Trump and allies pump up his narrow victory

On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald 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, 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 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 Thursday demonstrated the challenges for Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas. While Gaetz, a former Republican member of Congress from Florida, denied allegations of attending sex and drug parties and having sex with an underage girl, they proved too much even for Republicans eager to stay in Trump’s good graces.

With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997% 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%. 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 UCLA and author of “Identity Crisis” about 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.”

But Trump has a clear interest in portraying it that way as he seeks to transform Washington. “It obviously gives you more momentum if you say, ‘The people have spoken, and they want my set of policies,’” Vavreck said. “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”

As he assembles a Cabinet and administration during the transition, 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.

Asked about the president-elect’s characterization of his victory, Trump’s campaign sent a statement by Steven Cheung, his communications director, attacking the Times and repeating the sweeping claims. “President Trump won in dominating and historic fashion after the Democrats and the fake news media peddled outright lies and disinformation throughout the campaign,” he said.

Trump would not be the first newly elected or reelected 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. And President Joe Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Trump in 2020 as a mission to push through some of the most expansive social programs since the Great Society, then saw Republicans take control of the House in 2022 and the White House and Senate two years after that.

“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 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.

Trump legitimately has plenty to brag about from this month’s election without need for exaggeration. In winning a second term, he demonstrated remarkable political grit and resilience, overcoming a lifetime of scandals and investigations, two impeachments, four indictments, multiple civil judgments and conviction on 34 felony counts. Only one other defeated president, Grover Cleveland, ever mounted a successful comeback before, and he did not have such heavy political baggage in 1892.

Moreover, Trump won the popular vote for the first time in three tries and became the first Republican to win it in 20 years. The electorate moved in his direction across the country, even in deep blue states that he lost like New York and California. He won all seven battleground states and improved his Electoral College tally from 306 votes out of 538 eight years ago to 312 this time. And his party held onto the House and took control of the Senate, giving him more leeway to enact his policies over the next two years.

All told, he proved that he is not the historical aberration that many political strategists thought he was, doomed to be repudiated and not reelected. He demonstrated that more Americans agreed with his view of a dystopian nation in crisis and were willing to accept a felon as their leader than considered him the unacceptable fascist-leaning threat to democracy that his opponents described.

But good is never good enough for 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, Trump has long claimed to be more popular than he is.

At his first White House news conference as president after the 2016 election, he declared that he secured “the biggest Electoral College win since Ronald Reagan,” which was true only if one did not count George H.W. Bush, Clinton and Barack Obama, each of whom won larger totals in the Electoral College.

A year later, Trump claimed online to be “the most popular Republican in history of the Party,” which again was true only if one did not count five other Republican presidents who were more popular since World War II, according to polls. And he regularly boasted at rallies that he won the women’s vote in 2016, which was true only if one did not count women who were not white.

So it should come as no surprise that Trump would frame his latest victory in grandiose terms. “We had tremendous success, the most successful in over 100 years, they say,” Trump told Indonesia’s president in a call that was recorded and played on Fox News on Nov. 12. “It’s a great honor and so it gives me a very big mandate to do things properly.”

Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for George W. Bush’s successful reelection campaign in 2004, said the only mandate that 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.”

© 2024 The New York Times Company