It is hard to overstate the extent of Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s (AMLO) victory in the Mexican presidential elections this past Sunday. AMLO garnered 53 percent of the vote, a whopping thirty points more than his closest contender, right-winger Ricardo Anaya. He won the most votes at the presidential level in Mexican history and by the widest margin since the democratic transition in 2000. He triumphed in all but one of the country’s thirty-two states — a dozen of which gave him over 60 percent of the vote — and prevailed in 80 percent of the country’s municipalities.

AMLO’s party, Morena — created in 2014 and running in its first nationwide elections — also wracked up landslide victories. They secured a solid majority in congress and the senate. They will preside in five of the nine governorships that were up for grabs, winning most of those races by historically wide margins. In Mexico City, where AMLO served as mayor in the early 2000s, Morena’s candidate, Claudia Sheinbaum, finished sixteen points ahead of the second-place candidate. In López Obrador’s home state of Tabasco, the party’s candidate won by forty points. The astonishing gains spread beyond traditional AMLO strongholds, extending well into the north. Mexico’s three main parties — the PRI, the PAN, and the PRD — woke up Monday morning and found themselves transformed into minority parties. The entire political arena had been shaken overnight.

Although AMLO had been leading in the polls for months, many in the country went into election day worried of possible fraud and vote-buying operations. Several scattered reports of suspicious activity throughout the day heightened those fears. Some of these reports were dramatic. In the state of Puebla, for example, a van carrying stolen ballots crashed as it sped away. Area residents rushed to catch the perpetrators and linked arms around the vehicle to protect the ballots as they waited for authorities to arrive. The electoral cycle itself had been marred by violence, with over one hundred candidates from different parties assassinated over the course of the campaign, most likely at the hands of the drug cartels.