Donald Trump’s “unprecedented and powerful mandate” is looking smaller than ever.
After his 2024 election win, Donald Trump claimed that the American people awarded him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate,” a historic, landslide victory that gives him the right to reshape the United States as he sees fit. Like many of Trump’s statements, a recent study proves this was hyperbole.
In a post on X, the account Republicans Against Trump responded to Senator Marsha Blackburn’s claim that Americans “overwhelmingly” voted for the president-elect in November. “‘Overwhelmingly?'” they wrote, “Trump’s popular vote win was one of the smallest in modern history.”
According to the graph, Trump’s “historic” win was the smallest margin recorded since 2000. Trump earned 1.7% more of the popular vote than his opponent Kamala Harris. PolitiFact reported that “For votes counted through Nov. 20, Trump’s margin over Harris was 1.62%. That’s smaller than any winner since Bush in 2000, when the margin was 0.51%. Going back further, only John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Nixon in 1968 won the popular vote by smaller margins, 0.17% and 0.7%, respectively.” They also reiterated that it was the “fifth-smallest popular vote margin since 1960.”
The president-elect’s “unprecedented” victory ranks lower than former president Barak Obama’s popular vote margin and current President Joe Biden’s (less than half, according to PolitiFact). When compared with true “mandate” territory, Trump doesn’t even hold a candle. Trump’s paltry 1.7% is nowhere close to the landslide wins earned by Calvin Coolidge, FDR, or Richard Nixon. He’s ranked lower than Reagan, Eisenhower, and lower than former president Jimmy Carter.
Trump’s supporters were quick to come to their candidate’s defense, citing the president-elect’s frequent and erroneous claims of voter fraud. Even when they win, they somehow still think the election was stolen.
Even when considering Coolidge’s victory margin was nearly 25 times larger than Trump’s, that hasn’t stopped the president-elect’s self-aggrandizing comparisons. Donald Trump has always been a sore winner. According to sports writer Rick Reilly, author of Commander In Cheat: How Golf Explains Trump, Trump once declared himself the victor of a golf game with no winner at all. Trump demanded a trophy, and the country club improvised with a flower pot.
According to Trump himself, his “mandate” win was supported by the divine. “I said that many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason,” Trump told a crowd of his supporters at West Palm Beach, “and that reason was to save our country and to restore America to greatness, and now we are going to fulfill that mission together.”
Theological notions aside, the only historic victory that Trump can claim is that he’s the first Republican president to win the popular vote (albeit narrowly) in 20 years—but that’s really more of a criticism of the Electoral College, isn’t it?
Based on these numbers, it certainly is. Trump’s mandate claims are weakening by the day.
Thomas Whalen, a presidential historian at Boston University, described Trump’s mandate claim with one word: “laughable.” Whalen says that Trump’s hyperbole is a part of his “huckster management style” learned from politicians of yore like Roy Cohn. “Deny reality, never stop fighting, always make your accomplishments seem bigger,” according to Whalen, that’s all part of Trump’s political playbook. Based on his election win, that tactic allows him to skate by—barely.
Published: Dec 15, 2024 08:44 am