Trump did not get a mandate-he got less than 32% of eligible voters!

Don't let Trump and media gaslight you!

Obama in 2008 had a mandate election

Donald Trump and his allies want you to believe Trump won a mandate. Simply put: That’s bullshit. By no metric are the results of the 2024 presidential election anything close to what is considered a massive win that would be seen as a mandate for Trump’s agenda.

Yet there is the Politico headline, “Trump claims ‘unprecedented and powerful mandate.’” Over on CNN, their “data guru” Harry Enten declared Monday, “Everywhere you look, the Democrats are in this deep, dark state” adding, there’s “no real light at the end of the tunnel’ for Democrats. And others in corporate media have echoed that baseless claim.

Putting aside the good faith questions about election integrity-as I wrote about Sunday—Trump’s win from a historic point of view was nothing special. But the reason Trump and his supporters want you to think it was a “mandate” is so they can sell us on the lie that everything they now want to do in terms of policy is overwhelmingly supported by the American people. It’s not. Period.

Let’s look at this little thing Trump hates called “reality.”  For starters, Trump did not even win one-third (33%) of all eligible voters. (Warning: There will be math involved in this part.)  Voter turnout in the 2024 election per the Univ of Florida Election Lab was in area of 63% of eligible voters.  (Down from 66.4% in 2020.) Trump as of now won 50.2% of all votes cast. I’m not great at math but even I know that slightly over half of 63% is about 31.6%. (Okay, Siri helped me with that calculation!)  The bottom line is Trump received the support of just over 31% of all voters- that does not give anyone a mandate.

Also undermining Trump’s mandate BS is the popular vote total. In the 2020 election, Trump received 74.2 million votes.  How many votes did he receive in 2024? The answer: 75 million. There are still about 5 percent of ballots outstanding--primarily in very Blue California and Washington--so that number will creep up a bit but still we are talking just about the same vote total.  However, keep in mind since 2020, US population has grown by more than six million--yet Trump barely saw an increase in votes from 2020 to 2024 election.  

But wait, there’s more. Trump will likely win this election with just about 50% of the vote with approximately a three million vote margin of victory. Compare this to Obama in 2008 who won by nearly ten million votes! In 2012, Obama won by 5 plus million votes. In fact, in 2016, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by nearly 3 million votes—almost matching Trump’s margin over Harris. (Did Hillary have a popular vote “mandate”?!)  

And Trump’s popular vote margin over Harris will likely be less than two percent when all the votes are counted. In contrast, in 2008 Obama won by more than 7 percent. Even Biden beat Trump in 2020 by far more with 51.3% of the vote to Trump’s 46.9% and a margin of seven million votes. Did anyone in the media call Biden’s win a “mandate”? (Stop laughing—of course not.)

When it comes Electoral Votes (EV), Trump’s win was not even close to that of President Obama’s 2008 and 2012 victories—which we know really has to anger the orange faced racist. Trump locked up in 2024 a total of 312 EVs. But in 2008 Obama won 365 EVs and in the 2012 election he secured 332.

Want to see what a mandate election looks like? In 1988, GOP Vice President George H.W. Bush had a huge victory over Democrat Michael Dukakis where he won 426 Electoral College votes to Dukakis's 111. And before that in 1984, Ronald Reagan absolutely crushed Walter Mondale winning 525 electoral votes and more than 58% of the popular vote. 

But to me, the key factor in telling if this was a mandate election is if the political party of the winning presidential candidates saw big gains in the House and Senate. That makes a compelling argument that voters want that candidate’s agenda to be turned into policy. For example, in 2008 when President Obama was first elected, Democrats saw a net gain of 23 House seats and eight Senate seats.  In 1980, Ronald Reagan not only won by 9.7 percent, carrying 44 states and earning 489 electoral votes, Republicans flipped control of the Senate for the first time since 1954 winning 12 Senate seats and taking 34 House seats.

That is what mandate elections look like. In case of Trump, while votes are still being counted in the House races, it appears the GOP will have a net gain of zero seats or even a net loss of one seat--meaning they will control the House by an anemic three seats. (There is still an outside chance House Democrats make the gap even smaller or win control of the House.)  In terms of the Senate, it’s true Republicans flipped three seats—and possibly four—but those three were in states that had trended Republican over the past six years so it was less Trump and more shifting partisanship in Ohio, West Virginia and Montana.  

Trump and his GOP/corporate media allies want you to believe this was a massive win in an effort to make us lose hope. That want us to submit. They want us to stop fighting so the GOP can be unchallenged as they seek to implement their tax cuts for the wealthy, gutting of Social Security and Medicare, privatizing the VA, imposing a national abortion ban and worse. But we will never surrender to Trump and MAGA.

In sum, whenever you hear the GOP or talking heads on cable say, “Trump won more than half of the country,” correct them with the facts: Trump won barely 31% of eligible voters. In addition, his margin of victory in the popular vote was anemic and the GOP almost lost control of the House. This was no mandate. And don’t let them gaslight you into thinking it was!

---