The Election Wasn't a Realignment—or a "Mandate"

There is a lot of talk about how the election result is a great realignment and/or a "mandate" for Trump's policies.  The available evidence doesn't support such notions.

When all votes are fully counted, it looks like Trump will have won the popular vote by 1.5  points and have 1-4 point margins in the 7 swing states. That's not the kind of large margin of victory typically associated with realignment elections in which large blocs of voters shift from one party to another (e.g. 1932 or 1980). It's actually a narrower victory than Bush won in 2004 or Obama in 2012.  Few would argue either of those wins was a realignment or a mandate. Biden in 2020 won the popular vote by a bigger margin (about 4.5 points) and had nearly the same electoral vote margin (306 for Biden in 2020; 312 for Trump this year). For those keeping score, I wrote at the time that Biden didn't have a mandate either. Trump's popular vote margin may actually be a little smaller than Hillary Clinton's was in 2016 (yes, obviously, she lost the electoral college).

House and Senate results are consistent with the above. The GOP will have only a narrow House majority (probably about 220-215). The Republicans gained only 4 seats in the Senate, despite a very favorable map, and actually lost 4 of 5 swing-state Senate races, despite Trump winning all five of those states on the top of the ballot.

Around the world, there has been a big backlash against incumbents because of inflation/price increases. As I noted in a preelection post, this is standard "retrospective voting" (punishing incumbents for perceived bad conditions), and it was weighing heavily against the Democrats. The others who faced elections all got clobbered or are about to be. The Democrats actually greatly outperformed these background conditions by losing only narrowly.

It is true there has been a bigger shift in the Hispanic vote than elsewhere. Exit polls suggest Trump lost it by only about 53-45 (some polling data shows a weaker performance for Trump). However, that means he got about the same share of the Hispanic vote as….. George W. Bush in 2004—the last time the GOP ran a presidential campaign with this highly favorable background conditions.

Also, it has long been clear that Hispanic identity is highly fluid and diverse, and therefore that the group is far less politically monolithic than, e.g., blacks. Many second and third generation Hispanics don't even identify as "Hispanic" or Latino on surveys. It's possible the GOP will be more competitive for Hispanic votes from now on. But even that would be something of a continuation of possible preexisting trends. This fluidity of the Hispanic vote undercuts the validity of both left-wing hopes of building a dominant coalition based on "woke" identity politics and right-wing paranoia about a "great replacement."

I do recognize that the election result is painful and disappointing for those (emphatically including me!) who hoped Trump's awfulness and that of the MAGA movement generally would enable Kamala Harris to overcome the background conditions and win. These factors did likely help keep the election close, however. The Democrats only lost narrowly, and did not get massively clobbered like most other incumbent parties buffeted by post-pandemic inflation and price increases.

The narrowness of the victory and the major role of anti-incumbent economic "retrospective" voting also undercuts claims that Trump has a "mandate" for his policies, in the sense that the election indicates there is strong majority public support for them. Preelection survey data on policy actually indicates most of his policies were actually less popular than those of the Democrats.

Some political scientists reject the entire notion of a mandate, arguing the idea is incoherent and not supported by evidence. I myself have long argued that a policy's popularity says little about whether it is right or just. Many good policies are highly unpopular, and terrible ones sometimes win majority support. Think, e.g, of widespread public support for slavery and racial discrimination throughout much of American history. Thus, I would oppose much of Trump's agenda, regardless of whether he has a "mandate" or not. But for those who believe mandates exist, and give them more normative weight than I do, it's worth noting there was no such mandate in this election.

None of this proves that the Democratic Party has optimal issue positions or that Kamala Harris was a great candidate. Neither is true. They do have some unpopular positions (e.g.—on various "woke" issues). And Harris surely had a variety of flaws. But the same is true of the Republicans and Trump (who, unusually for a winning presidential candidate, has a highly negative approval rating that is about 8 points underwater). If not for inflation and price increases, above, the Democrats would have won relatively easily, despite their very real weaknesses on some issues.

In post-election analyses, it's typical for pundits to say the losing party would do better if only they adopted more of the commentator's own positions. Not me! I know all too well that I have many unpopular views. I'm the guy who wrote a book that explains why political ignorance and bias lead majorities of voters to hold positions that are badly wrong on many issues. There and elsewhere, I also highlighted flawed "retrospective voting" of the kind that played a big role in the Democrats' defeat above (blaming incumbents for bad conditions even if they didn't cause them, and voting for policies that may actually make them worse, as Trump's tariff and immigration policies will with prices).

I readily admit that a party that ran on a platform adopting all my views would get clobbered. But that fact doesn't prove the 2024 was a mandate or a realignment.

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