Decisive win still no mandate

Decisive win still no mandate

 While the president-elect continues to shock and awe as he selects his administration, one of whom has bowed out before opening night, the national media would do well to ease up its post-election coverage of the clear victory. 

 To wit: Enough already with the whole mandate thing.

 Sure the winners will go there, exaggerating the win as something more than it really was. But deep down they know the truth. So should those who presumably report it. This was no landslide. This was no runaway. Ergo, this was no mandate. 

 Let's go to the numbers: The big one, of course, is that those who voted against president-elect Trump outnumber those who voted for him. Granted, the GOP captured the White House, the Senate and the House, a trifecta of some repute. But more Americans said no to him than said yes. That is the inconvenient math. 

 Moreover, his winning number of votes as of this writing remained at less than 50 percent in one of the closest popular votes in American history. So the three-pronged victory owes much to the antiquity we call the Electoral College and some tortured and gerrymandered maps in several states.

 If partisans and other true believers see a mandate in that math, they need to check their work because the arithmetic doesn’t lie. Less than half of all who voted, about 155 million, pulled the lever for the president-elect, the first GOP winner of the White House to capture the popular vote in a couple decades. If you include the eligible voters who skipped out on this go round (89 million), only 64 percent of voters showed up to make the decision on who would be the leader of the free world. That means about 33 percent of all eligible voters marked their X for president-elect. If you throw in those too young to vote and other assorted ineligibles, out of America’s 336 million or so souls, 76,735,585 (as of this writing) made the decision for everyone. 

Some big mandate.

The difference between the perception of winning the big three bully pulpits and carte blanche to act as if the vast majority of Americans truly want what the winners are selling is considerable. All of which means when the victors make the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows or sit for a one-on-one in the Rotunda to claim some expansive warrant from the people, members of the media need to push back on that notion. 

 For example, in a post-election email to replenish GOP coffers drained from the campaign, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “We have an incredible opportunity in front of us. The American people have spoken, and they have given President Trump and our House Republicans a mandate.” Glowing and basking in victory may feel good and cause such overstatements, but those who tell us the stories that have meaning in our lives owe us the truth. And the truth is in the numbers. 

 Mandates smack of widespread support for changes in policy a new administration may offer, some of which could circumvent the democratic process in the mistaken belief that a political victory at the ballot box was far greater than the facts reveal. Once that misinformed momentum gains strength, reversing or slowing it becomes more difficult, resulting in wildly unpopular or ineffective policies. 

 For example, President Barack Obama claimed a mandate in 2008. Perhaps he should have too, with a popular vote edge of nearly 7 percentage points over John McCain, 52.9 to 45.7. The Democrats also won the Senate and House that year, so Obama’s administration focused on healthcare reform leading to the now Affordable Care Act (ACA) with what they believed was a mandate. Even though the ACA proved popular, two years later during midterm elections the GOP gained an enormous 63 seats in the House to take control. Future Democratic Senate leader Chuck Schumer insisted they had misread the mandate, thinking healthcare reform was more important to voters than the economy. 

 Meanwhile, back in 2024 the triangular GOP sweep is real and about to take office. But before they do, they and all Americans would do well to check the appropriate calculus: Big win? Yes. Mandate? No.