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.”

Texas could implement a plan to bus migrants directly to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in an effort to get them processed for deportation, according to media reports. 

The move would be a departure from the state’s program, part of Operation Lone Star, that has bussed thousands of migrants to sanctuary cities, a source told the New York Post. It has yet to be approved by Gov. Greg Abbott. 

Fox News Digital has reached out to Abbott’s office and ICE. 

“We are always going to be involved in border security so long as we’re a border state,” a Texas government source told the newspaper. “We spent a lot of taxpayer money to have the level of deterrent that we have on the border, and we can’t just walk away.”

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Abbott has been especially aggressive in combating illegal immigration, bussing migrants to blue cities in an effort to bring attention to the border crisis. Under the proposed plan, buses chartered by Texas from border cities will be taken to federal detention centers to help ICE agents process migrants quickly, the Post reported.

Texas has been in a legal fight with the Biden administration over its efforts to curb illegal immigration. On Wednesday, an appeals court ruled that the state has the right to build a razor wire border wall to deter migrants. 

Officials have also offered land to the incoming Trump administration to build deportation centers to hold illegal immigrant criminals.

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“My office has identified several of our properties and is standing by ready to make this happen on Day One of the Trump presidency,” Texas Land Commissioner Dawn Buckingham said during a visit to the border Tuesday.

Authorities have also warned of unaccompanied migrant children being caught near the border. On Thursday, a 10-year-old boy from El Salvador told state troopers in Maverick County, Texas, that he had been lost and left behind by a human smuggler. 

The boy was holding a cellphone and crying, Texas Department of Public Safety Lt. Chris Olivarez posted on X. The child said his parents were in the U.S. 

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On Sunday, troopers encountered an unaccompanied 2-year-old girl from El Salvador holding a piece of paper with a phone number and her name. She told authorities that her parents were also in the U.S. 

That morning, state troopers also encountered a group of 211 illegal immigrants in Maverick County. Among the group were 60 unaccompanied children, ages 2 to 17, and six special interest immigrants from Mali and Angola. 

“Regardless of political views, it is unacceptable for any child to be exposed to dangerous criminal trafficking networks,” Olivarez wrote at the time. “With a record number of unaccompanied children and hundreds of thousands missing, there is no one ensuring the safety & security of these children except for the men & women who are on the frontlines daily.”

He noted that the “reality is that many children are exploited & trafficked, never to be heard from again.” 

What does a small, solidly Republican city in Oregon have in common with California’s largest liberal enclaves? All breathed a sigh of relief this year thanks to the far-right U.S. Supreme Court.

The court’s conservative bloc ruled in favor of the city of Grants Pass, Ore., in June, overturning a key lower court ruling on homelessness and clearing the way for local governments to crack down on sleeping in public spaces regardless of the availability of housing or shelter. California’s response to the ruling has become a vivid reminder of not just the intractability of the homelessness epidemic but also the tension between national liberal politics and local policy in Democratic-dominated states and cities.

Some 186,000 people across California lack consistent shelter. Roughly 84% of the state’s voters believe homelessness is a “very serious” problem, a Quinnipiac University poll found, and Democrats and Republicans were in similarly broad agreement on that assessment, at 81% and 85%, respectively. In that light, it’s not surprising that California officials have wasted no time since Grants Pass in implementing their preferred “solution” to the homelessness problem.

From San Diego to San Francisco, state and local workers began disassembling makeshift shelters and camps and displacing the homeless people living in them. Within days, entire blocks were remade across the state. Residents rallied to social media platforms such as Reddit and Nextdoor to exchange strategies for getting homeless encampments removed from their own neighborhoods.

Other California residents have taken the Supreme Court’s ruling and Democratic officials’ exuberant co-sign as further evidence of the nation’s growing disdain for society’s most marginalized. Reports spread of homeless people being ejected from campsites with little or no warning, their pets taken away and medications lost, among other indignities.

The American Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have condemned the Grants Pass ruling. The chief executive of the National Alliance to End Homelessness said it set a “dangerous precedent.” But the precedent set by California Democrats has arguably been far more dangerous.

During the initial waves of the Golden State’s housing crisis, in the late 1970s, Democratic politicians were reluctant to be seen as overtly antagonistic to the state’s homeless people, many of them veterans of the nation’s wars in Vietnam and Korea. But as the homeless population has grown and diversified, officials have faced deepening NIMBY sentiment not just in California’s well-heeled liberal cities but also in Democratic-leaning working-class communities that increasingly experience the highest rates of homelessness and related problems such as loitering and blight. As a result, anti-homeless policies have become more politically appealing despite being painfully at odds with inclusivity and other virtues Democrats signal on the national stage.

Addressing the housing crisis has been a quintessential and enduring social justice cause for Democrats, encompassing themes that tend to unify the party, including health, economic and racial equity. According to one survey, 82% of homeless adults in California reported having experienced a serious mental health condition, and 65% had used illicit drugs at some point. The state’s Black people are disproportionately affected by homelessness: Despite making up only about 5% of California’s total population, they represent roughly 25% of its homeless people. Such statistics helped liberals frame homelessness as a product of Republican policies weakening social services and promoting unchecked capitalism.

But that view has lost support as homelessness has become more dramatic and visible over the last decade. In some of California’s liberal enclaves, homeless encampments have become full-blown tent cities. Scenes of squalor, drug use and petty crime have spawned a subculture of gonzo-style documentary videos racking up hundreds of thousands of views on YouTube. San Francisco and Los Angeles have the most prominent crises, inviting scrutiny of the latter city’s readiness to host the 2028 Olympics.

Democrats’ conundrum is whether authorities should roust, fine and imprison people residing in public spaces in the interest of answering the broader community’s quality-of-life concerns. Critics have argued that such criminalization is a cruel distraction and that more affordable housing is the only way to meaningfully address the crisis.

Gov. Gavin Newsom and his predecessor, Jerry Brown, devoted billions of dollars to homelessness prevention and affordable housing even as the homeless population generally continued to grow. Newsom was quick to seize on the conservative Supreme Court’s permission to put punishment ahead of housing, warning cities that if they don’t remove encampments, they risk losing state funding. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who just lost a reelection bid partly because of concerns about homelessness, likewise promised to be “very aggressive” in removing encampments. Never mind that those displaced by the state’s homeless sweeps often end up occupying another nearby space and returning at a later date.

So how did we get here? California’s ruling Democrats have tried to have it all ways, largely cultivating and tolerating deeply bureaucratic housing development standards while amplifying a booming tech industry populated by employees willing to pay top dollar for homes, dramatically boosting prices. And although Newsom and others have heralded emergency housing and other measures to answer the crisis, the total capacity is far short of the unhoused population. That’s partly because new facilities are often rebuffed by cities such as the L.A. suburb of Norwalk, which recently enacted a moratorium on homeless shelters.

Reducing and preventing homelessness, whatever the underlying motivations, is one of the few civic concerns that bind the political parties together in an age of stark polarization. Beyond the obvious moral merits of the cause, it could provide a road map to arrive at bipartisan solutions for other challenges facing the state and country. Unfortunately, the consensus on homelessness is coalescing around a prescription with little chance of long-term success.

Jerel Ezell is an assistant professor of community health sciences at UC Berkeley.