Does Donald Trump Have a Mandate?

And why do the vibes feel more sweeping than the actual election results?

The Politics Notebook is a good place to take on one question from a few different angles, and to see what others are saying about a topic. Today, let’s look at the question of Donald Trump’s mandate: Does he have one, or not? And if not, how to explain why the vibes feel more sweeping than the actual election results?

Do the 2024 election results suggest a mandate for Trump?

In the first three weeks of this term Donald Trump has been more aggressive in his efforts to remake government than perhaps any president since Franklin Roosevelt. Which poses both an interesting contrast and a question.

When FDR took office in 1933 the nation was mired in the depths of the Great Depression. The unemployment rate was nearly 25%, the financial system was on the brink of collapse, and things were so dire that some of his advisors worried the country could be on the brink of a revolution. Voters were so ready to try something new (what Roosevelt in one speech called “bold, persistent experimentation”) that FDR won the 1932 popular vote by 17% (57-40%) and the Electoral College by 472-59, which at the time was one of the biggest margins ever in a presidential race.

Trump, on the other hand, took office in when the U.S. economy, in the words of both the Wall Street Journal and The Economist, was the envy of the world. He won the popular vote by just 1.5% and the Electoral College by 312-226.

From that perspective, one president had an obvious mandate for dramatic change; the other, not so much. It’s true that in today’s polarized America few presidential elections result in landslides. The last huge presidential win took place in the 1980s.

But even then, if you look at every election since the 1980s (in what you might call a post-landslide America), Trump’s victory still doesn’t stack up very well in terms of widespread support. Here, for instance, is the margin of victory for each winner of the popular vote from 1992 to 2024:

1996 Bill Clinton 8.51%

2008 Barack Obama 7.27%

1992 Bill Clinton 5.56%

2020 Joe Biden 4.45%

2012 Barack Obama 3.86%

2004 George W. Bush 2.46%

2016 Hillary Clinton 2.09%

2024 Donald Trump 1.48%

2000 Al Gore 0.51%

That’s right, Trump’s popular vote win this year was smaller than Hillary Clinton’s in 2016.

But, but, but Trump supporters sputter, it’s about the Electoral College not the popular vote. And sure, of course, in terms of who takes office, that’s true. But if you’re talking about a mandate, well, the popular vote is still an important gauge of how much support a president has among voters.

Moreover, even if you go by electoral votes and not the popular vote, Trump is essentially just tied with Biden’s 2020 performance (both elections hinged on six swing states; Biden won all six in 2020, Trump did the same in 2024) and he is behind both of Obama’s and Clinton’s victories.

An analysis by the Council on Foreign Relations described the election results this way:

Indeed, by historical standards Trump’s victory is unimpressive. Consider the following: His margin of victory in the popular vote … is the fifth smallest of the thirty-two presidential races held since 1900. More people in 2024 voted for a candidate not named Trump than did. A shift of roughly 235,000 votes in the right combination in Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin would have elected Harris.

By any definition imaginable, this election result does not scream mandate.

Perhaps voters see a partial mandate where Trump sees a sweeping one?

There is a caveat here, as it’s fair to say that Trump has a mandate for some actions … but not others.

As Stanley Greenberg suggests in a piece for The American Prospect, when one combines the election results with polling one can more realistically say that Trump does have a mandate to do something about immigration and to reduce the cost of living. I don’t disagree with that.

On the other hand, he notes that it doesn’t poll well at all when voters are asked about the possibility of Trump reversing Biden’s climate policies or implementing economic policies that favor the rich over the working class.

And yet, Trump is doing all of these things and is claiming that voters gave him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” His actions in office are those of a president who believes he has the authority to do anything he wants, even to the point of ignoring laws and judicial rulings.

The reasons for this aren’t hard to decipher, as John Nichols wrote in The Nation:

Why are the Republicans so desperate to claim they secured a “landslide” when the results reveal that this was one of the closest presidential elections of the post–World War II era? Because they know something that Democrats sometimes forget: Politics is about perceptions, and a president who is perceived as enjoying the overwhelming support of the voters is far better positioned to change not just the policies but the trajectory of our politics.

So yes, there are reasons for Trump and the GOP to claim a mandate despite an historically close election. It may be a bit hypocritical, sure, since the GOP fought tooth and nail against the suggestion that even larger wins by Obama constituted a mandate, but let’s allow that Trump can at least claim one. What interests me more is something beyond even that discussion.

The truly interesting question here, in my mind, is this: Given the closeness of the election results and the polling on issues, why are so many voters — and even some in the media — treating Trump as if he won a more sweeping victory than he did in reality?

As Ezra Klein wrote:

If you handed an alien these election results, they would not read like a tectonic shift. And yet they’ve felt like one.

There are the usual explanations that you might expect, which Politico wrote about, such as that Trump exceeded expectations in swing states, which created a perception on election night that didn’t match the totality of the end results. Also:

A bigger part of it may be psychology. After 18 months of covering the endless campaign, it’s only human to justify the emotional investment by finding a sweeping verdict in the results — even if it’s not there.

So why do the vibes from Trump’s win feel more sweeping than the election results show?

For this, I found two intriguing answers, one each from the left and the right.

As the more progressive Klein suggested:

Trump’s cultural victory has lapped his political victory.

That is, Trump had a narrow political win but a bigger cultural one. Klein lays out four possible reasons for why Trump’s win may feel bigger than it actually was.

One is that Trump, and the right wing in general, has done a much better job of utilizing social media and grabbing attention from the public.

To the Trumpian right, mastering social media — and attention, generally — means being, yourself, a dominant and relentless presence on social media and YouTube and podcasts … It’s the politician-as-influencer, not the politician-as-press-shop.

A second reason could be that corporate CEOs have also felt emboldened by Trump and have themselves announced shifts to the right.

“The election has empowered some top executives to start speaking out in favor of conservative policies, from tax cuts to traditional gender roles,” The Financial Times reported. Announcements from major corporations pulling out of climate change compacts or dismantling D.E.I. systems have been a vibes multiplier, creating the sense of a major shift happening at all levels of American society.

Klein suggested two additional reasons, one being a backlash from a certain cohort of young men against a culture they felt increasingly alienated from and who have been very vocal about their support for Trump on social media and in podcasts.

And the other reason, which makes considerable sense (and is connected to reason #1), is that Joe Biden during his presidency never really demanded attention from the media or the public, and so Trump in contrast naturally appears as a more commanding center of the political world.

All of these reasons, suggest Klein, have merged to give Trump’s win a luster of cultural dominance that exceeds the president’s political victory.

The conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg, meanwhile, had a somewhat different take on the same question, focusing on two other possibilities.

Another important factor is that MAGA is part of a larger global phenomenon. Populism and nationalism have been on the rise in Europe, Latin America and India … The trends that have shaped American politics — the global financial crisis, mass immigration, COVID, inflation — were not contained within our borders.

But for Goldberg the biggest reason for the vibe shift is that “Trump and Trumpism have shattered a near metaphysical consensus about politics, on the right and left.” In short, much of what we once thought we knew about how politics works has been eclipsed by a new reality.

Goldberg writes:

The FDR coalition is gone, the white working class is now operationally conservative, and the Latino and Black working classes are now seen as gettable by Republicans. The assumption that they are “natural Democrats” was obliterated in this election. Republicans have figured out how to talk to those constituencies.

Meanwhile, progressives who grew up knowing only the language of FDR-era class politics or post-civil rights-era racial and feminist discourse have found large numbers of voters — their voters — don’t want to hear it anymore. That disorienting feeling, that sense that history or demography or the “moral arc of the universe” might not be bending in your direction anymore, is what some call a “vibe shift.”

Interesting takes. I’m not sure any one answer is fully explanatory, but these may all contain part of the truth as to what’s happening these days in politics. Trump did not exactly win a dominant victory in the last election, yet it’s hard to deny that he is changing the country’s political culture.

So Trump could well be shattering all the rules and ushering in a new political era. Or he could be misreading his win and acting in ways that far exceed what voters want, in which case there may be a backlash brewing. Or both could be true — he could face a backlash even as he still changes the nation’s politics.

As in all things, we won’t know the reality for some time yet. But the questions are worth contemplating for they hold clues to the American future.

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