The Mandate That Wasn’t

News, protesters and other assorted characters at the Constitution Center prior to the Presidential Debates 10 September 2024. Photo by Michael Stokes, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

Donald Trump won this year’s presidential election. The Former and Future Guy is true to form in acting as though his victory is an overwhelming mandate from the people for radical (and I do mean radical) change. But while Trump’s victory was decisive, a landslide it wasn’t. And claiming a mandate that doesn’t exist is not going to end well for Republicans.

Consider these facts:

• CNN now places Trump’s share of the popular vote at 49.9 percent. While still a popular vote win, Trump apparently did not win a majority.
• Trump’s current margin of victory is only 1.6 percent.
• The current count has Trump leading by only 2,592,489 votes out of more than 150 million nationwide.
• Trump won the swing states by less than 120,000 votes.

None of this means that Trump’s victory was not legitimate, but it does mean that it was razor thin. A different decision by fewer than one percent of the nation’s (or swing state) voters would have put Kamala Harris in the White House.

A prudent politician would factor this narrow margin into his agenda. The American people are not sold on Donald Trump or his Agenda 47. Statistically speaking, half of the country didn’t want him back. The election did not give him a carte blanche to drastically change the country. He was not given the all clear to make power grabs, eviscerate the federal government, or generally abuse the powers of his office.

But Donald Trump is not a prudent politician. He is also a lame duck before he enters office since he is constitutionally limited even though he has referred to a possible third term. Trump cares nothing for the Republican Party he will leave behind and thus he has very little reason to exercise power responsibly.

That isn’t true for many of the people who will staff his Administration. A great many people who will work in the Trump Administration have political aspirations of their own. Whether these aspirations will be enough to rein in the majority tendency to overreach remains to be seen, but I’ve seen little reason to hope that they will.

If Trump and the Republican overreach, it will follow a pattern that goes back at least as far as the first Trump Administration (and a lot further in reality) when the former president took office with less of a mandate than he has now and proceeded to enact a very partisan agenda with no regard for winning over moderates and independents. This was particularly short sighted since Trump lost the popular vote in 2016.

The Biden Administration followed and made the same mistake. Biden had a mandate to not be Trump but progressives interpreted that as a mandate to try to ram through a left-wing wish list rather than addressing concerns of swing voters. Democrats just paid a heavy price for their policy errors, particularly when it came to culture war issues. One of the most devastating ads of the cycle attacked Harris’s support for transgender treatments for prisoners and transgender athletes in school sports, saying, “Kamala is for they/them, Donald Trump is for you.”

Now Trump seems poised to perpetuate the cycle with appointees from the MAGA lunatic fringe and poorly conceived policies. Trump recently posted confirmation that he planned to declare a national emergency and use the military for mass arrests and deportations of illegal immigrants, but polling shows that majorities of Americans that would include a sizable number of Trump swing voters favor a pathway to legalization and oppose mass deportations. Public opinion will probably become even more opposed to deportations as Americans see first hand what such a policy looks like.

Tariffs are a more popular policy at the moment, but this may change as the policy is put into place. When voters start to understand that they, not foreign companies, are paying the tariffs through higher prices, see American companies suffering from Trump’s trade war, and feel the affects of a slowing economy, tariffs will probably lose popularity. High consumer prices were a major reason that Harris lost so enacting a policy that will raise them higher seems particularly tone deaf.

Some Trump voters are already having second thoughts based on what they’ve seen so far. Among those are Muslim voters in Michigan who backed Trump because of Biden’s support for Israel. CBS News reported that Trump’s Arab backers are disappointed over both Trump’s appointment of staunchly pro-Israel Republicans such as Mike Huckabee, Marco Rubio, and Elise Stefanik as well Trump’s failure so far to appoint prominent Muslim supporters to his Administration. The Arab voters hope that Trump would push for a ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, but that seems unlikely.

Donald Trump may not be concerned about electoral blowback from unpopular policies and alienating voters, but other Republicans should be. The GOP is going to have to find a way forward after Trump, and that task will be much more difficult if Trump leaves the country in economic decline and filled with ticked-off voters.

Democrats may be learning the lesson that Trump failed to grasp. Kamala Harris ran a somewhat centrist campaign and the Democratic Party is currently in the throes of navel gazing after the red wave. They might well decide that the progressive left is an albatross that needs to be dumped in order to make a play for the middle. If the Democrats become a sane, centrist alternative to MAGA Republican wingnuts, the party might stage a comeback much quicker than Republicans expect. There’s suburbs have been a key to recent elections and the suburbs don’t like crazy.

So far, neither side has learned from the repeated mistake of trying to do too much too quickly and getting rebuked by the voters. The first team that does learn from the past may be able to usher in a long term majority, but one that won’t enact radical change as much as preserve the status quo.

It’s far from a sure thing but if either side is going to internalize the truth that a two-percent win is not a blank check, my money would be on Democrats after their recent “shellacking.” Since Trump has been on the scene, Republicans seem incapable of learning anything.