As pro-democracy voters clear their heads and strategize on how to take back power at the federal level, the first thing to be absolutely clear on is that Donald Trump and the Republican Party did not receive a “mandate” from the voting public in last week’s election. While they won the presidency, the Senate, and the House, a quick look at past elections shows that their margins of victory are not those associated with other significant turning points in public sentiment or historical political realignments. Yes, they won, and with these victories will be able to exercise power, as is the case in our system of government. Crucially, though, this is not the same as receiving mass approval for the radical and extreme plans that they appear poised to unleash on the country. As the ballots have been counted, Trump’s percentage of votes has slipped to just a fraction over 50%. The GOP is up in the Senate by 3 seats. And the party’s continued hold on the House appears to be by a Vance’s whisker.
A survey of state-level results also refutes a sharp nationwide swing to the right. Perry Bacon, Jr. recently surveyed the array of progressive legislation that just passed in moderate and conservative states:
Voters in seven states, including Arizona, Missouri and Montana, all of which Trump won, voted to change their states’ constitutions to guarantee abortion rights. Kentucky and Nebraska, two other very Trump-leaning states, rejected school vouchers measures. Alaska, Missouri and Nebraska passed provisions mandating employers provide their workers paid leave; Alaska and Missouri also raised their minimum wage to $15 per hour.
These are simply not the types of results you’d expect to see in a nationwide political realignment, and in fact shows that majorities of voters in plenty of red states disagree with Trump and the GOP on vital issues.
Yet there is nothing at all surprising about Trump proclaiming a mandate for himself, perhaps especially with results like these cutting against the notion of a new Republican hegemony. This is a man for whom lies and exaggeration are primary political weapons. Much more surprising has been the willingness of some in the political media to go along with such claims, when they really should know better. It’s no excuse that some may have been surprised by Trump’s victory. It’s slightly more persuasive when they point to the significant shifts in the Latino and male African-American votes — yet a quick look at the last two elections show us what a crock the mandate proclamations truly are.
Currently Trump leads Harris by 1.8% of the popular vote, but this is expected to narrow as blue-leaning West Coast votes continue to be counted, with a strong possibility that Trump will fall below 50% of the total popular vote. In comparison, Hillary Clinton beat Trump in the popular vote by just over 2%; in 2020, Joe Biden beat Trump in the popular vote by 4.5%. Needless to say, neither Clinton nor the media talked a lot about a “Hillary mandate”; nor was there a bunch of mandate talk when Biden won.
Apart from being rooted in long-standing bad practices like groupthink, I would wager that many in the media feel incentivized to ascribe such democratic legitimacy to Trump’s win because of the very real anti-democratic and reactionary threat they know that he poses. “Mandate” is an idea rooted in democracy, with the sense of a strong majority making its voice heard; in a perverse way, political media who echo this language are in fact strengthening the hand of an unapologetically anti-democratic Trump and GOP.
Even more disheartening have been those Democrats who have appeared to accept Trump’s proclamation of a massive victory. They speak of a catastrophe for the party, of the Democrats being massively out of touch with the American people and doomed to some undefined but vast time in the political wilderness — even as the continued counting of votes unravels Trump’s already discredited claims of a mandate. There is a huge difference between the normal political behavior of acknowledging a loss and vowing to do better next time by engaging in introspection, on the one hand, and preemptively declaring one’s party a hopeless wreck condemned by its own haplessness, on the other. The one silver lining is that those throwing out the baby with the bathwater have clearly identified themselves as the people that Democrats should opt not to treat as credible leaders in the coming months and years.
This brings us to the second point we need to be totally clear-eyed about: The Democratic Party leadership has failed at its primary mission of this election, which was to keep from power a criminal authoritarian who leads a made-in-America fascist movement. Saying so does not mean that everything the Democrats did in this election and in the decisive preceding years was all bad or wrong, or that there is something irredeemably unsound about the party’s core values or policy prescriptions (in fact, I believe very much the opposite to be true in most areas). Moreover, any fair accounting needs to admit that there were many headwinds to a potential Harris victory — including the inflation of the last few years and longer-term concerns about cost of living — that Harris herself had little control over. And a fair accounting must also acknowledge a truly hideous media environment for Democrats, in which a far-right echo chamber propagated lies to untold millions (including to undecided and unaffiliated voters), and in which the mainstream media largely failed to communicate to the public the overwhelming threat to our democracy, our society, and our lives that a second Trump presidency would entail (for instance, by badly downplaying warnings from former generals associated with the first Trump administration that he is a “fascist.”)
But a primary reason why Donald Trump was able to beat Kamala Harris is because a sufficient number of Americans saw him as a legitimate choice for the presidency — and the relative legitimacy of Trump in the eyes of the public was at least somewhat within the Democrats’ control over the past four years. Given that Trump is a convicted felon, handled the covid pandemic so ineptly that literally hundreds of thousands of American died unnecessarily, and tried to overthrow the 2020 election and so end American democracy, the fact that a majority of voters chose him over Harris may well be one of the most depressingly remarkable facts of our lifetimes. And while a great deal of Trump’s vote surely came from his MAGA base, and his appeals to white supremacist, misogynistic, and Christian nationalist sentiments, his margin of victory was provided by attracting a certain number of voters who could have been persuaded not to vote for him — as well as by a significant number of voters who cast a ballot for Biden in 2020 but chose to sit out 2024.
Both sets of voters — the persuadable pro-Trump voters and the disincentivized pro-Biden voters — might well have shown up for Harris if the Democrats had done their duty to the country over the last four years by relentlessly reminding everyone of the first Trump administration’s many horrors and Trump’s unfitness to hold political office. Among other things, congressional Democrats could have launched all manner of well-premised investigations into the corruption of his administration. From the repeated ripping off of taxpayers by forcing government employees to stay in Trump hotels at jacked-up prices to the abysmal handling of the coronavirus pandemic, to the human rights abuses against migrants (including the infamous family separation policy), the public deserved an accounting, and Trump a discrediting.
Yet even after Trump’s insurrection following the 2020 election, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, leading Democrats decided that a perfunctory and unsuccessful impeachment effort would be sufficient punishment. Shamefully, more than a few may have been taken in by assurances from some in the GOP, like Senator Mitch McConnell, that Trump was finished as a force in the Republican Party. Alongside this, newly-elected President Biden decided he wanted the country and the party to look to the future, not the past. The Democrats hewed to this strategy — which amounted to a faith that the nation, in rejecting Trump once, would never elect him again — despite the fact that within mere weeks of Trump’s impeachment, the Republican Party began a rapid shift to fully embrace Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and to renew its bonds of affection with this rotten man. The January 6 commission, while admirable, is the exception that proves the rule, a stand-alone effort overshadowed by Democratic inertia on multiple other possible fronts (and undercut as well by a Justice Department that simply failed in its duty to bring Trump to justice in a timely manner).
Meanwhile, the GOP’s near-lockstep allegiance to Trump, and punishment of those who deviated from this worship, accomplished two important things: it allayed any lingering fears among many GOP rank-and-file that Trump had engaged in discrediting behavior, and it communicated to non-MAGA voters that insurrection was a matter of partisan controversy, not an objectively disqualifying fact about Trump. So not only did the Democrats fail to finish off a mortal threat to our politics when he was diminished, this lack of effort also cleared the path for a truly diabolical propaganda effort on the part of the GOP to rehabilitate Trump.
Seeking to return to an elusive pre-Trump era normalcy, the Democrats as a party also failed to fully engage with a widespread disillusionment with democracy itself that Trump’s 2016 election revealed. Addressing this issue was, and is, admittedly a complicated order. To their limited credit, congressional Democrats did draft excellent legislation that would have nipped gerrymandering in the bud, beat back voter suppression, and made Election Day a holiday, among other improvements, but these never got to up or down votes. Yet, given such legislative hurdles, the party had a strong interest in encouraging public discussions about the basics of our democracy that it simply did not pursue (though this failure was shared by much of American society, with a few notable exceptions). Among other things, they did not seem particularly interested in examining why so many Americans seemed outright ready to abandon the basics of democracy (free and fair elections, the rule of law) in favor of the authoritarian solutions offered by Trump. Nor did they appear to grasp the appeal that Trump’s fascistic politics could have on so many Americans, or display any urgency in countering them. Finally, they seemed to lack any strategy for confronting the rivers of white supremacism, misogyny, and Christian nationalism that were at the heart of the movement backing Trump.
However, as I noted above, the fact that Democratic leaders made grave errors in setting the party’s anti-Trump and anti-MAGA strategy, and that these errors have contributed greatly to the party’s failure to stop him, does not mean that the Democratic Party itself is a failure, or that its competing vision for American is broken. I don’t think Democrats made these mistakes because they didn’t actually want to beat Trump and win power, or because they secretly hate democracy.
It is true that the roots of these errors tie to serious flaws in the party that will need to be addressed, including but not limited to: a general lack of aggression in confronting the GOP and asserting power when the party holds it; a geriatric president whose lack of vigor and memories of the pre-Trump Republican Party hamstrung the Democrats; a failure to address long-term cost of living challenges; and an unwillingness to confront and solve the reality of a media environment heavily tilted against the party and in favor of the GOP.
But it is also true that the Democrats are firmly rooted in the democratic traditions of this country, and for all their flaws are the sole remaining major pro-democracy party in the United States, with a long history of fighting for equality on many fronts — on race, on gender, on the economy. One thing the Democratic Party should never apologize for or browbeat itself about is how the party made defense of democracy a key plank of the Harris campaign. If anything, this argument needs to be expanded and sharpened — both to make concrete the harms that MAGA authoritarianism will do to our individual and collective lives, and to provide a countervailing vision of American life. As the party begins to debate strategies for taking on MAGA and winning back power in the coming years, the commitment to democracy provides ample guidance for starting to confront the incoming Trump administration right now, without further delay.
And the first order of business is to refute the propagandistic declarations that Trump has won a “mandate.” There is no point letting Trump start off his presidency with an unchallenged lie that overstates popular backing for his radicalism, corruption, and authoritarianism; as Adam Serwer acidly puts it, “Americans cannot vote themselves into a dictatorship any more than you as an individual can sell yourself into slavery.” At worst, this country is split down the middle over many fundamental issues; at best, a progressive majority is sitting right in front of us, but half-hidden, ready to be rallied by Democratic politicians ready to take the fight to MAGA, to re-energize American democracy so that it regains the faith of the disillusioned, and to fix the economy so that a huge chunk of the population isn’t constantly a paycheck away from financial disarray.
In an interview about the recent election, author Paul O’Neil took aim at Trump’s mandate talk, noting that, “Trump’s margin of victory was humdrum. His final vote tally will fall millions short of the votes won by Biden in 2020. The opposition to him is huge and intense and in the right. So let’s be clear: this malicious criminal does not have the barbaric mandate he claims for himself. On the contrary, it is the opposition that has a mandate, derived from centuries of democratic tradition.” O’Neil’s assertion that it is in fact the Democrats and other opponents of Trump who have a mandate is an idea we should all take to heart, a no-holds-barred attitude not of resistance but of utter defiance. It would be myopic to view this election outcome without context, without a sense of our long history of increasing democracy and the way MAGA seeks to slam that flow into dizzying reverse. Even if Harris had not received nearly as many votes as Trump, the Democrats would still have the full authority of American democracy and the constitutional order behind them. It’s time to start acting like it.