With all of that arrayed against him, Trump won not just the Electoral College by handy margins overall and within the battleground states, but he also became the first Republican candidate to win the national popular vote since 2004. Trump didn't have the coattails that usually accompany that kind of victory, but Republicans flipped the Senate and managed to barely maintain their grip on the House. 

That looks like a rather pointed rejection of Democrats, if not a full-throated endorsement of Trump. The once-and-future president certainly believes he has a mandate for broad change from the status quo, as his Cabinet picks make clear. 

Not everyone is convinced. CNN's Harry Enten tried to douse Democrat fantasies about Harris' standing during the election, but now wants to pour some cold water on any claims of a Trump mandate. Calling the win "very wide ... but not particularly deep," Enten says that the popular vote win is far too weak to claim any kind of a broad mandate, and that Democrats actually did better down-ballot than people think:

“The case that Trump’s mandate isn’t all that. Look, if you look historically speaking, Donald Trump is now under 50% in the national popular vote, barely under 50%, but he is under 50%. And I want to take a look and compare his popular vote victory to those historically speaking over the last 200 years,” Enten told host John Berman. “His popular vote victory ranks 44th out of 51. That ain’t exactly strong. Some might argue that is weak, weak, weak in the words of Tony Blair.”

“In fact, his popular vote win at this point is the weakest going all the way back … to 2000 to find a weaker one, a smaller popular vote victory than Donald Trump currently has,” he continued. “So yeah, Trump has won the popular vote, but it ain’t all that, my dear friend, John Berman.”

Well, that a fiver will get you a café latté these days at Starbucks. Maybe. It's been a while since I've bought a café latté or anything else at Starbucks. As far as what kind of a mandate the popular vote gets you, let's reflect on what the media threshold has been in the past:

I remember when Bill Clinton won the 1992 election with a whopping 43% of the vote and Time Magazine and the rest of the regime media said it was a "mandate for change." pic.twitter.com/r9Og5MIJxN

— Jeremy Carl (@realJeremyCarl) November 19, 2024

Did Bill Clinton have a mandate? Does Trump?

There are two ways to look at the "mandate" argument, which is either that it's irrelevant or that it means everything. And to some extent, both are correct, or at least defensible. Perhaps the best way to look at the question of mandate is somewhat similar to the way Lewis Powell suggested we treat obscenity. It's almost impossible to define in any consistent manner, but when material crosses the line, "I know it when I see it." 

The case for irrelevancy is easy. In a federal system, it's immaterial. Voters elect presidents through the Electoral College, and the authorities and jurisdictions for presidents are fixed no matter the quality of the victory. That's why presidents claim mandates even in narrowly divided elections; to govern without conviction on one's own agenda is politically fatal. Presidents get four years in office no matter how well they perform, although voters get a chance to punish or reward them in the midterm cycle. In that sense, the issue of "mandate" is immaterial; presidents pursue their policies and let voters have their say at the proper time.

To paraphrase Shakespeare, presidents assume a mandate, even if they have it not. It's the only way to succeed, especially in the first few months of a presidency.

However, even if one can't really define mandates per se in a measurable sense, we know failure on mandates when we see it. All we need to do is look at what happened with Joe Biden, who misread his election so badly that it quickly turned into a failure and never recovered. Biden and his team assumed that the 2020 election results handed him a mandate to become a transformational president a la FDR or LBJ, rather than the transitional president Biden had promised to be. Biden won in 2020 by appealing to the center and assuring voters that he would work with both parties on a path of cooperation and consensus. He turned on a dime to push the far-Left agenda and quickly became one of the most unpopular presidents of all time, setting up Donald Trump's return. 

Or for that matter, look at what happened to Clinton. Biden made the same mistake that Clinton and his team did, mistaking an endorsement of centrism for a mandate to push the country to the Left. Clinton put Hillary in charge of an effort to nationalize health care, which turned out to be so unpopular that Clinton lost Congress in the midterms. Clinton was smarter than Biden, however, and used his "triangulation" strategy to co-opt the Republican agenda and restore his popularity in time to win re-election. 

Does Trump run that risk too? Sure, but not because he only got 49.9999% of the popular vote rather than 50.000001%, and not because he didn't carry Eric Hovde and Mike Rogers into the Senate. He runs the same risks that all presidents do no matter their margin of victory -- of misreading the mood of the country and crossing them up. That may be tougher to do in this instance because of the deep unpopularity of both Biden and his administration, but there are certainly still some risks. 

The biggest risk? Going overboard on the chaos without achieving positive gains from the disruption. Trump will have to deliver real achievements before the next midterms if he wants to be able to have four years of real impact. If he can't get enough in place before the midterms, he'll end up with two years as lame-duck status with a Congress controlled in part or in whole by Democrats.

Of course, that's really nothing more than just listening to voters, and Trump won't be the only entity judged by the success or failure of that enterprise. Democrats will need to listen to why voters rejected them in this cycle, and if they don't, then Trump and the GOP may benefit no matter how much they can deliver in the next two years. Democrats are already proving themselves either too arrogant or too clueless to learn lessons from this election. 

That's not a mandate so much as it is political common sense. Now that I think about it, though, that may be almost as mythical as "mandates" ...