A Trump “mandate”?

Flush with election night news that he had won the presidential election fair-and-square, Donald Trump took to the stage at his victory rally to assert: “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” The day after the election the Trump lickspittle Rep. Elise Stefanik declared “we the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide.” Trump rewarded Stefanik’s fealty with an appointment as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

On the Democratic Party side of the political spectrum, despair mixed with lashing out at millions of “stupid” and “selfish” Americans who supported Trump. As always, social media brought out the worst, of which this was just one small example:

“I hope every woman who voted for Trump and lives in a no abortion state gets what they wanted. To bleed out in a parking lot due to a miscarriage and no doctor will help you because THAT’S what you voted for. Y’all deserve it.”

Even Rachel Bitecofer, the political scientist turned Democratic Party consultant, condemned Uncommitted movement adviser Waleed Shahid with the indefensible: “I probably won’t be able to stop the Schaudenfreude when Shahid gets deported”.

Did Americans vote for authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism? Is that who Americans “are”?

Millions of Americans are avid supporters of Trump, and, at the very least, don’t consider Trump’s racism and misogyny disqualifying. But it’s harder to extend those observations to all Americans, or even to the around 64 percent of eligible voters who voted.

The most obvious refutation of this is the election results themselves. As more votes are counted, it becomes much clearer that Trump’s victory, far from being a landslide, was quite narrow. Overall, when all presidential votes are counted across the country, more voters will have chosen someone other than Trump. At the time of writing, Trump had corralled about 49.8 percent of all votes counted, meaning that more than 50 percent of voters chose either Harris or a third party candidate. In fact, Trump’s victory is the seventh narrowest (about 1.6 percentage points in vote share higher than Harris) in 51 presidential elections going back to the 1820s.

When compared to the 2020 election, we see a mirror image. In each election, the incumbent president was turfed out, the winning candidate’s party lost ground but prevailed as the majority in the House; and the winning candidate’s party narrowly won the Senate. Trump and the Republicans certainly won, but the closeness of their victories doesn’t suggest a fundamental reordering of U.S. mainstream politics.

That doesn’t mean that the Trump administration won’t try to act on its most reactionary, authoritarian, and venal impulses. But those actions won’t embody “the will of the people,”—even of those who voted. To take a couple of examples: exit polls showed that support for abortion rights exceeds support for either major party candidate. And clearly, millions of people who support abortion rights also voted for Trump. If the Trump administration pushes through a national abortion ban, it won’t be because it was acting on an anti-abortion “mandate.”

Second, exit polls showed most voters support “mass deportation” of the undocumented. At the same time, even stronger majorities support providing the undocumented with a path to U.S. citizenship. When people are asked if undocumented residents who have lived and worked in the U.S. for decades should be deported, support for “mass deportation” evaporates.

Despite what the pundit “hot takes” and “instant analyses” say, the simplest explanation for the election result is that millions of people were dissatisfied with the Biden administration for its management of the economy, and enough of them decided either to vote for Trump or crucially not to vote for Harris (more on this later) to make Trump the winner.

And that’s the judgment of the estimated 155 million or so people who voted in the 2024 election, of a voting eligible population of just under 245 million. When the vote counting is completed, Trump is expected to net about 77.8 million votes and Harris about 75 million votes. Trump’s total will be about 4 million fewer than Biden received in 2020. Meanwhile, about 90 million people who could have voted didn’t. In other words, the “party of nonvoters” is the winner again—as it has been in every election since the post-Civil War era.

Research over the years has shown that these non-voters tend to be younger, not college educated, lower income and people of color. They don’t pay much attention to politics, but that doesn’t mean that they don’t have political opinions. One of the reasons they tune out mainstream politics, according a large 2020 study of nonvoters, is because they have little trust in politicians or the system to do anything that will change their lives for the better. They are more likely to consider the system “rigged,” compared to those who cast ballots.

An October Associated Press story showed these sentiments were very much alive in 2024. It reported on an encounter between a voter registration organizer and Earl Jones, a 73-year-old Detroiter who said he survives on Social Security and “hustling” and hasn’t voted since the 1970s: “I ain’t voting for nobody unless we see somebody go do something for us, and not just for me, for everybody — you, him and him,” Jones said, pointing to people around him. “If they do something for us it’ll be alright. If they don’t, the hell with it.”

Feelings like those of Jones hurt Harris. While the media maps of the vote showed a “red shift” to Republicans in most of the country, Harris lost the most ground in what Democratic Party strongholds in urban areas were historically. A Politico analysis of precinct data in “swing-state” urban areas such as Philadelphia, Phoenix and Charlotte, showed major declines in Democratic turnout from 2020. In swing-state precincts that have African American populations of 85 percent or more, Harris lost more than 17,000 votes compared to Biden’s total in 2020 while Trump gained about 3,500 votes in the same precincts. Politico showed a similar pattern in swing-state precincts that were more than 85 percent Latino.

And those data are from the seven swing states, where both campaigns focused the entirety of their campaigns. In those states, the popular vote split between the Democrats and Republicans shifted about 2.5-3 percentage points to the Republicans, compared to 2020 results. In fact, Harris won more votes than Biden did in four of them (Wisconsin, Georgia, Nevada, and North Carolina). In the nation overall, the shift was about 5.5-6 percentage points compared to 2020. The decline of the Democratic presidential vote in non-swing states like California, New York and Illinois, and the increase in Republican votes in Texas and Florida accounts for bulk of the national popular vote shift.

These figures illustrate the absurdity of the electoral college system of electing a president. A multi-billion-dollar presidential campaign that essential ignores 43 of the 50 states doesn’t have to address itself to the mass of working people clustered in some of largest and most diverse areas of the country like New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston or Tampa. It’s why so much post-election commentary magnifies as significant changes what are small shifts among voters in a handful of states.

Widening the lens on the election result helps to provide more perspective. Do the “American people” really want an authoritarian theocracy that architects of the conservative Project 2025 promise? Did they get a vote for what they “really” want?

The 2020 study quoted above noted that about one in five nonvoters say they would vote for a third party if they did vote. And, for about two decades, opinion polls have shown majorities of Americans saying a third party is needed because the two major parties don’t “do an adequate job” of representing the American people. In 2024, however, third party support was low by historical standards, and the Democrats couldn’t blame the Green Party or the independent campaign of Dr. Cornel West for costing them the election.

The money-soaked US electoral system managed to do what it always seems to do in presidential years: present an increasingly dissatisfied electorate with two capitalist parties: one an increasingly authoritarian, theocratic party (the GOP) and, the other, a center-right party of the status quo (the Democrats). That’s the way the plutocrats and oligarchs behind both parties like it. The Elon Musks and Richard Uihleins on the Republican side, and the Michael Bloombergs and Reid Hoffmans on the Democratic side aren’t about to finance a real political challenge to their dominance of the U.S. political economy.

Social commentator Freddie deBoer, who said he voted for the Green Party’s Jill Stein in Connecticut, drew this conclusion:

A country with a two-party system that include[s] a far-right party and a center-right party is a country that will inevitably move in a far-right direction. And not [pundits] Jon Favreau nor Gail Collins nor Matt Yglesias nor Jon Chait nor the New York Times editorial board nor Hillary Clinton herself nor any other of the tongue-cluckers have a response to that fact. Because they’ve assumed away any possibility of positive change; they know they’re stuck. That’s the other thing almost nobody did [on election day]: articulate any path for the country to get better. You can’t, because better can’t emerge from this rotten system.

There’s no use in sugar-coating the election result. But it’s also important to remember that most positive social change in U.S. history didn’t come from elections. It came from the struggles of ordinary people. This may not seem to be in the cards right now, but history hasn’t “ended.”

The great peoples’ historian Howard Zinn put it well:

The Constitution gave no rights to working people; no right to work less than 12 hours a day, no right to a living wage, no right to safe working conditions. Workers had to organize, go on strike, defy the law, the courts, the police, create a great movement which won the eight-hour day, and caused such commotion that Congress was forced to pass a minimum wage law, and Social Security, and unemployment insurance….Those rights only come alive when citizens organize, protest, demonstrate, strike, boycott, rebel and violate the law in order to uphold justice.”