Politics
As Trump’s lead in popular vote shrinks, does he really have a 'mandate'?
In his victory speech on Nov. 6, President-elect Donald Trump claimed Americans had given him an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
It’s a message his transition team has echoed in the last three weeks, referring to his “MAGA Mandate” and a “historic mandate for his agenda.”
But given that Trump’s lead in the popular vote has dwindled as more votes have been counted in California and other states that lean blue, there is fierce disagreement over whether most Americans really endorse his plans to overhaul government and implement sweeping change.
The latest tally from the Cook Political Report shows Trump winning 49.83% of the popular vote, with a margin of 1.55% over Vice President Kamala Harris.
If there ever was a mandate, this isn’t it.
— Hans Noel, Georgetown University
The president-elect’s share of the popular vote now falls in the bottom half for American presidents — far below that of Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson, who won 61.1% of the popular vote in 1964, defeating Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater by nearly 23 percentage points.
In the last 75 years, only three presidents — John F. Kennedy in 1960, Richard Nixon in 1968 and George W. Bush in 2000 — had popular-vote margins smaller than Trump’s current lead.
“If there ever was a mandate, this isn’t it,” said Hans Noel, associate professor of government at Georgetown University.
Trump’s commanding electoral college victory of 312 votes to Harris’ 226 is clear. And unlike in 2016, when he beat former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, he won the popular vote and the needed support in the electoral college.
The question is whether Trump can garner significant public support to push through his more contentious administration picks and the most radical elements of his policy agenda, such as bringing in the military to enforce mass deportations.
Democrats say that the results fall short of demonstrating majority public support for Trump and that the numbers do not give him a mandate to deviate from precedent, such as naming Cabinet members without Senate confirmation.
“There’s no mandate here,” Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.) said last week on CNN, noting Trump had suggested using “recess appointments” to get around Senate hearings and votes for his nominees. “What there certainly should not be is a blank check to appoint a chaos Cabinet.”
GOP strategist Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution who ran for California controller in 2022, rejects such framing by Democrats. He argues that Trump’s victory was “quite resounding,” in large part because it defied expectations.
In an election that almost all political pundits expected would be close and protracted, he reversed Democrats’ 2020 gains, won all seven battleground states and even made inroads with voters in blue states such as California. Republicans also will take control of the Senate and retain their control of the House.
“Look, if the popular vote ends up having him at 49.6% versus 50.1%, do I think it’s a meaningful difference?” Chen said. “No, I don’t.”
Scholars of American politics have long been skeptical of the idea of a presidential mandate.
The first president to articulate such a concept was Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, who viewed his 1832 reelection — in which he won 54.2% of the popular vote — as a mandate to destroy the Second Bank of the United States and expand his political authority. In arguing he had the mandate of the people, Jackson deviated from the approach of previous presidents in refusing to defer to Congress on policy.
In “Myth of the Presidential Mandate,” Robert A. Dahl, a professor of political science at Yale University, argued the presidential mandate was “harmful to American public life” because it “elevates the president to an exalted position in our constitutional system at the expense of Congress.”
Even if we accept the premise of a mandate, there is little consensus on when a candidate has achieved it.
“How do we know what voters were thinking as they cast ballots?” Julia R. Azari, an assistant professor of political science at Marquette University, wrote in a recent essay. “Are some elections mandates and others not? If so, how do we know? What’s the popular vote cutoff — is it a majority or more? Who decides?”
In “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate,” she argues that it’s politicians in weak positions who typically invoke mandates. This century, she wrote, presidents have cited mandates with increasing frequency as a result of the declining status of the presidency and growing national polarization.
That’s particularly true of Trump, who has long reveled in hyperbole.
In 2016, he bragged that he’d won in a “massive landslide victory,” even though his electoral college win of 304 to Clinton’s 227 was not particularly dramatic by historic standards and he lost the popular vote by 2 percentage points.
Four years later, he refused to accept he lost the electoral college and the popular vote to Joe Biden, falsely claiming he was the victim of voter fraud.
When Trump speaks of his supposed mandate, he is not an outlier, but is drawing from bipartisan history.
In the last four decades, no president has won the popular vote by double digits, but politicians including George W. Bush and Barack Obama have increasingly tried to justify their agendas by invoking public support.
When Democrat Bill Clinton defeated Republican President George H.W. Bush and Ross Perot, an independent, in 1992, his failure to win a majority of votes did not stop his running mate, Al Gore, from declaring they had a “mandate for change.” Five days after Clinton was inaugurated, he announced he was creating a task force to devise a sweeping plan to provide universal healthcare.
“In my lifetime, at least,” Clinton told reporters, “there has never been so much consensus that something has to be done.” The effort ultimately failed for lack of political support.
The fake news is trying to minimize President Trump’s massive and historic victory to try to delegitimize his mandate.
— Karoline Leavitt, incoming White House press secretary
Four years ago, Biden also declared a “mandate for action.”
And while Biden prevailed in the electoral college 306 to 232, his share of the popular vote was 51.3%, hardly a dominant performance.
As mainstream news outlets have reported on Trump’s shrinking popular margin, Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s incoming White House press secretary, has lashed out at the media.
“New Fake News Narrative Alert!” Leavitt posted on X, adding a red warning light emoji. “The fake news is trying to minimize President Trump’s massive and historic victory to try to delegitimize his mandate.”
Trump’s victory is not by any objective measure “massive or historic.” But Republicans say that news outlets have subjected him to a different standard than they apply to Democratic presidents.
After Clinton won in 1992 after 12 years of GOP presidents, some Republicans note, Time magazine put his face on its cover with the headline “Mandate for Change.”
Clinton won just 43% of the popular vote, one of the lowest shares in U.S. history.
Presidents sometimes bolster their claims of a mandate by cherry-picking polling results.
On Sunday, Trump’s transition team highlighted new polling from CBS News, claiming it showed “overwhelming support” for his “transition and agenda.”
But even though the poll indicated that 59% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of the presidential transition, it did not show overwhelming or even majority support for many parts of his agenda.
For example, while Trump won strong backing for his broad immigration plan, with 57% supporting a “national program to find and deport all immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally,” the poll showed far less support — 40% — for his plan to use the military to carry out deportations.
Whatever the popular vote, the Hoover Institution’s Chen argues, Trump is in a strong position because he can count on GOP majorities in both houses of Congress.
“He’s going to be able to do, from a legislative perspective, largely what he wants to do,” Chen said.
But several GOP senators have already emphasized the importance of requiring FBI background checks for Trump’s more contentious nominees.
It also appears he lacks public support for pushing through his picks without Senate approval. More than three-quarters of respondents, according to the CBS poll, believe the Senate should vote on Trump’s appointments.
Noel, the Georgetown professor, said that Trump’s rhetorical strategy aside, the president-elect might have to move past the “‘I won, so everybody get out of my way’ kind of politics” and work behind the scenes to seek common ground with moderate Republicans and maybe even some Democrats.
“In the past, people have made strong claims about mandates, but then they’ve coupled that with more cautious policymaking,” Noel said. “If Trump doesn’t do that — if he acts like he believes his own story — then we’re in a different, more Trumpian kind of place.”
U.S. military forces stopped and boarded a second sanctioned tanker carrying oil from Iran in the Indian Ocean, the Pentagon said on Thursday, ramping up pressure on Tehran as the Trump administration seeks to resume negotiations to end the war.
A naval boarding team roped down from hovering helicopters and fanned out on the vessel, the M/T Majestic X, according to a Pentagon statement that included a 17-second video of the operation.
The military said the boarding was part of a “global maritime enforcement to disrupt illicit networks and interdict vessels providing material support to Iran, wherever they operate.”
Earlier this week, Navy SEALS boarded another ship in the Indian Ocean, the M/T Tifani, after the Pentagon said it was carrying oil from Iran.
Navy destroyers are also shadowing several other Iranian vessels, including the Dorena and Sevin, which had left from the Iranian port of Chabahar before the U.S.-imposed blockade began on April 13, a U.S. military official said. The Navy is directing those ships to return to an Iranian port, the official said.
With the M/T Tifani and M/T Majestic X now at least temporarily in the custody of the military, a U.S. military official said it was up to the White House to decide what to do with the sanctioned vessels and their cargo. The administration previously seized several tankers carrying illicit oil from Venezuela after a U.S. commando raid there in January that seized Nicolás Maduro, the country’s president.
“International waters cannot be used as a shield by sanctioned actors,” the Pentagon said in its statement on Thursday, adding that the department would “continue to deny illicit actors and their vessels freedom of maneuver in the maritime domain.”
Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, hinted last week that the U.S. military would likely commence boarding operations like the ones this week. He said that U.S. military commanders elsewhere in the world, and especially in the Indo-Pacific region, would “actively pursue any Iranian-flagged vessel or any vessel attempting to provide material support to Iran.”
The U.S. Navy has turned back at least 31 ships trying to enter or exit Iranian ports since an American blockade outside the contested Strait of Hormuz began about a week ago, U.S. Central Command said late Wednesday.
Last Sunday, a Navy destroyer disabled and seized the Touska, an Iranian cargo ship, after it tried to evade the blockade. It was the first time a vessel was reported to have tried to evade the U.S.-imposed blockade on any ship entering or exiting Iranian ports since it took effect last week.
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White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt explained why President Donald Trump does not consider Iran’s seizure of two ships in the Strait of Hormuz a violation of the ceasefire agreement.
Leavitt made the statement during an interview with Fox News’ Martha McCallum on Wednesday just hours after Iran captured the Greek and Mediterranean-flagged vessels.
“Does the seizure of two ships — as we said, they were Greek and Mediterranean-owned ships with cargo on them, and the reports are that Iran basically seized them and then moved them into Iranian waters. We don’t know what’s going to happen to these crews. We’re not sure where all of this is going. Does the president view that as a violation of the ceasefire?” McCallum asked.
“No, because these were not U.S. ships. These were not Israeli ships. These were two international vessels,” Leavitt responded.
US FORCES ATTEMPTING TO BOARD SANCTIONED RUSSIAN-FLAGGED OIL TANKER IN NORTH ATLANTIC, SOURCES SAY
Karoline Leavitt, White House press secretary, conducts a press briefing. (Tom Williams/CQ-Roll Call, Inc via Getty Images)
“And for the American media, who are sort of blowing this out of proportion to discredit the president’s facts that he has completely obliterated Iran’s conventional Navy, these two ships were taken by speedy gunboats. Iran has gone from having the most lethal Navy in the Middle East to now acting like a bunch of pirates. They don’t have control over the strait,” she continued.
“This is piracy that we are seeing on display. And the naval blockade that the United States has imposed continues to be incredibly effective. And, to be clear, the blockade is on ships going to and from Iranian ports. And the point of this is the economic leverage that we maintain over Iran now. While there’s a ceasefire with respect to the military and kinetic strikes, Operation Economic Fury continues, and the crux of that is this naval blockade,” she added.
The Iranian made ‘Seraj’ a high-speed missile-launching assault boat on display in Tehran on August 23, 2010, as Iran kicked off mass production of two high-speed missile-launching assault boats the ‘Seraj’ (Lamp) and ‘Zolfaqar’ (named after Shiite Imam Ali’s sword) speedboats which will be manufactured at the marine industries complex of the ministry of defense. (YALDA MOAIERY/AFP via Getty Images)
Iran’s Revolutionary Guard Corps said the vessels, identified as the MSC Francesca and the Epaminondas, were operating without proper authorization and had tampered with navigation systems, accusations that could not be independently verified. The ships had earlier reported coming under fire near the strait, underscoring the increasingly volatile conditions in one of the world’s most critical shipping lanes.
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The Guard attacked a third ship, identified as the Euphoria, which had become “stranded” on the Iranian coast, Iranian media reported. It did not seize that vessel.
Ships and tankers in the Strait of Hormuz off the coast of Musandam, Oman, April 18, 2026. (Reuters)
Both the U.S. and Iranian sides have targeted commercial and cargo vessels as part of a broader pressure campaign tied to stalled negotiations. U.S. forces have also moved to seize at least one Iranian-linked vessel in the region, with each side accusing the other of violating the terms of a fragile ceasefire.
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The Strait of Hormuz is a vital artery for global oil shipments, with roughly 20% of the world’s supply passing through it. Traffic has slowed dramatically as ships reroute or avoid the area amid gunfire, seizures and conflicting directives from both militaries.
Fox News’ Morgan Phillips contributed to this report.
WASHINGTON — Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass and L.A. County Supervisor Kathryn Barger met privately with President Trump and administration officials Wednesday to press for federal support and yet-unpaid wildfire recovery funding as the region continues to rebuild from the 2025 fires.
“This afternoon we met with President Trump and Administration officials to advocate for families who lost everything,” Bass and Barger said in a statement. “We had a very positive discussion about FEMA and other rebuilding funds as well as the support of the President to continue joining us in pressuring the insurance companies to pay what they owe — and for the big banks to step up to ease the financial pressure on L.A. families.”
Barger said the two leaders had a “high-level discussion” with the president in the Oval Office, sharing stories about what fire survivors are experiencing day to day. She added that “we left details behind with the President,” but did not specify whether Trump made any funding or policy promises during the meeting.
“First and foremost, today’s meeting was to thank the President for his initial support of infusing federal resources to expedite debris removal, as well as his recent tweet about insurance companies, which have already proven fruitful,” she said in a statement provided to The Times.
Bass was similarly reserved about the discussions, telling reporters that “we will follow up with the details,” but signaled progress is being made on federal support.
“I think what’s important is that we certainly got the president’s support in terms of, you know, what is needed, and then the appropriate people were in the room for us to follow up. And that was Russ Vought, who is the head of the Office of Management and budget,” Bass told KNX on Wednesday.
The meeting comes on the heels of a yearlong standoff between California leaders and the Trump administration over wildfire recovery funding, disaster response and whether the federal government should have a say in local rebuilding permitting.
California leaders, led by Gov. Gavin Newsom, have accused the Trump administration of withholding billions in critical wildfire aid, prompting a lawsuit over stalled recovery funds. Officials allege political bias in the delay of billions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency.
Newsom visited Washington in December. When he made his rounds on Capitol Hill, he met with five lawmakers, including three who serve on the Senate and House appropriations committees, to renew calls for $33.9 billion in federal aid for Los Angeles County fire recovery.
But the governor said he was denied a meeting with FEMA and would not say whether he had attempted to meet with Trump to discuss the issue.
Bass, meanwhile, appears to have found a path to the president on a subject that has been paramount for her community.
The fruitful meeting comes after Trump lobbed insults at the mayor at a news conference earlier this year, where he called her “incompetent” for how she handled last year’s wildfire recovery efforts. He alleged that under Bass’ leadership, the city’s delay in issuing local building permits will take years when it should have taken “two or three days.”
California officials, including Newsom, have urged the Trump administration to send Congress a formal request for the $33.9 billion in recovery aid needed to rebuild homes, schools, utilities and other critical infrastructure destroyed or damaged when the fires tore through neighborhoods more than 15 months ago.
What Bass and Barger’s meeting with the president ultimately produces remains to be seen.
The billions in recovery aid have not yet materialized, but the meeting could potentially give those discussions new momentum.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request seeking comment about the meeting.
Earlier this month, Trump criticized insurance provider State Farm on Truth Social for its handling of the devastating Los Angeles County wildfires. He accused the insurance giant of abandoning its policyholders when tragedy struck.
“It was brought to my attention that the Insurance Companies, in particular, State Farm, have been absolutely horrible to people that have been paying them large Premiums for years, only to find that when tragedy struck, these horrendous Companies were not there to help!” Trump wrote.
But the rebuke didn’t come out of the blue. It stemmed from a controversial February visit to Los Angeles by Trump administration officials.
Trump tapped Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in an effort to strip California state and local governments of their authority to permit the rebuilding of homes destroyed in the Eaton and Palisades fires.
Within the week, Zeldin was in Los Angeles, bashing Newsom and Los Angeles officials at a roundtable with fire victims and reporters, saying that residents were suffering from “bureaucratic, red tape delays and incompetency” and that leadership was “denying them … the ability to rebuild their lives”.
During the trip, officials heard direct complaints from local leaders and fire victims about insurers being slow, restrictive and insufficient with their claim payouts.
After these meetings, Trump directed Zeldin to investigate the insurers’ responses. State Farm, facing roughly $7 billion in fire-related claims, is also under formal investigation by California’s insurance commissioner over its handling of the crisis.
Despite tensions with the administration, Bass and Barger appeared confident that progress was being made on the insurance and funding issues.
“Our job is to fight for our communities,” their joint statement concluded. “When it comes to this recovery, our federal partners are essential, and we are grateful for the support of the President.”
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