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.

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.

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.”