“[T]he beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive.” President-Elect quoted in Time magazine, December 12, 2024.
“What’s obvious is that he won by a very narrow margin and that there is no big mandate here,” said Alex Keyssar, a presidential scholar and history professor at the Harvard Kennedy School.” Quoted in Justine McDaniel, “Election results don’t support Trump’s claims of a landslide and mandate,” the Washington Post, January 20, 2025.
Since the inauguration roughly a week ago, there have been several statements coming from Trump and his allies that deserve scrutiny. One of the many arguments that I question is the portrayal of Trump’s victory over as a landslide or a mandate. Let us take a moment and look at the facts – which as President John Adams pointed out are “stubborn things.”
The Washington Post reports that Trump’s “margin of victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in the national popular vote — 1.5 percentage points — is the smallest of any president who secured a popular-vote win since Richard M. Nixon in 1968.” Furthermore, when we focus in on the details of Trump’s win in the popular vote, we find that the margin of his victory (1.5 percent) is smaller than any President who had won the popular vote since Richard Nixon in 1968. While Trump, won the popular vote he did not achieve a majority here (49.9 percent according to the AP).
When we look at Trump’s margin in the electoral college, also do not see evidence of a mandate. Trump’s margin of victory in the electoral college is smaller than that of Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, and George H.W. Bush. When compared with presidents such as Ronald Reagan in 1984 or Richard Nixon in 1972. Both Reagan and Nixon won with electoral college margins of above 500 (compared with 86 for Trump). As James Lindsey points out in Foreign Affairs:
Trump’s victory certainly pales in comparison to the landslide presidential victories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1936 (60.8 percent of the popular vote and 523 electoral votes), Lyndon Johnson in 1964 (61.1 percent and 486), Richard Nixon in 1972 (60.7 percent and 520), or Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8 percent and 525).
Interestingly, if we are using votes as a proxy for a mandate, ”Biden’s victory [in 2020] is more impressive than Trump’s. He got more than 50 percent of votes cast and won with a margin of 4.5 percentage points.”
Presidents claiming that they have won a mandate from the people is nothing new. Both Republican and Democratic candidates have done it. What separates Trump from the rest of them is the bravado and vigour and sheer repetition of the mandate claims.
One item that has been ignored in this debate is that even though we can have guesses and well-informed opinions about why Trump defeated Harris, it is a very hard point to prove one way or another. As Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, who has studied the changing politics of presidential mandates, points out "We really don't know why voters cast their ballots. And one thing we do know about elections, and it's very much true in 2024, is that elections seem to be kind of a broad referendum on the status quo."
In American politics, voters are far more likely to fire an incumbent than they are to hire a challenger. Based on the evidence so far, we can conclude that Trump vs. Harris was simply a rejection of the status quo under President Biden rather than an endorsement of any policy agenda. This fact should be good news for Democrats as they seek to oppose Trump’s agenda on Capitol Hill. The problem is that Democrats have not been aggressively pushing back on Trump’s mandate claims. This means that Trump may win with swagger and rhetoric the mandate that eluded him at the ballot box. The choice is up to the Democrats.
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