(C) Daily Kos This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered. . . . . . . . . . . Donald Trump’s Phantom Mandate [1] ['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.'] Date: 2024-12-12 Immediately after multiple media outlets predicted his win in the November 2024, election, Donald Trump declared that the country had delivered him and Republicans an ‘unprecedented mandate.’ “This is a moment like nobody’s ever seen before. Frankly, this was, I believe, the greatest political movement of all time. There’s never been anything like this in this country,” he told his supporters who gathered for a watch party in Florida the day after the election. Did Trump and the GOP get a mandate, though? There’s no doubt that he won the election, but can his win really be called a mandate? I suppose it depends on how you define the term. The term mandate, broadly defined, means the authority that voters confer on an elected official to act on their behalf. Ordinarily, though, a political mandate refers to the idea that the official has been elected in a show of strong support for their platform and wants to see those platforms enacted. A mandate is often declared after a wave election, which is one where there has been a significant shift in which one political party makes substantial gains in seats in a legislative body. This commonly describes a situation when one party wins a large and lopsided number of House and Senate seats while sustaining minimal losses. So, we’ve got definitions, no matter how unprecise, out of the way. Let’s look now at the 2024 election outcomes and see if they fit these definitions. Trump got 312 of the 270 electoral votes needed compared to 226 for Kamala Harris. The gap between the two candidates is because Trump won all of the battleground states, and if one takes only the electoral college votes, it could look like something of a landslide. But, electoral votes are misleading. They do not necessarily accurately represent actual numbers of voters due to the peculiarities of the electoral college system. According to the Cook Political Report, of the 155,203,911 votes cast, Trump won 77,300,739 (49.81) percent, while Harris won 75,014,534 (48.33 percent).With less than 50 percent of the votes and only a 1.48 percent gap between him and Harris, he did win, but it can hardly be called a landslide—or a mandate. Sure, some voters who thought of him as a mendacious, philandering conman before November 5, were rating him as a strong, capable leader on November 7, but these were some of the same people who thought the economy was in the toilet before the election, but that it was in good shape afterwards despite no change in the economic statistics. Sadly, this only validates my unscientific theory about the 20-60-20 distribution of human behavior. While this theory, which has been validated by a couple of Polish mathematicians, applies primarily to the behavior of people in organizations, I believe it also applies to general intelligence and critical thinking skills, and will say no more about what that implies, only that humans tend to make decisions for odd and illogical reasons and then subsequently try to justify those decisions in even more illogical ways. Enough of that, though. What about the legislative outcome of the election? Did that also convey the impression of a mandate for the GOP, which did, in fact, win control of both the House and the Senate? Let’s look at the numbers, and you decide. We went into the elections with Republicans controlling the House while Democrats had a narrow majority in the Senate. A wave election would imply that one party came out of the election with a substantial majority of control of both Senate and House. While the Republicans did seize control of the Senate, the numbers hardly convey the sense of overwhelming control. The GOP retained control of the House with 220 seats to 215 for Democrats, and now have a 53 to 47 advantage in the Senate. But, is that really a decisive advantage? In the Senate, the GOP can only afford to have three members cross the aisle to have their way. If three vote with Democrats, leading to a tie vote which can be broken by the vice president in the GOP’s favor. If they lose four, they’re in trouble. In the house, things are equally bleak for Republicans, given the current schisms between hard right MAGA Republicans and those who might retain an ounce of integrity. Six House Republicans refusing to go along with a White House initiative, such as mass deportation of farm labor from GOP-controlled agrarian states, and there’s no one to rescue them. Currently, the House-led GOP had problems getting all its members to vote for a spending bill to avoid a holiday government shutdown, getting it only after including a ban on transgender care for minors in the defense bill—a move that will alienate many service families who have transgender family members. This is but a tiny peek at what’s to come in the new congress that will be seated in 2025. GOP senators fear that the chaos that is likely to reign in the House could derail Trump’s agenda. The president himself could also throw sand in the gears with some of the things he’s threatened, such as making recess appointments of cabinet members to bypass the Senate confirmation process, using the miliary to implement his mass deportation plans, or eliminating agencies at the advice of his new bromance, Elon Musk, who he has named co-chair of his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency. Each of these policy proposals has the potential to step on Senatorial prerogatives or raise constitutional issues that could bog the government down for Trump’s entire four-year term. That would be news to delight Democrats if not for the fact that the lives of millions of Americans, most of whom don’t really agree with much of what Trump proposes to do, would be thrown into turmoil. Reflecting on the outcome of November’s election, I’m reminded of the saying, ‘be careful what you wish (vote) for, because you might get it.’ [END] --- [1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2024/12/12/2291518/-Donald-Trump-s-Phantom-Mandate?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web Published and (C) by Daily Kos Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified. via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds: gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/