“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Donald Trump declared in the early morning hours of November 6, 2024, after all the polls had closed. Indeed, he claimed that he had won “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” Trump was excited by the numbers showing him with well over 50 percent of the popular vote and establishing a wide lead over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.
Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.
Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.
Over the weekend, as California, Oregon, Washington, and other Western states moved closer to completing their counts, Trump’s percentage of the popular vote fell below 50 percent. And his margin of victory looks to be much smaller than initially anticipated. In fact, of all the 59 presidential elections since the nation’s founding, it appears that—after all of the 2024 votes are counted—only five popular vote winners in history will have prevailed by smaller percentage margins than Trump.
Trump’s popular-vote advantage has declined steadily since election night. As of Monday afternoon, Trump was at 49.94 percent, while Harris was at 48.26, according to the authoritative Cook Political Report’s tracking of results from official sources in states across the country. And we can expect that the Republican’s total will only continue to tick downward as heavily Democratic states on the West Coast finalize their vote tallies.
Trump’s still ahead of Harris in the popular vote. He also maintains a lead in the decisive, though absurdly antidemocratic, Electoral College— slightly less than Barack Obama’s in 2012, slightly more Joe Biden’s in 2020—based on a pattern of wins in battleground states. So, the failure to win a majority won’t cost Trump the presidency. But he’s lost his ability to suggest that he trounced the Democrat. In fact, she’s now trailing him by just 1.68 percent of the vote.
Let’s put this in perspective: Trump is winning a lower percent of the popular vote this year than Biden did in 2020 (51.3), Obama in 2012 (51.1), Obama in 2008 (52.9), George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.2), Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8), Reagan in 1980 (50.7), or Jimmy Carter in 1976 (50.1). And, of course, Trump numbers are way below those of the presidents who won what could reasonably be described as “unprecedented and powerful” mandates, such as Richard Nixon’s 60.7 percent in 1972, Lyndon Johnson’s 61.1 percent in 1964, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent. As Trump’s percentage continues to slide, he’ll fall below the thresholds achieved by most presidents in the past century.
Harris, on the other hand, is looking like a much stronger finisher than she did on election night. In fact, the Democrat now has a higher percentage of the popular vote than Presidents Trump in 2016 (46.1), Bush in 2000 (47.9), Clinton in 1992 (43), or Nixon in 1968 (43.4). She has also performed significantly better than recent major-party nominees such as Trump in 2020 (46.8), Trump in 2016 (48.2), Mitt Romney in 2012 (47.2), John McCain in 2008 (45.7), George W. Bush in 2000 (47.9), Bob Dole in 1996 (40.7), George H.W. Bush in 1992 (37.4), Michael Dukakis in 1988 (45.6), Walter Mondale (40.6), Carter in 1980 (41), or Gerald Ford in 1976 (48).
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