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Playing With / Landslide Election

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Basic Trope: An election is won by an ample margin of votes.

  • Straight: Alice and Bob are both running to become president of Tropeland, and Alice gets seventy-five percent of the votes.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is elected unanimously. Even the other candidates vote for her.
  • Downplayed: Alice is elected as president, getting sixty percent of the votes in a country where no candidate has ever received more than fifty-five percent of the votes for president before.
  • Justified:
    • Alice is the ruler of The Dictatorship; the election is rigged and nothing but a publicity stunt.
    • The country is not yet quite The Dictatorship, as there is still a semi-functional democratic multi-party system that could theoretically get rid of the current president, Alice. However, she's a President Evil who has been using her power to intimidate political opponents, dismantle the free press, spread propaganda and suppress voters in areas that prefer Bob. Her underhanded tactics pay off when she receives seventy-five percent of the votes.
    • Bob's party had fallen apart during the campaign; this undermined his chances of winning.
    • Bob gets caught up in a major scandal shortly before the election.
    • Bob's party is currently in power, and has been spectacularly terrible at governing. The majority of the electorate is desperate to get rid of them.
    • Bob's policies are too radical to garner much public support, so the more pragmatic Alice easily beats him.
    • Alice is so strong and popular that pretty much no one would stand a chance against her, even though Bob would likely win against a generic opponent.
    • There's no particular reason for Alice's large win. She just happens to be more charismatic and much better at connecting with voters.
  • Inverted: Alice and Bob are neck-and-neck throughout the election and the result comes down to the last vote.
  • Subverted:
    • Despite the difference in sheer vote count, Alice's party still doesn't have an absolute majority in the Parliament and so a run-off vote is required.
    • Polls suggest that Alice will win by a huge margin. When the election comes, she barely scrapes together enough votes.
    • It is discovered that Alice has received bogus votes.
  • Double Subverted:
    • Alice gets the required majority after curbstomping Bob again in the run-off.
    • Alice's votes were undercounted, Bob's were overcounted, or both, so her landslide victory is restored.
    • Without said votes (also discovered to be third-party actions) Alice still has the required majority.
  • Parodied:
    • The results are blatantly rigged in Alice's favour, e.g. by claiming she got one hundred million votes even though there are only five million citizens eligible to vote in the country.
    • "The results are in! Alice, who received Eleventy Zillion votes, is our new president!"
    • The results claim that Alice somehow got one hundred sixty-nine percent of the votes.
    • Alice gets a hundred percent of the vote — as in that Alice's vote for herself was the only vote cast. Everyone else was too busy watching TV to bother with the election.
    • Alice wins by a landslide — as in, an actual landslide crushed Bob to death before the election.
  • Zig-Zagged: Bob wins the first round with forty-nine percent of the votes, and Alice gets twenty-five percent, with the remainder scattered between various third-party candidates, but a run-off vote between the top two candidates is required due to Bob not getting an absolute majority of the vote. Due to Bob being hit by a major scandal in-between the first and second rounds of the election, and the third-party voters all siding with Alice, the second round results in Alice winning with seventy percent of the vote to Bob's thirty percent.
  • Averted:
    • The election is a relatively close call.
    • No election takes place at all.
  • Enforced: "It wouldn't make any sense that Bob won with his party on the verge of going down in flames."
  • Lampshaded: "Man, I didn't know elections could be this one-sided!"
  • Invoked:
    • Bob's opponents launch massive smear campaigns against him, and keep going long after it's clear that he almost certainly can't win. They don't just want an Alice victory — they want to give Bob a crushing defeat from which he can never recover.
    • Bob is unpalatable to most voters. Alice's party conspires to help him win his party's nomination, hoping it'll give Alice an easy curb-stomp victory in the final round of the election.
    • Alice is a President Evil who works systematically to undermine the opposition so that she can 'win' re-election in a landslide and use her 'popularity' to justify pushing her nefarious agenda.
    • Bob is an in-universe celebrity who never wanted to be President. His candidacy is merely a PR stunt that went too far. Once he — to his horror — becomes his party's presidential candidate, it's too late to resign, so all he can do is make his campaign as unpalatable as possible to ensure that he'll get curbstomped in the general election.
  • Exploited: Charles, who has long tried to win the leadership of the opposing party away from Bob, builds his campaign on his rival's resounding defeat and is chosen to lead the party in Bob's place.
  • Defied: Bob, the opposition leader in The Dictatorship, is warned that President Alice intends to rig the upcoming election and sets out to find evidence of those plans.
  • Discussed: "Bob is a terrible candidate. There is no way he'll get more than, like, twenty percent of the votes."
  • Conversed: "That was a near-beat-for-beat fictionalization of this presidential election in that country."
  • Implied: Alice looks more than just glad she won the election, Bob looks more than just disappointed he lost it, or both.
  • Deconstructed: Bob, embarrassed and depressed over his defeat, puts his political career to an end.
  • Reconstructed: After Bob's failure, his party examines what went wrong and uses this knowledge to their advantage in future elections.
  • Played for Laughs: Bob, the current president, is doing an awful job. This doesn't stop him from spending his entire campaign bragging about how he's the best president ever and that he's guaranteed to win re-election in a landslide. He is not happy when Alice gets ninety percent of the votes.
  • Played for Drama: Alice wins re-election with ninety percent of the votes because she's a President Evil who intimidates political opponents, works to destroy the free press, spreads propaganda and suppresses voters that favour her opposition. Her large margin of victory indicates that the public has largely given up the fight against her increasingly tyrannical regime.

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