What Trump and Biden have in common

Both presidents have hastened to exceed the limited mandate voters gave them.

Sometimes I wonder whether each of our two major parties has a death wish. We should be getting quite used to the pattern that developed over the last 40 years. A party wins the trifecta: the White House, the Senate, and the House. Even if one or more of the three were won by the narrowest of margins, the new president and his allies in Congress believe that they possess a mandate akin to Franklin Roosevelt circa 1933, or Lyndon Johnson circa 1965, with carte blanche from the voters.

Or they conclude that they may not have power for long, so they need to use it as fast as they can, which of course hastens the day when they first lose their majorities in the House and/or Senate, and ultimately the presidency as well. Soon, they are exiled to a political Siberia and have to wait until the other party repeats the process. It’s reminiscent of the old line that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again expecting a different result.

There were 10 national elections in the 1960s and 1970s. The presidency, the Senate, and/or the House flipped in just three of those elections: 1960, 1968, and 1976. Over the 10 elections of the 1980s and 1990s, one or more changes occurred in four years: 1980, 1986, 1992, and 1994. But starting in 2000, one or more has flipped in 11 out of 13 election years—all but 2004 and 2012.

Over the last four elections, the share of the vote that Kamala Harris, Joe Biden, and Democratic congressional candidates received among Democrats was between 93 and 98 percent. The percentage of Republicans who voted for Donald Trump in 2020 and 2024 and voted GOP for the House in 2018 and 2022 was between 94 and 97 percent.

The share of pure independents, those who don’t lean either way, ranged from 5 to 8 percent of the vote. These days, independents usually don’t vote for anyone or any party; rather, they vote against whichever candidate they hate or has disappointed them.

Given the monolithic nature of voting among partisans these days, nobody is going to win a landslide, generally defined as a double-digit margin in the presidential race. It's even less likely that a president emerges with a mandate, meaning a double-digit presidential win with a substantial number of electoral votes and significant margins in Congress. Each side’s partisans are simply too dug in; they are never going to be supportive of the other side.

There is no national consensus for a conservative or populist agenda, nor is there one for a liberal or progressive one. Joe Biden won the Democratic nomination in 2020 because he wasn’t either Bernie Sanders or Elizabeth Warren, and he won the general election because he wasn’t Donald Trump. Trump won in 2024 not because the American people loved his agenda but because they were so angry at President Biden and, by extension, Kamala Harris.

You would think that a party would figure this out and, should it have the good fortune to win that trifecta, would aim for the 35- or 40-yard line on its end of the field, rather than try to hammer it all the way into the end zone.

Some maintain that Biden’s “original sin” was his decision to seek a second term. To me, the political first sin was earlier, in the first nine months of his presidency. Despite having a Senate that was only 50-50, despite his party having lost House seats and holding the slimmest of majorities in that chamber, despite having won the Electoral College votes with wafer-thin margins in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Georgia, he embarked on an agenda that far exceeded in ambition that of either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama, each of whom won with larger margins and substantially more seats on Capitol Hill.

Biden was not nominated and elected to pursue the agenda that he did; he did not have the presidential victory or the majorities needed for embarking on an agenda that would be labeled by some “historic” and “transformational;” he was elected as a transitionary figure who would take a measured, incremental approach.

The metaphor I like to use is that every new president is issued a credit card, with the credit limit determined by the magnitude of his victory and the size of his party’s majority on Capitol Hill. The political price of exceeding that credit limit is excruciating, as Democrats are finding out. There should be some proportionality between the victory that a new president and party wins, and the ambition of their policy and regulatory agenda.

Now, much like Biden, Trump is fast blowing past his credit limit.