote for the lizard, not the wizard".
  
  Duke won over half the white vote...^note  When asked about his massive loss, he replied that he was proud of this. ^note  Don't worry; this doesn't mean that half of the white Louisianans voted for him. Half of the white Louisianans who showed up voted for him. A lot didn't; although turnout was high, this can be attributed to blacks turning out to keep Duke out of office. and, incredibly, eight percent of the black vote!
  
  In what can be considered a scarily accurate prediction, the now-defunct Shreveport Journal considered Edwards' career over after his loss to Roemer in 1987 and said that the only way he could win again was if he ran against Hitler. Edwards also got into the act, snarking to a journalist that the only thing he had to do to win was "stay alive".^note  We are talking about a man who once said "The only way I can lose this election is if I'm caught in bed with either a dead girl or a live boy" and described his opponent as "so slow it takes him an hour and a half to watch 60 Minutes." He also said that they were "both wizards under the sheets". Given that Duke was a KKK Grand Wizard ... burn.
• In the 1998 Tennessee state senate elections, Democratic candidate Charlotte Burks won 30,072 votes while her Republican opponent, Byron (Low Tax)^note not a nickname, he had his middle name legally changed to "(Low Tax)" Looper, won just 1,494 votes. This was caused by the fact that Burks was the widow of Tommy Burks, the long-serving, popular, and recently deceased previous senator ... whom Looper had just been charged with murdering, a crime for which he was eventually convicted two years later. On top of that, all votes for Charlotte Burks' were write-in ones, as an obscure Tennessee law meant that all the candidates had to be registered 30 days before the election and could not be replaced if they died. Even the state Republicans ran a campaign urging their voters not to support Looper after his arrest. On a positive note, considering her husband's murder, Burks was re-elected three times before her eventual retirement in 2015, and in her first term, one of her first actions was adding a law to allow candidate substitutions if they had died to prevent future occurrences of this scenario.
• The 2010 US Senate elections had a few:
  • In South Carolina, Republican incumbent Jim DeMint was expected to win easily given South Carolina's status as a solid red state, and midterm elections, in this case in the middle of Barack Obama's first term, are usually favorable to the party not holding the presidency. The Democratic primary was won by Alvin Greene, an unemployed military veteran who has never held public office. The primary victory was a surprise as Greene had not campaigned in any way, nor did he explain how he came up with the $10,400 filing fee to run in the primary. To say Greene came with baggage would be an understatement: he had been arrested a year earlier for showing pornographic images to an 18-year-old female while trespassing in a University of South Carolina computer lab. Greene agreed to a few television interviews and gave short, nonsensical responses, such as claiming he would create jobs by manufacturing toys of himself. According to the FEC, Greene's campaign received a grand total of $0 in campaign contributions. DeMint easily won 61%–28% on election day.
  • The special Delaware contest between Chris Coons and Christine O'Donnell was to fill Vice President Joe Biden's former seat. Coons was not really chosen to be a serious candidate, but merely a sacrificial lamb set to lose to the state's longtime Republican House member Mike Castle, who planned to finish his career by serving a single term in the Senate. Polls showed Castle beating Coons by wide margins; however, the Tea Party-backed Christine O'Donnell pulled off a massive upset, as many of the state's Republican voters found Castle too moderate to be their party's standard-bearer. O'Donnell, a perennial candidate who had never held prior office, was handicapped early on by video clips of her making, ahem, provocative statements condemning masturbation and premarital sex, doubting evolution, and, most notoriously, that she had dabbled in witchcraft in her youth. Saturday Night Live had a field day, mocking her weekly during the election. O'Donnell responded to the rumors by running one of the most bizarre campaign commercials in memory, beginning with her looking directly at the camera and stating, deadpan, "I'm not a witch." O'Donnell was also utterly destroyed debating Coons, giving indecisive answers, not being able to name a Supreme Court decision, and seeming unaware that the US Constitution specified a separation between church and state. Allegations also came up that O'Donnell was illegally using campaign contributions to pay for rent and personal expenses. Despite the election taking place during a Republican wave and O'Donnell completely dominating the media narrative, Coons easily won 57%–40% on election day.
• The 2012 Missouri U.S. Senate race, where long-time representative Todd Akin ran against incumbent Claire McCaskill, was ultimately decided by a major gaffe by Akin. In talking about abortion, specifically his opposition to allowing abortion even in the case of rape, he claimed (using a very poor choice of words) that "...If it's a legitimate rape, the female body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down...". This quickly went memetic for all the wrong reasons and ensured McCaskill's re-election by nearly 16 points, 54.8%–39.1%, in a state that Republican Mitt Romney easily won by 9 points in the presidential election. McCaskill would later admit she deliberately tried to ensure he was her opponent, banking on his propensity for controversial statements to do him in. Naturally, the seat went red the next time it was up in 2018.
• While the 2018 midterms were a big landslide in general for Democrats, and especially big one happened in the 3rd District of Illinois. Dan Lipinski was always expected to win re-election quite easily. But by a 47% margin? His opponent must be a trainwreck, right? Yep, because it was neo-Nazi Holocaust denier, Arthur Jones. We hate Illinois Nazis.
• Former California Republican Congressman Clair Burgener's final race in his district, covering part of San Diego, became this in 1980 when Tom Metzger, then a Grand Wizard in the Ku Klux Klan^note Metzger would later break with the KKK to start a neo-Nazi group called White Aryan Resistance while making other campaigns as a perennial candidate, emerged as the Democratic nominee - and much like what happened in the 1990 Louisiana Senate and 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race where David Duke advanced to the runoff despite being denounced by the Republican party, the California Democratic party; led by Governor Jerry Brown, quickly denounced Metzger and endorsed Burgener. This - coupled with having Ronald Reagan at the top of the ticket and Burgener's campaign publicizing Metzger's frequent racist remarks - led to Burgener closing his career by defeating Metzger with a stunning 86% of the vote, breaking a 40-year record for the most votes received in a House race.
• The 1976 race for Missouri's 6th Congressional District^note then covering most of northwestern Missouri eventually developed into this. The race pitted Republican State Representative Tom Coleman against Democratic businessman Morgan Maxfield for an open House seat whose previous occupant, Democratic incumbent Jerry Litton, had given up the seat to run for the Senate seat opening up following the retirement of Democratic Senator Stuart Symington (Litton, who many - among them Jimmy Carter - felt could potentially have been President, had won in an 11-candidate primary that included fellow Congressman James Symington (Stuart's son); Kansas City Mayor Charles Wheeler and former Governor Warren Hearnes but was tragically killed on August 3, 1976 along with his entire family and the pilot while flying to the Litton victory celebration^note Hearnes would win the Democratic nomination in a special primary but was defeated in the general election for the Senate by Republican John Danforth, Missouri's Attorney General and an heir to the Ralston Purina fortune who had previously ran against and lost to the elder Symington in 1970); resulting in a simultaneous special election to finish the term alongside the regular election for the term starting in 1977. Maxfield - citing his association with the late Jerry Litton as well as his friendship with Kansas City Chiefs owner Lamar Hunt - had a big lead for much of the race until a report by the Kansas City Star revealed that Maxfield had lied about almost everything pertaining to his personal background, with the biggest bombshell being that Maxfield - who claimed to have been a bachelor - was separated from his wife and children in Texas. This led to Maxfield's campaign manager resigning in protest, the St. Joseph News-Press switched their endorsement from Maxfield to Coleman and Coleman won both the special and general elections by landslides; beating Maxfield by a 61%-39% margin in the special election to finish the term Litton had most recently been elected to and a 58.5%-40.5% margin in the general election. Coleman would hold the seat until his defeat in 1992 by Democrat Pat Danner.^note Danner had run in 1976 to succeed her boss but lost the primary to Maxfield. As for Maxfield, in an eerie twist of fate he would lose his own life in 1981 in a plane crash.
• The 1974 midterms were largely a backlash against Richard Nixon and his administration's involvement in the Watergate scandal, and this was especially pronounced in Indiana's 2nd Congressional District, where incumbent Earl Landgrebe was one of the few Republicans who never stopped defending him even after the "Smoking Gun" tape which recorded him and his chief of staff discussing how to prevent the FBI from investigating the hotel break-in was released to the public^note ironically, in two of his previous bids for re-election; Landgrebe faced primary challenges from Republicans who felt he wasn't supportive enough of Nixon, voting with his fellow Republicans just over half of the time. Landgrebe refused to even listen to the tape, and shortly before Nixon's resignation, he told the press not to "confuse [him] with the facts" and that he would stand by the disgraced president even if the two of them had to be "taken out of [the White House] and shot." This resulted in Democrat Floyd Fithian, whom he had previously won an easy reelection against in 1972, handily unseating him by a 61-38 margin, in the process resulting in Democratic control of that district for the next 2 decades until Republican David McIntosh won the election to replace Fithian's retiring Democratic successor, Philip Sharp, during the Republican tidal wave of 1994.
• 1988 had a pair of examples in the U.S. House of Representatives.
  • The Colorado 5th district^note centered around Colorado Springs saw first-term incumbent Republican Congressman Joel Hefley facing Democratic challenger John J. Mitchell. However, Mitchell got into a dispute with TWA and - at the height of fears regarding the AIDS crisis - tried to retaliate by claiming that "AIDS is spread through TWA". The Democrats quickly washed their hands of Mitchell, who ended up losing to Hefley 75%-25%; by roughly a three-to-one margin.
  • The Georgia 4th district race^note then centered primarily around the suburbs of Atlanta pitted incumbent Republican Congressman Pat Swindall^note who first won by riding the Reagan coattails to defeat incumbent Democrat Elliot Levitas in 1984. Swindall, appealing primarily to evangelical Christians, was starting to be viewed as a rising star; with Swindall and wife Kimberly, a former Duke University cheerleader, being nicknamed the "Ken and Barbie of politics" against a relatively conservative Democrat in Ben Jones, an actor best known for playing Cooter Davenport in The Dukes of Hazzard in a rematch from 1986. Swindall began this campaign by running ads attacking Jones for admitting to past problems with alcohol and marijuana; only for it to be disclosed that Swindall had been implicated in a money laundering scheme where Swindall, seeking an $850,000 loan for his dream house, was told by an undercover IRS agent posing as a representative of the drug trade in Colombia (and who, unknown to Swindall, was secretly recording him) that drug money was included; with Swindall then suggesting an associate create a mortgage company as part of the scheme, then lied about his involvement to a federal grand jury, resulting in Swindall being indicted that October on 10 counts of perjury and Jones proceeded to defeat Swindall by a 60%-40% margin^note while one of the perjury charges was thrown out; a jury subsequently convicted Swindall of the other 9 and he was sentenced to a year in prison and a $30,450 fine. Swindall managed to get three of the other charges overturned, but when the case made it to the Supreme Court; they refused to overturn the remaining charges and Swindall began serving his prison sentence in 1994
• Again, from the 2022 Michigan Secretary of State election. Republican challenger Kristina Karamo's loss to incumbent Jocelyn Benson stemmed from the former's belief in conspiracy theories and a 2021 court filing that revealed she attempted to kill herself and her daughters in a car crash when her ex-husband sought parenting time following their divorce in 2014, which made voters feel she was unhinged.

The Candidate Just Didn't Click

No particular problem, major scandal, or political issue caused a candidate to lose out on the seat by such a wide margin; there was just a huge gap of charisma and ability to connect with voters separating the candidates.

• Again, from the 1984 US presidential election, President Ronald Reagan absolutely crushed Walter Mondale. President Reagan probably would have won no matter what, but Mondale's nasal speaking voice, hesitant phrasing, and inability to "spin" his message, particularly when contrasted with the ultra-smooth skills of "The Great Communicator", turned an ordinary defeat into a Landslide Election.
  • Also not helping Mondale was the fact he was Jimmy Carter's vice president, considering that dissatisfaction with the Carter administration was one of the factors that led to Reagan's landslide in 1980.
  • Or that Mondale often got eclipsed by his much more popular VP pick, Geraldine Ferraro, in his own campaign materials. Several women's groups famously wore buttons reading "Ferraro and What's His Name." The fanfare surrounding Ferraro soon died out as she was bogged down with controversies such as her husband John Zaccaro's finances and past links to The Mafia,^note most notably Robert DiBernardo, who was a caporegime for the Gambino crime family and known pornographer. DiBernardo rented out office space from one of Zaccaro's buildings, but was killed off for insubordination in 1986. Although not used during the election, it was later used to discredit Ferraro's run for the Senate in 1992 and her own stance on abortion, which alienated Catholic voters.
  • Additionally, Mondale had barely won the nomination, as it took the final set of primaries in states such as California and New Jersey before he emerged with the nomination over then little-known Colorado Senator Gary Hart and civil-rights activist Jesse Jackson.
  • An example of failure to spin: he publicly admitted that whoever became president was probably going to have to raise taxes, and while he was being honest about this responsibility, he emphasized that he couldn't expect Reagan to be so honest. The voters interpreted this as "Mondale promises to raise taxes!" Reagan did end up raising taxes in the end, for what that's worth.
  • Mondale himself, in hindsight, considered Reagan's quip of "I will not make age an issue of this campaign. I am not going to exploit, for political purposes, my opponent's youth and inexperience", which even got Mondale cracking up, after Mondale had pointed out Reagan's advanced age, to be the point when he realized he had lost the election.
• Same with Canada in 1984, where John Turner's older age, lack of charisma and archaic language (he called unemployment relief programs "make-work programs", not helping his case with young voters) proved no match for Mulroney.
• The 2011 Scottish Parliament election saw the highly charismatic Alex Salmond's SNP (Scottish National Party) win a surprise outright majority, hoovering up seats from Labour, the Liberal Democrats, and (to a lesser extent) the Conservatives. This was astounding for two reasons. Firstly, it had been assumed that it was impossible for any party to win a majority under the proportional voting system. And secondly, Labour had been leading the polls by double digits as late as two months before the vote. At the point where when polls began to show Salmond's party leading (and they underestimated it) pollsters scrambled to work out why their surveys were throwing up such bizarre results and what was wrong with their weighting formulas. The Conservatives had long been unpopular in Scotland, and the Liberal Democrats had lost support after forming a coalition with them at Westminster. The main reasons for Labour's defeat were their dull-as-ditch-water leader Iain Gray (aka: "who?") and the fact they campaigned against the Westminster government instead of the SNP (surely voting for secessionists was a better way to flip them off?). The SNP trounced the three other parties, forced them into humiliating leadership elections, and allowed Salmond to hold a referendum on his long-held aim to have Scotland secede from the United Kingdom. Which led to...
• In the United Kingdom General Election 2015, the Scottish National Party took 56 out of 59 constituencies in Scotland, virtually annihilating Labour and the Liberal Democrats north of the border. The Lib Dems had lost support UK-wide after forming the coalition with the Conservatives: voters thought they broke their promises and held little influence. But Labour floundered in Scotland too. The 2014 independence referendum had encouraged many left-wing voters to back independence, made the SNP more popular and energized than before, and left Scottish Labour in disarray. The result? Rocks Fall, Everyone Dies. The SNP, who had never won more than 11 seats before, became the third party in the House of Commons.
• The Canadian Liberals faced this problem doubly in 2011. On the right, Prime Minister Stephen Harper (Conservative Party) wasn't actually that great of a communicator—instead, he ran an extremely tight ship, which combined with the excellent work of the spin doctors to produce an incredibly coherent Tory message, as well as successfully persuading many voters that the scandal which saw Harper's minority government thrown out of power for contempt of parliament was a load of fuss over nothing, and just the Liberals being opportunistic. On the left, Jack Layton was well-known for his affability—and had public sympathy thanks to his well-known health problems (he would die of cancer four months after the election)—and when you compare Layton to the pedantic, professorial style of Michael Ignatieff ... well, it's hardly a contest. Any chance Ignatieff might have had was wrecked by his atrocious performance in the pre-election debate, particularly when Layton called him out on his poor parliamentary attendance record, and Ignatieff was only able to respond with an angry, condescending rant that left him with almost a literal 0% Approval Rating among prospective voters afterward. No wonder the Liberals were pushed down to third literally for the first time ever. This, however, helped the telegenic Justin Trudeau to rise among the party ranks, becoming its leader in 2013, and beating the Tories twice, handily against Harper in 2015 and in 2019 in an extremely close race to Andrew Scheer, who somehow had even less charisma than the former party leader.^note To what degree he couldn't click? He couldn't beat Trudeau, even considering the government had become quite unpopular because of a stalled economy, the SNC-Lavalin scandal, and some unearthed photos of the PM in blackface.
• The 2003 Ontario election wound up being this after the Conservatives issued a press statement calling Liberal leader Dalton McGuinty an "evil reptilian kitten-eater from another planet". It made them look nuts, and things pretty much snowballed from there.
• The 2002 Irish General Election saw a Fianna Fáil-led government under the popular Bertie Ahern face off against a potential coalition of Fine Gael under Michael Noonan and Labour under Ruairi Quinn. With the economy in a good state, the opposition would probably have lost anyway, but Noonan and Quinn made things worse by being unable to agree to a pre-election pact, meaning they fought the election as two separate parties rather than a potential government-in-waiting. Noonan's total lack of charisma did little to help and the result was a near meltdown for Fine Gael, which lost over 40% of its seats.
• The 2013 New York City mayoral election saw the charismatic Progressive Democrat Bill de Blasio running an energetic, populist campaign which mobilized voters to give him nearly three-fourths of the vote against his dull, unremarkable opponent Joe Lhota (whose statement that he'd allow kittens to be run over if it meant the subway could have good service obviously didn't help).
  • It happened again four years later; de Blasio's vote was down a not-inconsiderable amount over his initial election, but his re-election was assured by the shambolic Republican nomination process. The initial Republican favorite was Paul Massey, who raised so much money in the primaries that all his opponents soon dropped out, apart from inexperienced state assemblywoman Nicole Malliotakis, whose staying in the race was largely seen as a token gesture. And then Massey spent all his funds so fast that he bankrupted his campaign before the primary debates took place, ruining any credibility he had and forcing him to drop out. This left Malliotakis as the nominee by default, and between her lack of experience and her nomination being seen as a Consolation Award, de Blasio handily defeated her in the election.
• The 1872 U.S. presidential election saw Ulysses S. Grant easily romp to victory over the frail, sickly Horace Greeley; Grant won 31 states and over 80% of the electoral vote — just to add insult to injury, Greeley would die a little after the election, but before the Electoral College met, and thus received zero electoral votes.^note Three Georgia electors still cast their ballots for him, which were promptly declared invalid. It didn't help that Greeley wasn't actually from the Democratic Party –- which was in such poor shape it couldn't even field its own candidate — but rather from a dissident wing of the Republican Party, meaning that his policies ended up being so similar to those of Grant that he couldn't effectively differentiate himself from his rival.
  • This extended to the candidates' running mates too. Before the election, Grant ditched his corrupt, massively unpopular Vice President, Schuyler Colfax, and replaced him with Henry Wilson, a widely-liked and respected senator. Greeley's running-mate was Benjamin Gratz Brown, who not only was generally ineffectual in his prior role as Governor of Missouri, but had such a massive drinking problem that he frequently gave speeches drunk, forgot his own party's policies, and even tried slicing up and buttering a watermelon at a campaign picnic. For this reason, more than a few historians have deemed Greeley and Brown to be the worst-ever Presidential ticket from a major party.
• The 2004 US Senate election in Illinois. Barack Obama had been leading his initial challenger Jack Ryan (no, not him) in the polls, but then Ryan dropped out after a sex scandal. The Illinois Republican Party selected Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident (cue accusations of carpetbagging) known for using extremist right-wing rhetoric, as his replacement. Obama won the election with 70% of the vote and a 43-point margin. Considering John Kerry won the state in the presidential race on the same ballot by only 10.8 points, voters just really didn't like Keyes.
• Canadian Progressive Conservative Kim Campbell is known for three facts: being the first (and, so far, only) Canadian female prime minister,^note She was named interim prime minister following the retirement of then-current Conservative prime minister Brian Mulroney. the crushing defeat of the Progressive Conservatives in the 1993 elections, and being the only Canadian Prime Minister so far from British Columbia. She just came off as too aloof and dry when compared to Preston Manning, the leader of the somewhat more right-wing (and more western-focused) Reform Party, and a poor attack ad released by the PCs concerning Jean Chrétien did not help matters.^note  The ad showed still images of Chrétien's face whilst criticizing him, with voiceovers saying that they would be "embarrassed to have him as Prime Minister". While they were referring to the policies, the still images of Chrétien made people think they were referring to the person's behavior and physical appearance. Not helping is that Chrétien had Bell's Palsy, which gave him a slight defect. He turned this around by saying that he "spoke on one side of [his] mouth, unlike the Tories". The results were so disastrous that only two Progressive Conservative MPs were elected across the entire country; Kim Campbell was not one of them. This was not enough to preserve official party status in the House of Commons and is the reason why, 10 years after the election, the Conservative Party was forced to merge with the Reform Party (which by then changed its name to the Canadian Conservative-Reform Alliance Party^note They really did have that name, albeit only for a day as the party started realizing that the entire country was having fun at their expense; they simplified it to the Canadian Alliance.). Because the Progressive Conservatives were the only real opposition to the Liberals in a two-party system, and because of vote-splitting between the PCs and Reform/Alliance, the lack of a conservative opponent gave the Liberals free rein to rule nearly unchallenged for the next ten years.
• The 1997 UK General Election (mentioned above) was also decided by charisma and well-run campaigns. Tony Blair possessed charisma. Combined with Peter Mandelson's spin efforts, this helped him in mobilising support for Labour via a campaign that targeted the youth but ran on the idea of optimism for Britain's future. ("New Labour for a New Britain", anybody?) Conservative John Major, meanwhile, while not an especially bad prime minister (although disrepute had fallen over the cabinet and other members of his Party getting involved in scandals such as the infamous Cash for Questions affair), simply came off as too dry and boring in comparison. It didn't help that the Tories had made themselves unpopular through a series of scandals, involving sex and money, in one particularly notable example Tatton, estimated as the fourth-safest Conservative seat in the country, lost to an Independent due to the MP Neil Hamilton being caught taking bribes in the Cash for Questions scandal. The Tory campaign was also mismanaged, with half of the campaigns blasting Blair for "adopting Tory policies" (to be fair, Blair had formally made it so that Labour was far less opposed to the private sector), and the other half blasting Blair for being too socialist. In the end, the Tories lost over half of the seats they won in 1992 (which itself was a relatively thin majority compared to the 100-seat majorities that Margaret Thatcher's Tories held in the 1980s), and Labour took 418 seats. Adding salt into the wound, the Tories didn't win a single seat outside of England.
• Lester Pearson may be one of Canada's better-regarded Prime Ministers, but his career as Liberal Party leader (he replaced former PM Louis Saint-Laurent after the latter surprisingly lost the 1957 federal election) got off to a less-than-auspicious start when in his first speech as leader in 1958, he called Prime Minister John Diefenbaker — who had been in office for just under a year, with a minority government and a generally mixed reaction to his handling of a recession — to resign and hand over leadership of the country to him. Not only was this statement inherently absurd, Diefenbaker retaliated by reading from a statement which showed that the previous Liberal government knew full well that the recession was coming and did nothing to prepare the country for it. Realizing that he could easily crush this novice opposition leader, Diefenbaker called an election days later, and the Conservatives ended up winning over three-quarters of all the seats in Parliament. Still, Pearson learned from the experience and, five years later, steered the Liberals to victory.
• Both of Dwight D. Eisenhower's American presidential victories against Adlai Stevenson were landslides. Eisenhower was a (mostly) apolitical military man who joined with the moderate wing of the Republican Party (which was mostly okay with still popular New Deal projects while also staying hard on Dirty Communists), offering a more straightforward path for the U.S. compared to the vastly unpopular Truman Administration, marred by a stagnant economy, perennial strikes and suspicions of Red infiltration in government, but most importantly, the controversial firing of the popular General Douglas MacArthur in 1951. Meanwhile, Eisenhower was still lauded for his success in directing the Western Allies against Nazi Germany during World War II, and rode this popularity to victory in 1952, winning 442-89 in the Electoral College, 39-9 in total States and almost 7 million more popular votes than Stevenson in a ten-point victory. His victory was also partially due to fatigue after 20 years of Democratic control of the White House. According to an urban legend, Stevenson certainly didn't help his case with a half-hour boner live on television that managed to piss off a multitude of CBS viewers who had tuned in expecting another episode of I Love Lucy. Ike lengthened his win in their rematch in '56 (and he now had a booming economy and no foreign wars to back up his reelection), wining 457-73 Electoral College votes (over 85% percent), 41-7 States, and almost 10 million more popular votes than Stevenson, winning with a 15% margin. What made his latter victory impressive was that he won despite the Republican Party remaining in the minority in both the House and the Senate.
• The 2020 British Columbia general election: The John Horgan-led British Columbia New Democratic Party, after their coalition with the Green Party managed to barely topple the BC Liberals and take hold of the government by one seat in 2017, decided to call for a snap election in 2020 in order to take a stab at getting the NDP a majority government once more. Horgan and his NDP succeeded at that goal spectacularly, taking 57 out of 87 seats with their rival, the BC Liberals getting only 28. The BC Liberal challengers were marred by various campaign problems, generally boiling down to the BC Liberals' socially conservative campaign unexpectedly blowing up in their face. What made this landslide even more remarkable was that, as The New '10s closed, a conservative wave swept over Canada, leading to many provincial Liberal (which does not include the BC Liberals, which are the province's local conservative party) and NDP affiliates to tank in elections.