I think "blowout" to some (most? vast majority?) without more context implies that the voting citizens strongly preferred a candidate. So people pushback against the clickbait word being used to drive engagement.
The only score that matters is the one used to call the game, because that’s the only score anyone is trying to win. We simply don’t know what would have happened under a different set of rules.
The “ground game” is extremely expensive: https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4934604-kamala-harris-g.... Especially for republicans, whose voters are spread out over rural areas. In post-election interviews, Trump campaign strategists revealed that to save money they largely eschewed a traditional ground game in favor of target outreach to low propensity voters. Even then, Trump received a lot of criticism on the right for doing a handful of rallies in California and New York.
As it is, both campaigns focused most of their resources on the seven swing states, and Trump swept all of them. Had the election been close you would’ve expected by sheer chance each candidate to get some of the swing states, but that didn’t happen.
Certainaly there are no rules for what is a blowout or a mandate... But we can look back and see Reagan won all but one state, and say yeah, that was a blow out, and Reagan had a mandate.
IMHO, if you don't win in any of your opponent's stronghold states, it's not much of a blowout. Yes, it was a win and any win gets you the whole four years, so it doesn't really matter what you want to call it, but it's yet another gaslighting IMHO.
To be clear, I don’t think it was a blowout or a landslide or anything like that. I’m just saying it’s not as close as the PV would make it seem. Harris’s campaign said their internal polling never showed her ahead, and the result was consistent with that.
In particular, he wiped out two decades of immigration-driven leftward shift in the electorate, which was how Biden was able to win traditionally red states like Arizona and Georgia. Trump won Nevada, which is now under 45% white, by more than Bush did in 2000, when it was 65% white. He lost New Jersey by less than six points, doing better now that the state is only 55% white than Bush did in 2004 when it was 70% white. He won Texas by a similar margin to Bush in 88 and Florida by more than Reagan did in 1980.
