Trump victory was 'slim' and not the 'historic mandate' Republicans claim: analysis

David Badash, 

The New Civil Rights Movement
November 13, 2024 

Trump visits North Carolina Source: REUTERS

President-elect Donald Trump last week declared he had won a “historic mandate,” but as states continue to count votes, his margin continues to shrink, debunking his claim.

Most notably, according to the California Secretary of State’s Office, there are more than 2.6 million votes left to be counted in the Golden State, out of a total of more than 13 million.

The Republican Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, also wasted no time claiming a “mandate” for the GOP, just as Trump did.

“The American people have spoken and given us a mandate. We will be prepared to deliver on day one. With Republicans in control, we will secure the border, grow our economy, restore American energy dominance, and end the radical woke agenda. America’s best days are ahead of us,” he claimed.

As recently as Monday, New York Republican Party chair Ed Cox also called it a “historic mandate.”

The results are clear: Donald Trump won the White House and Republicans are projected to have a majority in the House and the Senate—but any claim to a “mandate,” or a “historic” election is false, say critics.

“Yes, Trump won, but it is not a mandate,” declared former Under Secretary of State Richard Stengel, a former managing editor of TIME magazine. “His very slim popular vote margin seems outsized only in comparison to the fact that Rs seldom win the popular vote. He got fewer votes than last time. He won because of the millions of folks who chose not to vote—hardly a mandate.”

“As blue Western states and cities finish counting votes, it looks like the popular vote ‘landslide’ projected for Donald Trump last week turned out to be a trickle,” writes The Nation‘s Joan Walsh. “When all the votes are counted, he will end up with a margin of roughly two points over Vice President Kamala Harris. Presidents Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1972 won more than 60 percent of the popular vote; Ronald Reagan in 1984 won 58 percent. Those were landslides.”

Walsh acknowledges that the results are not “good news” for Democrats.

“But it’s not the top-to-bottom repudiation of Democrats as it first looked like, and the way to respond is not to launch a civil war within the Democratic Party,: she notes. “Unfortunately, that has already begun. Centrists blame the doctrine of ‘woke,’ with particular ire for trans Americans (we see you, New York Rep. Tom Suozzi); leftists say Democrats abandoned the working class (we hear you, once again, Senator Bernie Sanders). Both positions are wrong. Others point fingers at the Harris campaign. Meanwhile, much of the media hypes Trump’s win as a landslide, which would seem to validate his racist, anti-worker agenda.”

Currently, according to the Cook Political Report’s vote tracker, Donald Trump is beating Kamala Harris by about 3.2 million votes, or 2.17%. Those number will change, of course, but the margin will likely stay about the same if not narrow.

“When the votes are all counted,” The Washington Post’s Philip Bump notes, “Trump will likely end up with the narrowest margin of victory since 2000. And it’s probably in large part because a lot of 2020 Biden voters stayed home.”

“It is likely that,” he continues, “when all of the votes are counted, Trump will have received about half of the votes cast, beating Vice President Kamala Harris by about a percentage point. As a function of the two-party vote, Trump’s popular vote victory — his first — will probably be the smallest since Al Gore received more votes than George W. Bush in 2000.”

Focusing on swing states, as Vice President Harris did during her 107-day campaign, Bump adds, “while most non-swing states probably saw drops in turnout, it is likely to be the case that most of the seven swing states — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin — will have seen increases in vote totals. It’s another indication that the Harris campaign’s intense focus on those states provided a boost to her candidacy, albeit a fruitless one. (Last week, we noted that the shift in the presidential vote margin in the swing states was smaller than other states, which suggests the same thing.)”