Donald Trump Has No Mandate

Donald Trump will return to the White House via one of the weakest election victories in American history, so Trump and the Republicans have no mandate.

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Donald Trump Has No Mandate

One of the most annoying aspects of modern American politics is that no matter the margin of victory, the winning party or candidate will always declare that they have a mandate. The reality is that mandates are hard to come by. There is no threshold number for what constitutes a mandate, but generally speaking, it is an overwhelming voter consensus toward a candidate and their party.

Mandates tend to be thought of as significant. FDR had a mandate in 1933. Ronald Reagan had a mandate in 1980, Barack Obama had a mandate in 2008, and it can be argued that Joe Biden had a mandate in 2020.

Other successful presidential candidates clearly didn’t have a mandate. George W. Bush did not have a mandate in 2000, and Donald Trump didn’t have a mandate in 2016.

Trump and Republicans have been claiming that they have a mandate in 2024, but CNN’s Harry Enten explained, this is not the case.

Enten said:

If you look historically speaking, Donald Trump is now under 50% in the national popular vote. Ver barely under 50%, but he is under 50%. And I wanna take a look and compare. Compare his popular vote, victory to those historically speaking over the last 200 years, his popular vote, victory ranks 44th. at a 51.

That ain't exactly strong. Some might argue that is weak, weak, weak in the words of Tony Blair. In fact, his popular vote win at this point is the weakest, going all the way back. You have to go all the way back to 2000 to find a weaker one, a smaller popular vote victory than Donald Trump currently has.

So, yeah, Trump has won the popular vote, but it ain't all that.

George W. Bush had a bigger popular vote win in 2004, and if you're looking at a combination of popular vote and electoral college vote, Look, Obama twice had, had bigger popular vote and electoral college vote victories.

And Joe Biden did as well. Joe Biden's popular vote victory twice as big, electoral college victory a little smaller. Talk about coattails for Donald Trump. Yeah, let's talk about coattails here. So, you know, you talk about the Senate, you know, short coattails. States, Trump won, but Democrats won a lot of these Senate races.