The emperor has no mandate
Donald Trump barely won last year. Stop treating him like a conquering hero.
"The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive."
So proclaimed our brand-new, very old soon-to-be-president Donald Trump, during a December interview with Time magazine after he was named their “Person of the Year.” He’s repeated similar bloviations regularly since the 2024 presidential election wrapped up in his favor last November. In his victory speech, he claimed that the voters had “given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.".
Presidential “mandates” come from the pretty simple idea that the better you do in an election, the more you can interpret that election as the American people’s tacit approval for you, the winning candidate, to do in your presidency what you promised to do in the campaign. It follows logically from the stated purpose of a political campaign: a chance for candidates to present their visions for the country to the voters, and for voters to weigh in on those visions by voting. Thus, if the voters elect you in a landslide, it’s reasonable to assume that they want you to pursue your agenda, more than you would if you won by the skin of your teeth — or if you somehow won despite getting fewer votes than your opponent, as Trump did in 2016.
But Trump did get more votes this time than in 2020 or 2016. It was certainly his strongest performance of the three presidential elections in which he’s been a candidate. In this respect, I’m not surprised by the temptation to proclaim 2024 as a “change election” or a “mandate” for Donald Trump to come roaring back into town and execute his will with ruthless, unchecked authority. There’s also a pervasive commentary that the election was such a decisive victory that it signifies not just a political but a cultural kind of “vibe shift” that tells us that America is changing rapidly and objectively in a new direction.
This point of view is embodied maybe most pathetically in the way that the business community, and Silicon Valley in particular, has reacted to Trump’s win. Tech giants like Apple, OpenAI, Meta, and Amazon, either directly or through their CEOs, made identical $1 million donations to Trump’s inaugural committee, something they must have accidentally forgotten to do for Joe Biden four years ago (oops). Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, even took the pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to pay homage to the new president.1 Meanwhile, Tim joined Mark Zuckerberg (Meta), Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sundar Pinchai (Google), and Elon Musk (SpaceX/Tesla) as guests of honor at Trump’s inauguration, seated directly behind Trump’s own immediate family on the dais.
It’s not all just symbolic ring-kissing, either; this perspective on 2024 as a “sea change” election and Trump as our new emperor-king is apparently also influencing policy at these companies. X (formerly Twitter) is getting more tolerant of heinous, hateful posting by the day, and Meta (formerly Facebook) announced a raft of new changes to how they approach the moderation of political speech that the far right is likely to be pleased with. "The recent elections,” Zuckerberg pronounced while announcing these changes, “feel like a cultural tipping point towards, once again, prioritizing speech."
Most infuriating of all has been the fracas around Tiktok’s impending ban as a result of its parent company Bytedance’s failure to sell Tiktok to an American owner. I have no opinion on the law itself. I have never used Tiktok, and truly can’t bring myself to care much about the deletion of an app that seems, on balance, like it’s rotting the brains of an entire generation and good for not much else. But Bytedance’s brazen, flagrant violation of the law as intended, coupled with its absolute debasing of itself at the feet of a man who isn’t even president yet, is being executed under the assumption that the incoming president won decisively, and thus has absolute power to disobey laws passed by Congress and declared fully constitutional by the Supreme Court.
The problem with all of this knee-bending — besides how much it makes me want to throw up in my mouth — is that it’s based on a delusional interpretation of the 2024 results that isn’t borne out by the facts. Donald Trump did win in 2024, and by more than he did in 2016. But the idea that his win marks some massive, undeniable turning point in American politics, and that we should all change our collective behavior as a result, is built on a house of cards that, God willing, is likely to crumble not long after Trump takes office.
Let’s dig into the numbers behind this supposed “vibe shift.”
Before we dive into Trump’s claims about his own win, it’s worth reminding ourselves of a few key reasons he is not a true dictator, much less a god or an emperor, as many of his supporters seem to wish that he was.
The first is the situation in Congress, which I wrote about last month. Not only do Republicans have the slimmest of majorities in the House (5 seats) and the Senate (6 seats); but they seem to be riven by such extreme, petty-as-hell internal division that they’re going to have a near-impossible time securing many of the farthest-reaching legislative priorities Trump, or cronies like Elon Musk and Steve Bannon, have on tap.
That other much-maligned branch of government, the judiciary, also appears less likely to back him to the hilt than they could be. Don’t get me wrong, they set him up nicely with last year’s Trump v. United States Supreme Court decision, which appears to give him near-total legal immunity from decisions he makes in office. But the Supreme Court is not the only court, and many federal circuit and district courts were major bulwarks against the worst excesses of Trump’s first term. Joe Biden appointed a record number of these federal judges in a four-year time period, and few of them will have patience for any extra-Constitutional behavior from the Executive Branch.
But the biggest reason of all we might expect Trump to fail is his very, very precarious position in the realm of public opinion. According to an average of recent polls, only 48% of Americans have a favorable opinion of Trump as he enters office for the second time. That’s historically really low, even lower than the 50% he entered his first term with in 2017 (Joe Biden entered office in 2021 with a 54% average favorability rating; Barack Obama began his first term in 2009 in the 60s).
The gap between Trump’s real and imagined popularity with the American public is emblemized by his hyper-inflated sense of just how much ass he kicked in the 2024 election. The truth? He kicked very little. In the interview with Time I referenced earlier, Trump boasted as he often does about some random thing someone on the internet said: "Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate." As usual, it’s practically impossible to parse exactly what the man is talking about; but really there’s no statistic that comes close to matching the “129 years” he mentions.
Take the simple metric of votes gotten out of total votes cast — otherwise known as the national popular vote. Trump won in 2024 with 49.9% of the popular vote, compared to Kamala Harris’s 48.4%. This popular-vote margin (1.5% for the non-math-doers) wasn’t exactly pathbreaking; in fact, it was the second-narrowest margin in the last half-century (George W. Bush’s margin of .51% in 2000 is the undisputed champ).
The same pattern is true for the institution that made Trump an accidental president in the first place: the Electoral College. And in this case, Trump’s victory was even farther away from making any kind of history. His 2024 margin of victory (312-226) is only the largest since… three elections ago, when Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney 332-206. Trump beat Kamala Harris by the same number of Electoral College votes as John F. Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by in 1960, and that was the closest election in American history in terms of the popular vote.
We can’t blame the guy entirely for having such weak numbers. The closeness of the three Trump elections we’ve had the misfortune of living through since 2016 are not a departure, but a settling into of a new routine of American politics. National elections in the U.S. are simply way closer than they’ve ever been.
Take another look at the charts above for some evidence: For the first 85 years of the last century, we see that presidential elections were routinely decided by double digits. Fourteen times, in fact, or almost half of the presidential elections we had last century. But since 1988 — that is, throughout my entire lifetime — the popular vote margin of every presidential election has been less than 10 percentage points, and usually much less.
This is even clearer when we look at the Electoral College. Most of us likely remember Barack Obama’s landslide, country-re-aligning Electoral College win in 2008, or Bill Clinton’s even bigger re-election in 1996. But both of these victories pale in comparison to either of Ronald Reagan’s Electoral College romps in 1980 and 1984; Nixon’s 1972 landslide; or Lyndon Johnson’s win in 1964 after ascending from the Vice Presidency following JFK’s assassination. Don’t even get me started on FDR.
But today, the idea of a Reagan-esque near-sweep of the Electoral College is unthinkable.2 The reasons why could make up an entire year’s worth of Substack posts (in fact, I teach an entire class dedicated to the question). But the long and short of it is that today’s voting electorate is not just polarized — that is, far apart from the other side in terms of ideology, culture, and (as I’ve written about before) geography.
Our voters, and our politics, are also calcified, as political scientists John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck describe:
Voters are increasingly tied to their political loyalties and values. They have become less likely to change their basic political evaluations or vote for the other party’s candidate. This is not just polarization but calcification. And just as it does in the body, calcification produces rigidity in our politics — even when dramatic events suggest the potential for big changes.
Party loyalty is up, and candidate-specific advantages are down. The issues that voters say matter the most to them appear to be the ones on which the parties are most polarized, which makes it more difficult than ever for these voters to even consider supporting the other party, no matter the flaws of their own candidates. Voters also perceive a greater threat than ever before from the other party, driven largely by underlying polarization.
The result is that the percentage of voters in 2024 who supported the same candidate in 2020 is astronomically high — upwards of 90% according to early data. Trump won by winning back the tiniest sliver of 2020 Biden and third-party voters, and juicing turnout just a little bit with younger or previously disengaged voters. In other words, very few minds actually changed between 2020 and 2024. Nowhere is this more evident than in the swing states, which are the actual places where presidential elections are decided.
Let’s zero in specifically on the “Blue Wall”3 states in the upper Midwest, which together were enough to swing the last three elections one way or the other. In all cases, each of the states were decided by less than three percentage points; in most cases by less than one. In all cases, the election was hard-fought and hung by a thread.
If just a couple hundred thousand voters in these states changed their minds — out of a country where nearly 250 million Americans are eligible to vote — we would have had a different president in any of the last three elections. Whatever Trump’s Chicken McNugget-addled brain tells him, he is wrong: he came perilously close to losing last year; certainly closer than Biden was to losing in 2020, and nearly as close as Trump himself was in 2016.
Our country is polarized, and deeply divided; but we’re also very evenly split. This makes elections both unbearable and unbearably close. It means that a handful of voters across a few states decide entire elections, and that the difference between one decision and another is enormous.
But it also means that Donald Trump won the 2024 election by nowhere near the amount that he claims; and has nowhere near the level of underlying support he seems to imagine. I think we — political scientists, journalists, and consumers of journalism and political news — would do well to remember this when our new president pretty much inevitably decides to way overinterpret his so-called “mandate” and do something incredibly unpopular.
This will probably happen before this post publishes on Tuesday morning.
Further Reading
Right as I was figuring out the structure for this post, a number of other excellent journalists, commentators, and political scientists posted on variations of this very same topic. But I’m not bitter! They each tackle the question from a few different directions, so if you’re interested in reading more about our ultra-competitive period of time that we’re in between the two parties, check them out:
“Politics Without Winners: Can either party build a majority coalition?” by Ruy Teixera and Yuval Levin, American Enterprise Institute.
“Did Republicans take Washington in a landslide? Not so much.” by Zach Levitt, The New York Times.
“Explaining the 2024 election's exaggerated mandate vibes.” by Julia Azari, Good Politics/Bad Politics.
“MAGA is misreading its mandate.” by David French, The New York Times.
“The Bitter End: The 2020 Presidential Campaign and the Challenge to American Democracy.” by John Sides, Chris Tausanovitch, and Lynn Vavreck
I wonder if they talked about the time Trump referred to him as “Tim Apple” in a 2019 White House meeting.
We’ve only had one sweep in American history: James Monroe in 1820. And even then, John Quincy Adams received a pity electoral vote from a “faithless elector” from New Hampshire. Reagan is the only president to win all but one state; FDR, Nixon, and Jefferson won all but two.
I don’t think we can call them that anymore, can we?
Bloviation it is! I did not watch ANY of yesterday's coronation but I'm feeling very ill today as a result of his actions on Day One. And although he did NOT get a mandate, he and his ilk certainly act like it. Hopefully, his impending destructive objective will be held in check by a congress that has a few more profiles in courage than what they've demonstrated so far.
Besides being an interesting post, as always Charlie, I've learned a new word - bloviation. Thank you for that.
Having watched the votes from each State come in last year, while staying with my son in Nevada, I'm very switched on to the fact that t(his) victory is not a landslide at all. But the way he comes across to so many millions of people around the world, the impression he gives, is that he has the mandate of the people, that he is the chosen one, to 'make America great again'. We'll see. I'm not holding my breath over here in the UK.