Four years earlier, almost to the day, the newly elected Joe Biden proclaimed that voters had just presented him with “a mandate for action against COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism.” Four years earlier, after Trump’s first election in 2016, Paul Ryan, then Speaker of the House of Representatives, marveled at his “incredible political achievement” and said: “He just got a warrant.”

For nearly two centuries, presidents have claimed that their election gives them the political right and moral authority to do what they campaigned for. This assertion dates back to Andrew Jackson, who insisted that as the sole official elected to represent the entire nation, a president had the right to implement his agenda with “the least possible hindrance.” That’s not what the Constitution says and it’s not how our system works, but that never stops presidents and their loyalists from invoking the M-word.

“The mandate myth is now a standard weapon in the arsenal of persuasive symbols that all presidents exploit,” said Robert Dahl, a political science professor at Yale. written in 1990. Sometimes presidents have deployed this weapon with almost comical audacity. In 1973, as the storm clouds of Watergate gathered, Richard Nixon appeared on television to insist that the scandal must not interfere with the “mandate” conferred by his re-election last November. “If you want the mandate you have given this administration to be carried out,” Nixon told the nation, then “those who would exploit Watergate” must not be allowed to succeed.

This was, of course, a completely selfish statement. But Nixon’s “mandate” claim had at least one point in his favor: He had won the 1972 election with one of the greatest landslide victories in presidential history, winning 49 states and capturing nearly 61 percent of the vote. popular vote. From an objective legal perspective, a president’s margin of victory has no bearing on his constitutional authority. In practical terms, however, a candidate who comes to power with the support of a large majority of the electorate will likely be seen as having gained more latitude to pursue his or her priorities than a candidate who has barely outpaced his or her opponent.

Trump is in the “barely edged » category. He won the election with 49.9 percent of the votes cast, compared to 48.3 percent for Kamala Harris, a margin of just 1.6 percentage points, one of the smallest in history. In the electoral college, Trump will obtain 312 votes, or 58% of the total. As a political analyst Chris Stirewalt points outthis will leave him “tied with James Garfield in the 1880 election, with the 44th largest victory in 60 presidential elections.”

Trump won the election fair and square. But it is absurd to imagine that he now possesses “a powerful and unprecedented mandate” or that he leads “the greatest political movement of all time.” Americans were roughly evenly divided before the election and remain so after the election. Trump’s total of 76 million popular votes is certainly impressive; Harris’ total of 74 million votes is hardly less so. The Republicans got the White House and a slim majority in the Senate, not because a massive tsunami was unleashed in their favor, but because of a slight red shift, broad but very superficial. Given the even party split and how often control of the White House and chambers of Congress has flipped in recent years, it is entirely reasonable to expect a similar shift in the other direction the next time voters go to the polls.

None of this means that Trump shouldn’t try to implement his policy priorities or that congressional Republicans shouldn’t try, within reason, to help him. He do That means that when Trump returns to the White House in January, it will be as president of a still deeply polarized nation in which consensus on almost everything is nonexistent. The Democrats lost the election because they went too far and made themselves a little more unpopular than the other party. Unless Trump and the Republican Party want to make the same mistake, they should tone down the “mandate” talk, rein in their follies, and prove they can govern like adults.

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