People love to use strong sounding terms these days, and I think the term landslide is probably used to describe races that a generation ago would not have been called landslides. Some people use a 20% margin of victory (which in a two-way race would be 60% to 40%) as the boundary between a landslide win and merely a "comfortable" win. See the Center for Voting and Democracy's summary of 1998 election predictions at
http://www.fairvote.org/reports/monopoly/predict/ . Still, if a candidate gets close to four out of every ten voters (I know it's also two out of every five but people often think more in powers of ten) to vote for him or her, it doesn't seem to me like that candidate has been defeated in a landslide even if all the remaining voters voted for one other candidate. Most people will consider a two to one victory in a two way or nearly two way (if there are some other candidates but they get a very small percentage of the vote) race as a landslide, and I feel I agree with that. A third of the vote is a sizable portion of the vote, but two-thirds is a very large majority and most legal hurdles in America (like overriding vetoes and in my home state of Maine sending bond issues or constitutional amendments to the people) that require more than a simple majority of the vote require two-thirds of the vote, giving that fraction some significance and suggesting that the founding fathers thought that was a landslide victory. A 65% to 35% result is close to two to one, and I think you could get away with calling that a landslide. You might get a whining letter to the editor from the local grouch who supported the losing candidate (and who perhaps remembers a time when such a result would not have been considered a landslide), but I think the editor or whoever checks your work (if anyone) before it goes to the paper would have no problem with it and may even suggest you add it if you didn't use the word landslide. Good luck in writing your article and in deciding whether or not to use the term landslide.
Sincerely,
Kevin Lamoreau
