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@unabomber @meowski @brad @BowsacNoodle @lichelordgodfrey While Carroll Quigley has a point about turnout but may be ignoring how that changes in bad years, and I’d yesterday found it very interesting that 1976 to 1980 turnout was down a tad, the talk/essay is very dated when it says “Since 1945 or so, we have had pretty close elections”

Just a few months later Nixon utterly smashed McGovern. Nixon!!! Yes, he had a major negative reputation long before. That’s also the first election I followed closely.

Also worth noting is that Quigley is talking about the political scene of revealed preferences (voting minus cheating) before the New Left took control of the Democratic party post-1968 (and 1968 was totally wild and very important, enough so my parents had me watch it, although it was a few years before I understood why it was so important Nixon won).

Since then we’ve had two more landslides, 1980 and 1984, pretty much mirrors of 1968 and 1972, even with a somewhat significant third candidate in 1980 (John Anderson who got 6.6% of the vote, that’s not small).

Looking further, you could score 1988 as a landslide, that’s because Dukakis was just that bad and we hadn’t learned how bad the Bush family was. 1996 was not close because Dole was that bad, Perot was again a spoiler, and Bill Clinton had sufficiently recovered from his massive mistakes in his first two years (he and Hillary had even followed the same pattern in Arkansas!). And 2008 wasn’t close.

I’ll save the essay and (maybe) look at it sometime soon.