Presidents love to claim they have a "mandate" after winning an election.
"[T]he beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive," President-elect Donald Trump said of his 2024 presidential victory in an interview with Time magazine that was published Thursday after being named its "Person of the Year."
That claim echoes what Trump said during his victory speech last month.
"America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate," he said.
In the Time interview, Trump even boasted, "Somebody had 129 years in terms of the overall mandate." Trump indeed handily won in the Electoral College, but his 312 electoral votes and 49.7% in the popular vote are nowhere near the most in 129 years. His electoral vote tally is the highest since 2012 when former President Barack Obama won 332.
And while Trump is the first Republican in 20 years to win the popular vote, it's hard to claim a "mandate" when a president gets less than 50%, as Trump did in this election. In fact, Trump's popular-vote margin was the second-narrowest in the last 60 years.
There's a long history of presidents in both parties claiming mandates, the idea that because they won they have the will of the people behind their policy agendas. But presidents often overread whatever their mandate might be because there are multiple factors that go into why a person voted the way they did. Elections are rarely, if ever, a full-throated endorsement from voters of every policy position that a candidate puts forward.
"We really don't know why voters cast their ballots," said Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University and author of Delivering the People's Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate. "And one thing we do know about elections, and it's very much true in 2024, is that elections seem to be kind of a broad referendum on the status quo."
Presidents of both parties have long used the word to claim a popular endorsement of their agendas.
Lots of presidents in the past 100 years, from Franklin D. Roosevelt during the Depression to Richard Nixon trying to save himself from Watergate to President Biden have claimed sweeping mandates.
In this last presidential campaign, voters repeatedly said they were unhappy with high inflation in the aftermath of the pandemic, higher than pre-pandemic grocery store prices and the lack of affordable housing. Many were also upset with the number of migrants crossing the southern U.S. border. And they placed blame on the Biden administration for all of it.
Trump capitalized and won a ticket back to the White House for another term. He has a lot of big things that he wants to get done – some of them controversial – from mass deportations of immigrants in the U.S. illegally to extending his tax cuts, which expire next year.
Trump will come into office with full control of the levers of power in Washington. Republicans won control of the Senate and maintained control of the House. But they actually wound up losing a seat in the House, making their narrow majority even narrower, despite Trump winning the presidential election.
Control of the House was so close that it came down to just 7,309 votes in three congressional races, according to the Cook Political Report's David Wasserman.
So how much of a mandate is that really?
"We're seeing this fit into a typical pattern where presidents kind of know that they're going to be embattled," Azari said. "They know that their viewpoints will be controversial. And so they use the mandate to try and suggest, all right, it's OK for me to do this or my critics are ultimately not just critics of me, but they're critics of the popular will."
Mandate claims have been used more often when presidents feel embattled.
Presidents often invoke claims of a mandate when they feel like they have a political fight on their hands.
"As presidential politics have become more polarized and also become sort of more troubled and fraught in the wake of Vietnam and Watergate, that is really when we see an uptick in presidents talking about election results," Azari said, " 'and the reason I was elected' and justifying what they do in terms of their campaign promises. I also saw all this happen at moments of defensiveness."
Take Nixon, for example. As the Watergate scandal was unfolding, he tried to use the idea of a mandate to rally popular support and keep him in the White House.
"If you want the mandate you gave this administration to be carried out," he said in a televised address to the country, "then I ask for your help to ensure that those who would exploit Watergate in order to keep us from doing what we were elected to do will not succeed."
Nixon, who won with almost 61% of the popular vote in 1972, dismissed those who wanted him to resign, saying a week after that address, "There are a great number of people in this country that didn't accept the mandate of 1972."
It didn't work.
He stepped down in disgrace in 1974, but nearly a decade later, he changed his tune. An emboldened Nixon again used the mandate to argue that it was, in fact, the reason the "elites" forced him from office.
"I had a mandate," Nixon said in a 1983 interview with Frank Gannon, a former Nixon White House aide. "I was going to reorganize the government. I was going to cut down on the bureaucrats. I was going to return more power to the states and the people. I was going to shape up the place. They knew that."
What it really takes
Notably, Lyndon B. Johnson, whom many believe has one of the strongest claims to a mandate with his sweeping victory in 1964 following the death of John F. Kennedy – 61% in the popular vote and 486 electoral votes – didn't use the word often.
In 1967, three years after his election, he reflected on his legislative strategy.
"The president's mandate rarely lasted longer than six months," he said, "and I hoped that we could get most of the pledges we made in our platform enacted as soon as possible."
More than most presidents, LBJ, a former Senate majority leader and dubbed "Master of the Senate," knew how to get bills passed. He got a number of Great Society measures through, including the advent of Medicare and Medicaid and an expansion of Social Security, as well as civil rights legislation.
He knew that passing those measures had more to do with numbers, political horse-trading and relationships than any idea of a vague mandate. And Azari argues that even Johnson, with his sweeping victory, really didn't have a mandate.
"Were people really voting for a specific set of policies or were they voting for the status quo?" she noted. "Were they voting against Barry Goldwater [the Republican nominee]? It gets very muddled very quickly when you start asking these questions."
FDR also got a lot done, of course. His first inaugural address, coming in the midst of the Great Depression, is remembered for his famous line that "the only thing to fear is fear itself."
But in that same speech, he said this near the end: "In their need, they have registered a mandate that they want direct, vigorous action."
FDR pursued a massive expansion of government with his New Deal agenda to try and help lift the country out of the Depression. He passed measures that included stricter regulation of Wall Street and the development of the Social Security safety net.
1980 is another election when Ronald Reagan had a claim to a mandate. He won in an electoral landslide (though the popular vote was much closer with Reagan finishing just below 51%).
There were lots of questions then about a realignment and a rightward shift in the country. But, again, there were a lot of factors in that election as well.
"[W]as it simply, again, a kind of rejection of the status quo," Azari said, "the frustration voters felt in 1980 around the presidency of Jimmy Carter? And if it was a policy mandate, was it about economics? Was it about social issues? Was it about national security? These questions are just not answerable."
Azari said the idea that "the president somehow has a unique relationship with the electorate and the electorate thus then confers again the special justification on the president to do certain things" dates back to at least the 1830s and the presidency of Andrew Jackson.
An NPR search of the UC-Santa Barbara's The American Presidency Project database of presidential speeches and public appearances found the earliest use of the word "mandate" to explicitly claim an endorsement of a candidate's agenda after an election was by Calvin Coolidge in 1923.
Coolidge assumed office after Warren Harding died of a heart attack in 1923. A year later, Coolidge won a sweeping Electoral College victory and 54% of the popular vote.
"When the country has bestowed its confidence upon a party by making it a majority in the Congress, it has a right to expect such unity of action as will make the party majority an effective instrument of government," Coolidge said in his inaugural address. "This administration has come into power with a very clear and definite mandate from the people."
Lots of presidents would follow suit, from Herbert Hoover to Ronald Reagan, from Bill Clinton to Joe Biden.
"They have given us a mandate for action on COVID, the economy, climate change, systemic racism," Biden said after winning election four years ago.
That would have been quite the mandate. There's a danger in presidents overreading their mandates and taking their eye off what really matters in passing legislation.
"When it comes down to it," Azari noted, "what they can and can't do really comes down to what is in the interests of members of Congress when they're voting on a piece of legislation?"
For Trump, his narrow majorities may limit the sweep of what he's able to accomplish legislatively. He will undoubtedly try to do what he can within an expanding scope of presidential power, but for lasting societal change, a president needs Congress.
And, as LBJ pointed out, a president has limited time to do it because the shine of an election wears off fairly quickly – mandate or not.
Copyright 2024 NPR
