Trump claims massive mandate, but presidents often overinterpret their victoriesExBulletin

Former President Donald Trump, Republican presidential candidate, arrives at an election night event at the Palm Beach Convention Center November 6, in West Palm Beach, Florida. Julia Demaree Nikhinson/AP .

switch captionJulia Demaree Nikhinson/AP

Presidents love to claim they have a “mandate” after winning an election.

“[T]The beauty is that we won by a lot. The mandate was huge,” President-elect Donald Trump said of his 2024 presidential victory in a Time magazine interview published Thursday after being named “Person of the Year.”

This claim echoes what Trump said during his victory speech last month.

“America has given us a powerful and unprecedented mandate,” he said.

In the Time interview, Trump even boasted, “Someone was 129 years old in terms of overall tenure.” Trump did indeed win the Electoral College handily, but his 312 electoral votes and 49.7% of the popular vote are far from the highest in 129 years. His electoral vote total is the highest since 2012, when former President Barack Obama won 332.

And even though Trump is the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, it's difficult to claim a “mandate” when a president gets less than 50 percent, as Trump did in this election. In fact, Trump's popular vote margin was the second narrowest in the last 60 years.

There is a long history of presidents of both parties claiming office, the idea that because they have won, they have the will of the people behind their policy agendas. But presidents often overinterpret regardless of their tenure, because multiple factors explain why a person voted the way they did. Elections are rarely, if ever, about unqualified voter support for every policy position presented by a candidate.

“We really don't know why voters voted,” said Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University and author of Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate. “And one thing we know about elections, and this is absolutely true in 2024, is that elections seem to be some sort of broad referendum on the status quo.”

Presidents of both parties have long used the word to claim popular support for their programs.

Many presidents over the past 100 years, from Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression to Richard Nixon trying to save himself from Watergate to President Biden, have claimed sweeping mandates.

During the last presidential campaign, voters repeatedly said they were unhappy with high inflation in the wake of the pandemic, higher than pre-pandemic grocery store prices, and a lack of affordable housing. Many were also unhappy with the number of migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. And they blamed all of this on the Biden administration.

Trump capitalized and got a ticket back to the White House for another term. He has a lot of big things to accomplish, some of them controversial, from mass deportations of illegal immigrants in the United States to extending his tax cuts, which expire next year.

Trump will come into office with full control of the levers of power in Washington. Republicans took control of the Senate and retained control of the House. But they ended up losing a House seat, making their narrow majority even narrower, despite Trump's victory in the presidential election.

Control of the House was so tight that it narrowed to just 7,309 votes in three congressional elections, according to David Wasserman of the Cook Political Report.

So how much of a mandate is this really?

“We're seeing this fit into a typical pattern where presidents kind of know they're going to be under siege,” Azari said. “They know that their views will be controversial. And so they use their mandate to try to suggest, okay, it's OK for me to do this or my criticisms are not just criticisms of me, but what are critics of the popular will.”

Mandate claims have been used more often when presidents feel in trouble.

Presidents often claim office when they feel they have a political fight on their hands.

“As presidential politics has become more polarized and has also become more troubled and more tense in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, that's really when we're seeing an increase in presidents talking about the results of the elections,” Azari said, “and that's why I was elected” and justifying what they're doing in relation to their campaign promises. I've also seen all of this happen in moments. defensive.

Take Nixon, for example. As the Watergate scandal unfolded, he attempted to use the idea of ​​incumbency to rally popular support and keep it in the White House.

“If you want the mandate you have given this administration to be carried out,” he said in a televised address to the country, “then I am asking for your help to ensure that those who would exploit Watergate to prevent us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed.”

Nixon, who won with nearly 61 percent of the popular vote in 1972, brushed aside those who wanted him to resign, declaring a week after that speech: “There are a great many people in this country who have not accepted the mandate of 1972. “.

It didn't work.

He resigned in disgrace in 1974, but nearly a decade later he changed his mind. Nixon, emboldened, once again used his tenure to claim that this was in fact the reason the “elites” had forced him from office.

“I had a mandate,” Nixon said in a 1983 interview with Frank Gannon, a former Nixon White House aide. “I was going to reorganize the government. I was going to reduce the number of bureaucrats. I was going to give more power back to the states and the citizens. I was going to shape the place. They knew it.”

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Notably, Lyndon B. Johnson, who many believe has one of the strongest claims to office with his landslide victory in 1964 following the death of John F. Kennedy (61% of the popular vote and 486 electoral votes) n didn't use the word often. .

In 1967, three years after his election, he reflected on his legislative strategy.

“The president's term rarely lasted more than six months,” he said, “and I hoped that we could implement most of the commitments we made in our agenda as soon as possible.”

More than most presidents, LBJ, a former Senate majority leader and nicknamed “Master of the Senate,” knew how to get bills passed. He pushed through a number of Great Society measures, including the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and the expansion of Social Security, as well as civil rights legislation.

He knew that passing these measures was more about numbers, political horse-trading and relationships than any idea of ​​a vague mandate. And Azari argues that even Johnson, with his landslide victory, didn't really have a mandate.

“Were people actually voting for a specific set of policies or were they voting for the status quo?” she noted. “Did they vote against Barry Goldwater [the Republican nominee]? It gets confusing very quickly when you start asking these questions. »

Of course, FDR also accomplished a lot. His first inaugural address, in the midst of the Great Depression, is remembered for his famous statement that “the only thing to fear is fear itself.”

But in that same speech, he said near the end: “In their need, they have registered a mandate that they want direct and vigorous action.” »

FDR pursued a massive expansion of government with his New Deal program to try to help the country emerge from the Depression. He adopted measures including stricter regulation of Wall Street and expansion of the Social Security safety net.

1980 was another election in which Ronald Reagan claimed office. He won a landslide electoral victory (although the popular vote was much closer, with Reagan finishing just below 51%).

Many questions then arose about a realignment and a shift to the right of the country. But again, many factors also played into this election.

“[W]because it's just, again, kind of a rejection of the status quo,” Azari said, “the frustration that voters felt in 1980 around the presidency of Jimmy Carter? And if it was a political mandate, was it a question of economics? Was it a social issue? Was it a matter of national security? There are simply no answers to these questions. »

Azari said the idea that “the president somehow has a unique relationship with the electorate and that the electorate again gives the president a special justification to do certain things” goes back at least to the 1830s and the presidency of Andrew Jackson.

An NPR search of UC-Santa Barbara's The American Presidency Project database of presidential speeches and public appearances found that the first use of the word “mandate” to explicitly claim approval of a candidate's agenda next election was that of Calvin Coolidge in 1923.

Coolidge took office after Warren Harding died of a heart attack in 1923. A year later, Coolidge won a landslide victory in the Electoral College and 54% of the popular vote.

“When the country has placed its confidence in any party by making it a majority in Congress, it has a right to expect such unity of action as will make the majority of the party an effective instrument of government,” Coolidge said in his inaugural speech. “This administration came to power with a very clear and specific mandate from the people.”

Many presidents will follow in his footsteps, from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan, from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden.

“They gave us a mandate to act on COVID, on the economy, on climate change, on systemic racism,” Biden said after winning the election four years ago.

It would have been quite a mandate. There is a risk that presidents will overinterpret their mandates and take their eyes off what really matters when passing laws.

“Ultimately,” Azari noted, “what they can and cannot do really depends on what is in the best interest of members of Congress when they vote on legislation?”

For Trump, his narrow majorities could limit the scope of what he is able to accomplish legislatively. He will undoubtedly try to do what he can within expanded presidential power, but for lasting societal change, a president needs Congress.

And, as LBJ pointed out, a president has a limited amount of time to do so because the luster of an election fades quickly enough or not.

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