Meaning
An election win so decisive that the opposition is figuratively swept away and buried, the winner's majority overwhelming and the result beyond doubt. The geological image supplies mass, momentum and inevitability: votes cascade like a collapsing hillside. There is no agreed threshold, and the phrase extends to referendums, leadership contests and any crushing win. No fixed margin defines it: commentators argue over 1945, 1997 and 2024 in Britain and 1936, 1972 and 1984 in the US. British English keeps landslip for the literal geological slip. Distinct metaphors from avalanche and mountain out of a molehill, which this site covers separately. Regional use: American English in origin; now standard throughout the English-speaking world.
Origin
The geological word is American: the OED's earliest evidence is 1822, in the Boston Daily Advertiser, and Etymonline dates the literal compound to 1841, noting the older British landslip (1670s). For the political sense the dictionaries disagree: the OED files it from the 1850s, while Etymonline's text says 'attested from 1888'. Slate documents nineteenth-century use well before either late date: the New York Post in 1856 expected John Fremont to win the presidency in a landslide (he lost), Horace Greeley was projected to defeat Grant 'in a landslide' in 1872, and in 1876 a Pennsylvania state senator hailed 'the great political landslide of the Centennial year' in the Reading Eagle; as late as 1888 papers still flagged the word with quotation marks. Wikipedia records that the term became popular in the nineteenth century to describe a victory in which the opposition is 'buried', like a geological slide - and the earliest attested uses were all forecasts of landslides that failed to happen.
Research Sources
References used to check this entry’s meaning, history, or documented forms.
Variants
- landslide majority
- landslide win
- win by a landslide
Usage Examples
- Trailing by twenty points in every poll, the challenger confounded the pundits and scored a landslide victory, carrying states nobody thought were in play.
- Within an hour of the polls closing, exit surveys pointed to a landslide victory for the opposition.
- The referendum ended in a landslide victory for reform, with every region but one voting yes.