‘The election did not produce the decisive victory for Trump’: A new report alleges that Trump’s popular votes have decline
After his 2024 presidential election win, Donald Trump boasted that he was given “an unprecedented and powerful mandate” by the American people. “
A political victory that our country has never seen before”. Evidently, Trump was jazzed up by his numbers, an early count of which showed him winning well over 50% of the popular vote. But after a recent tally, it turns out Trump’s “mandate” is much like his hands: curiously undersized.
“The election did not produce the decisive victory for Trump‘” says a new report by The Nation. As of Monday, November 18th, 2024, Trump’s popular vote tally fell below the 50% margin, placing him at 49.94%. Kamala Harris currently sits at 48.26%. This gives Trump a 1.7 point lead, smaller than Hillary’s Clinton 2.1 point popular vote lead in 2016, and smaller than Biden’s 4.5 point lead in 2020. If his history was made by Trump’s win, it’s only because Trump carried the popular vote by a historically small margin.
In Trump’s praise-craving mind, a win is still a win. After all, this is the man who once demanded the he receive a golf trophy for a game with no winner. According to sportswriter Rick Reilly, Trump has a long history of cheating at golf in order to claim victory. Reilly even wrote a book about it.
So what does an “unprecedented and powerful mandate” actually look like? Not like a Trump victory, that’s for sure. He falls well below the legitimately unprecedented Richard Nixon’s 60.7 in 1972 or Ronald Reagan’s 58.8 in 1984. He sits below both Bushes, Obama, and Jimmy Carter, each of whom received over 50% of the popular vote. Meanwhile, Kamala Harris currently holds more of the popular vote than Trump himself won back in 2016. Trump can claim that he’s the first president to win the popular vote in 20 years, but that’s really more a critique of the woefully undemocratic Electoral College than it is evidence of a “mandate”. Trump’s victory isn’t a landslide, it’s a pebble kicked down an anthill.
According to Mark Updegrove, a presidential historian and CEO of the LBJ Foundation, the size of Trump’s victory doesn’t matter. “He’s going to tell you he has a mandate because he wants to do what he wants to do. He would exploit any advantage,” said Updegrove in a statement. Updegrove went on to point out that presidents that have won far greater swaths of the popular vote have not used their actually historic victories to gloat, but to express respect for their opponents, hope for the future, and a sense of honor that Trump sorely lacks. After winning the popular vote by 22.58, Lyndon Johnson called his legitimate mandate “a mandate for unity, for a government that serves no special interest… a government that is the servant of all the people.” Can you imagine Trump saying something like that? Neither can I. Trump sees the government as nothing but a service to his own interests.
Grant Davis Reeher, a professor of political science at Syracuse University, told Newsweek that Trump ought to reign in his “mandate” rhetoric, lest it come back to haunt him and his party alike. Reheer says that Trump’s narrow win does not give him a mandate that would allow him “fire government workers,” “raise tariffs,” and “round up and deport all people who are here illegally,” without serious political repercussions. Democrats are gearing up to fight Trump and his “mandate” as we speak, and I’m pretty sure they have an idea of where he can stick it.
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