Connect the Dots 101

Remember the “big lie”? In 2020, Donald Trumplost the presidential election so Republicans just brazenly lied and insisted he won.

In 2024, we have a new post-election lie from the Republican party. Trump didn’t just win, they say, but he won big. He won a landslide. He won an historic mandate for his “Maga” agenda.

And it was Trump himself, of course, on election night, who was the first to push this grandiose and self-serving falsehood, calling his win “a political victory that our country has never seen before” and claiming “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate”.

None of this is true. Yes, Trump won the popular vote and the electoral college. Yes, Republicans won the Senate and the House. But, contrary to both Republican talking points and breathless headlines and hot takes from leading media outlets (“resounding”, “rout”, “runaway win”), there was really nothing at all historic or huge about the margin of victory….

First, consider the popular vote. Yes, Trump became the first Republican for two decades to win the popular vote. However, per results from CNN, the Cook Political Report, and the New York Times, he did not win a majority of the vote. Barack Obama did in both 2008 and 2012. Joe Biden did in 2020. But Donald Trump failed to do so in 2024.

And the former president’s margin of victory over Harris is a miniscule 1.6 percentage points, “smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968”, as an analysis in the New York Times noted last month. In fact, in the 55 presidential elections in which the popular vote winner became president, 49 of them were won with a margin bigger than Trump’s in 2024….

We actually know what a landslide in the popular vote looks like: the Democrat Lyndon Johnson defeated the Republican Barry Goldwater in 1964 by an enormous margin of 22.6 percentage points!…

But there is also method to their megalomania. As the political scientist Julia Azari has observed, when a president and a party claim a sweeping mandate it has “historically been connected to unprecedented expansions of presidential power” and can become a way “to give an unchecked executive the veneer of following the popular will”.

Trump, the 49.9% president, doesn’t represent the popular will. Yes, he won the election fair and square, and won the popular vote for the first time, but if we are to prevent him from expanding his power in the Oval Office we must resist this new Republican election lie. We must not allow him to pretend that he has some sort of special “mandate” for controversial policies and personnel.

https://amp.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/dec/03/donald-trump-historic-landslide-win-lie