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Obama’s Vote Margin Larger Than Reagan’s In 1980

By Justin Gardner | Related entries in 2008 Election, Barack, History, Voting

In fact, it’s the widest margin ever for any non-incumbent who has won the POTUS.

Check out these numbers…

So maybe it really was a landslide?

Still, as Nate Silver points, if you slice this onion a different way and look at the votes as a % of the total registered voters, Reagan comes out on top…

By this metric, Reagan’s win in 1980 is still somewhat more impressive than Obama’s — he won by 8,425,115 votes out of 159,635,102 available, or 5.3%.

By contrast, Obama won by 9,124,522 votes out of 213,005,467 available, or 4.3%.

However, Obama’s fraction is slightly better than George H.W. Bush’s in 1988, who won by 7,077,121 votes out of 167,701,904 available, or 4.2%.

So yes, Reagan’s shadow still looms large, but it seems like Obama has enough electoral ammo if he wants to try some more progressive ideas for the economy and beyond.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 and is filed under 2008 Election, Barack, History, Voting. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

2 Responses to “Obama’s Vote Margin Larger Than Reagan’s In 1980”

Alistair Says:
November 27th, 2008 at 9:43 am
Very impressive that he won by that kind of a margin!
darter22 Says:
November 28th, 2008 at 12:08 am
Obama’s inauguration will be the biggest celebration the world has seen since Europe was liberated from the Nazis.

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