The Trump "Landslide" That Wasn’t

Donald Trump seems poised to make a mistake that too many elected officials have made over the years: due to hubris and ego and claiming to have won a "landslide" and been given a "mandate" to pursue a course of policies and legislation that opposed by a significant minority - if not a majority - of voters they set the stage for a backlash.  Here in Virginia, Glenn Youngkin made such a mistake and pushed unpopular policies with the result that two years into his term, Democrats captured control of both houses of the Virginia General Assembly and Youngkin will leave office having had less than a memorable term in office.  While Trump and his MAGA political whores keep saying they have a mandated to implement Trump's policies, including aspects of Project 2025 highly unpopular with and opposed by a majority of Americans, the truth is that while Trump managed to win the popular vote, his margin of victory was very narrow and there was no landslide and there clearly is no mandate. Moreover, he did not win a majority of all votes.  Of course, Trump's ego will never allow him to accept this reality and the fanatics within his circle of MAGA cultists live in too much of a bubble to gage how unpopular much of their agenda is in fact. Expect hubris filled over reach and a possible voter backlash in two years time.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Trump's non-existent "landslide."  Here are excerpts:

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. Trump rejoiced in the moment. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” he boasted. In the two weeks since, his campaign has repeatedly heralded his “landslide,” even to market Trump merchandise like the “Official Trump Victory Glass.”

But by traditional numeric measures, Mr. Trump’s victory was neither unprecedented nor a landslide. In fact, he prevailed with one of the smallest margins of victory in the popular vote since the 19th century and generated little of the coattails of a true landslide.

The disconnect goes beyond predictable Trumpian braggadocio. The incoming president and his team are trying to cement the impression of a “resounding margin,” as one aide called it, to make Mr. Trump seem more popular than he is and strengthen his hand in forcing through his agenda in the months to come.

The collapse of Matt Gaetz’s prospective nomination for attorney general on Thursday demonstrated the challenges for Mr. Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas.

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent as of Thursday night, and he appears likely to fall below that once the final results are in, meaning he would not capture a majority. Another count used by CNN and other outlets shows him winning 49.9 percent. By either reckoning, his margin over Vice President Kamala Harris was about 1.6 percentage points, the third smallest since 1888, and could ultimately end up around 1.5 points.

“If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition,” said Lynn Vavreck, a political science professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Identity Crisis” about Mr. Trump’s first election, in 2016. “I would not classify this outcome as a landslide that turns into evidence of desire for a huge shift of direction or policy.”

As he assembles a cabinet and administration during the transition, Mr. Trump is certainly acting as if he has the kind of political capital that comes from a big victory. Rather than picking lieutenants with wide appeal, he is opting for highly unconventional figures with scandals to explain, almost as if trying to bend Senate Republicans to his will.

Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected president to assume his victory gave him more political latitude than it really did. Bill Clinton tried to turn his 5.6-point win in 1992 into a mandate to completely overhaul the nation’s health care system, a project that blew up in his face and cost his party both houses of Congress in the next midterm elections.

George W. Bush likewise thought his 2.4-point win in 2004 would empower him to revise the Social Security system, only to fail and lose Congress two years later.

“Trump’s appointments have already demonstrated that he will continue a bipartisan tradition of presidents over-reading their electoral mandate,” said Doug Sosnik, who was a White House senior adviser to Mr. Clinton.

Real landslides have been unmistakable, including Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6 points, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2 points and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2 points. In the 40 years since that Reagan victory, no president has won the popular vote by double digits.

[G]ood is never good enough for Mr. Trump, who typically offers a constant fountain of self-describing superlatives like “the best,” “the most,” “the biggest” and so on regardless of the topic. Rarely encumbered by contravening facts, Mr. Trump has long claimed to be more popular than he is.

So it should come as no surprise that Mr. Trump would frame his latest victory in grandiose terms. . . . . Mr. Trump’s allies know the path to his heart lies in flattering him, and some have adopted the mantra.

Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.

Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.

“This election was more of a repudiation of Biden and the Democrats than it was a vote for Trump,” said Mr. Sosnik. “A normal Republican candidate should have picked up at least eight Senate and 30-plus House seats given that the incumbent Democratic president had a job approval in the thirties with 70 percent of voters believing that the country was headed in the wrong direction.”

Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the younger Mr. Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004, said the only mandate that Mr. Trump won was to make the economy better.

“A majority of folks on Election Day didn’t like or trust Trump and thought he was too extreme,” he said. “The non-MAGA folks who voted for him did it despite Trump, not because of Trump. They were voting against Biden more than they were voting for Trump.”

“But given his razor-thin majorities in Congress,” he added, “he will fail to gain the support of Republicans from swing districts who will predictably fear defeat in the midterm elections if they enact legislation destroying Obamacare or increasing tariffs in ways that will impose shattering burdens on millions of voters.”

Let's hope the backlash begins quickly and that swing district Republicans put their own reelection needs over Trump's false, ego driven claims of a mandate.