Trump’s Low Credit Limit With Voters

A recurring theme of this column has been that too often, candidates, parties, and their supporters misread what an election was about and why one side won and the other lost.

Partisans increasingly think there are only two possible outcomes of any political contest: Either my side wins, or it was stolen from us.

As damaging as that is to our political culture, however, the real cardinal sin is to presume or pretend to have a mandate when one has not been earned. Partisans are now also convinced that any election their side wins is by definition a mandate, no matter how meager the margins. Any election they lose, no matter how wide the margin, is not a mandate.

Think of a newly elected president being issued a credit card by the voters. The credit limit on that card is determined by a combination of factors, starting with the national popular vote, followed by how many states he won and the final Electoral College count. Then throw in any gains by his party in the U.S. House and Senate, as well as maybe some down ballot offices.

If a candidate or party wants to do big things, they need to win the election big from top to bottom. Amore modest election outcome requires the agenda to be scaled back in alignment with the magnitude of the victory. With a country as narrowly and bitterly divided as ours is, landslides are nearly impossible, which makes mandates very unlikely. Even if a candidate wins a majority of the vote, margins are still small. In the 22 presidential elections from 1900 through 1984, 14 (64 percent)were landslides, defined as double-digit margins. In the 10 starting in 1988, none have been.

When Republicans claimed that Donald Trump had a mandate after the 2016 election, it was not particularly convincing, given that he lost the popular vote by 2.09 points, even though he bested Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College, 306 to 232. The case is even worse given that Republicans had a net loss of two Senate seats and six seats in the House.

The argument Democrats made for a mandate coming out of 2020 was not much more persuasive.President Biden did win the national vote by 4.45 percentage points (7 million votes) and the Electoral College, 306 to 232. But drill down to what matters, and the outcome rested on fewer than 126,000 votes in just four states. Down ballot, Democrats gained three seats in the Senate, pushing it to just50-50, with newly sworn in Vice President Kamala Harris in place to break the tie for control. On the other side of the dome, Democrats lost 12 seats but clung onto a six-seat majority in the 435-member House—hardly an authorization to embark on a “historic and transformational” agenda.

That brings us to Trump’s win this year. His current margin of victory is 1.55 percentage points, and312 electoral votes to 226 for Harris. To put it in historical perspective, Trump’s margin was less than half of Biden’s 4.45-point margin in 2020 or Barack Obama’s 3.86-point margin over Mitt Romney in2012. It’s a bit less than Hillary Clinton’s 2.09-point edge over Trump in 2016 and far below Obama’s7.26-point win over John McCain in 2008. Trump’s margin was a good, clean win, but not the stuff of mandates; indeed, it was the seventh-closest of the 43 elections since the beginning of the Civil War and the fourth-closest of the 20 since the end of World War II.

A net loss of one seat in the House shifts that chamber from a 221-214 advantage for Republicans to 220-215. No party turnovers in the 11 gubernatorial elections suggests pretty placid political waters, as does the minimal change in state legislative seats that were on the ballot this year as well.

Clearly, the four-seat net gain that Senate Republicans achieved this year was a great turn for them,but three out of the four were in states that Trump carried in 2016, 2020, and 2024. Trump carriedWest Virginia by a 42-point margin, so picking up an open seat there was not exactly earth-shattering.With Trump winning Ohio by 11 points, Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown needed a lot more ticketsplitters than were possible. The same goes for Montana’s Democratic incumbent, Sen. Jon Tester.Trump carried that state by 20 points. David McCormick’s victory over Sen. Bob Casey in Pennsylvania was by far the most impressive. Trump won the state by just 50.4 to 48.7 percent, so McCormick’s 48.8 percent support to Casey’s 48.6 percent didn’t have the benefit of the tailwind that his counterparts in Montana, Ohio, and West Virginia had.

The reality is that five purple states had Senate races. Democrats won four of them, even as Harris lost those states. Trump could not drag the GOP candidates across the finish line.

Winning only 20 percent of swing-state races does not seem to constitute a great cry for what Republicans were selling. Indeed, it should spark some internal discussion in Republican circles ofwhy they did not do better in the Senate.

A win’s a win, but people should be a bit more careful about throwing the word "mandate" around.

This article was originally published for the National Journal on Dec. 2, 2024.