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Before election night 2024 was even over, Donald Trump claimed that voters had handed him an “unprecedented” and “powerful” mandate.
Maybe they didn’t.
While it initially looked like Trump would get a majority of the popular vote, his margin has since shrunk, with Trump as of Nov. 21 securing 49.87% of the popular vote – a plurality, not a majority – and Kamala Harris getting 48.25%. More importantly, scholars who study presidents and political power don’t even know whether mandates actually exist.
“The possible objections to the entire idea of an electoral mandate are endless,” writes scholar Julia Azari, author of a book on presidential mandates. But unsurprisingly, she adds, “the idea remains attractive to politicians and commentators.”
Azari walks readers through the history of presidents claiming mandates, from Andrew Jackson to Barack Obama. What she found in her deep research is that presidents use the claim of a mandate when they want to expand their power – in some cases, she writes, as “a way to give an unchecked executive the veneer of following the popular will.”
In other cases, the claim of a mandate is “employed by politicians in weak positions, in response to polarized politics and flagging legitimacy.” As an example, she quotes 2000 election winner George W. Bush, who actually lost the popular vote but won the Electoral College, telling GOP congressional leaders, “I am able to stand before you as the President because of an agenda that I ran on.”
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