Trump Did Not Win a Mandate

Political terminology can be a bit confusing sometimes. While it is definitionally true that this was a realignment election, that does not mean it was a landslide for Donald Trump or that the voters delivered him a mandate. There were massive shifts in the electorate that will force the Democrats to finally start campaigning in the 21st century (assuming they actually want to win elections and not continue to be a social club for out of touch elitists), but Trump, who is currently sitting right on fifty percent of the vote with all states mostly or fully reported and about seven percent of California still counting its ballots, did not win a mandate as that term has historically been used.

First off, you have to have a clear majority of the popular vote to even get in the discussion for a mandate and enough has been counted that we know Trump will max out at around half of the popular vote at best. Second, a mandate includes your party too, not just the president, and as CNN’s data whisperer Harry Enten noted, for the first time ever, Republicans lost Senate races in states that Trump won—four of them, in fact. The Republican Party is also poised for its smallest House majority since the United States has had 50 states.

Trump’s popular vote winning margin currently ranks 44th out of 51 elections since 1824. He is our next president because of roughly 29,000 extra votes in Wisconsin, 80,000 in Michigan, and 122,000 in Pennsylvania, with those voters cumulatively representing around two percent of total households in all three states, per census data. Put another way: you could fit all those voters who determined those three states in the football stadiums at the universities of Wisconsin, Michigan and Penn State, and still have 59,000 empty seats left to fill. There is no world in which you can interpret these results as a mandate for the GOP.

This was a rebuke of the Democrats. The message inherent in the realignment of large groups of voters like Latinos is that the Democrats must change, not that the voters clearly wanted Republican governance. The electorate, like in every single presidential election save for one since 2008, voted for change from a status quo that is designed specifically for America’s modern aristocracy at the expense of everyone else. The Democrats lost in convincing fashion because they are now the party of America’s wealthy elite, but this does not mean that voters were chomping at the bit to let Trump enact his depraved vision of the world.

Trump’s actual agenda is vastly unpopular, even within his own party, as demonstrated by how every GOPer involved in Project 2025 sprinted away from Project 2025 during the campaign. Republicans are currently grabbing their fainting couches in the wake of Matt Gaetz’s nomination to be the United States Attorney General, shocked that the leopard bit their face off eight years after they first learned about the leopards eating faces party. As an admitted gambling man, I would be willing to bet that voters will staple this economy to Trump that they are perpetually unhappy with within the next two years.

Trump didn’t campaign on a plan to ameliorate people’s specific pain; he just acknowledged it instead of pointing to GDP charts like his opponents, and he said, “it’s their fault and I will fix it.” Given that every economist on the planet believes that he will not, in fact, fix it, and will, in fact, immensely exacerbate it, it is inevitable that his tornado of chaos will damage the real economy. This will eventually spill over to a stock market that is currently pushing all-time highs and is on the cusp of becoming the second-most expensive market in history behind the 2000 dot-com bubble. Putting my finance degree to work (PSA: this is never financial advice), my prognostication is that there is immense downside risk here for the market and I would not place it all in the tail. If Trump does what he wants to do, the market will very likely crash once it begins to feel its effects, and that’s when folks shocked at the leopards eating faces party doing what it always does will turn against him.

And people in the market know this, that’s why the ones who voted for him and think they’re not getting Matt Gaetz are the biggest fools of all, assuming that Trump the TV character is behind this obsession with tariffs to supposedly use them as negotiating leverage, and not the petty and vindictive wannabe mob boss demanding patronage that he has always been. Outside abject cruelty towards some of the most vulnerable people in America, there was no clear agenda in the Trump campaign to even fuel a mandate in the first place, and the most coherent policy the GOP has articulated outside hatred and tax cuts for the rich is “don’t worry, he won’t do what he’s threatening to do with those tariffs.” Trump’s agenda, if you can even call it that, has very little real constituency for it outside of the manchild echo chamber under Elon Musk’s posts.

This election was not a mandate. It was America rightfully pissed off while also in denial. Trump and the GOP are trying to frame it as a mandate, and because a Democrat is an inherently spineless being and our bothsides mainstream media is already enthusiastically bending the knee to their golden goose, Trump is likely to win that case and use it in his attempt to become even more unhinged. This feckless group of fundraisers who think they’re a national political party need all the help they can get against the GOP, and it’s important that us rabble rousers on the internet provide a steady crescendo to give the party some room to make an obvious case rooted in empirical reality.

Donald Trump did not win a mandate. Voters realigned in a clear manner that will take time to fully unpack what it all means, but the predominant message from this election is that the Democratic Party is a relic of another era. It cannot win elections against Donald fucking Trump without the help of a global fucking pandemic. If there is any kind of mandate in the final vote totals, it’s that the Democrats must change into a different party than they are right now.