On the night he won a second term, President-elect Donald J. 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, Mr. 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 Mr. 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 on Thursday demonstrated the challenges for Mr. Trump in forcing a Republican Congress to defer to his more provocative ideas. While Mr. Gaetz, a former Republican congressman 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 Mr. Trump’s good graces.
With some votes still being counted, the tally used by The New York Times showed Mr. Trump winning the popular vote with 49.997 percent 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 percent. 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 the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of “Identity Crisis” about Mr. 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 Mr. 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,’” Ms. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. 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.
Mr. Trump would not be the first newly elected or re-elected 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 Biden interpreted his 4.5-point win over Mr. 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 Mr. 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.
Mr. 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, Mr. 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 re-elected. He demonstrated that more Americans agreed with his view of a dystopian nation in crisis and were willing to accept a convicted 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 Mr. 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, Mr. 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, Mr. Clinton and Barack Obama, each of whom won larger totals in the Electoral College.
A year later, Mr. 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 Mr. Trump would frame his latest victory in grandiose terms. “We had tremendous success, the most successful in over 100 years, they say,” Mr. 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.”
His campaign has been pushing the theme as well. A fund-raising email sent the day after the election quoted Mr. Trump thanking supporters “for electing me in a landslide victory.” Another on Nov. 12 likewise referred to “his landslide victory.” By Tuesday, in yet another fund-raising email, this one selling the gold Trump victory glasses for just $45 each, it had become officially capitalized, in both letters and money, as “President Trump’s LANDSLIDE VICTORY.”
Mr. Trump’s allies know the path to his heart lies in flattering him, and some have adopted the mantra. The day after the election, Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, the chairwoman of the House Republican Conference, declared that “we the people made our voices heard by re-electing President Trump in a historic landslide.” She issued at least four more statements that same day referring to it as a landslide.
Five days later, Mr. Trump rewarded her by announcing that he would make her his ambassador to the United Nations. She thanked him in a statement. “President Trump’s historic landslide election has given hope to the American people and is a reminder that brighter days are ahead,” she said.
Senator John Barrasso, Republican of Wyoming, called it a “huge landslide victory.” David McCormick, the newly elected Republican senator from Pennsylvania, called Mr. Trump’s victory an “incredible mandate.” Representative James R. Comer, Republican of Kentucky, opened a committee meeting this week by calling it “our first hearing since the election in which President Trump won in a landslide.”
Mr. Trump’s 1.6-point victory is smaller than that of every winning president since 1888 other than two: John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968. In addition, two presidents won the Electoral College while losing the popular vote: the second Mr. Bush in 2000 and Mr. Trump in 2016.
Moreover, Mr. Trump had limited coattails this month. With some races yet to be called, Republicans were on track to keep almost exactly the same narrow majority in the House that they already had. The party picked up four seats in the Senate, enough to take control, a major shift that will benefit Mr. Trump. But even then, in the places where Mr. Trump campaigned the most, he failed to bring Republicans along with him in four of five battleground states with Senate races.
“This election was more of a repudiation of Biden and the Democrats than it was a vote for Trump,” said Mr. Sosnik. “A normal Republican candidate should have picked up at least eight Senate and 30-plus House seats given that the incumbent Democratic president had a job approval in the thirties with 70 percent of voters believing that the country was headed in the wrong direction.”
Matthew Dowd, who was the chief strategist for the younger Mr. Bush’s successful re-election campaign in 2004, said the only mandate that Mr. 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.”
Whether other Republicans see it that way may determine how successful Mr. Trump is in confirming his other contentious nominations and pushing through his legislative agenda, including deep tax cuts, expansive spending reductions, new curbs on immigration, revisions to the Affordable Care Act and repeal of Mr. Biden’s climate change programs.
“Trump can legitimately claim a mandate from the American people for his effort to make America great again,” said Bruce Ackerman, a professor of law and political science at Yale Law School.
“But given his razor-thin majorities in Congress,” he added, “he will fail to gain the support of Republicans from swing districts who will predictably fear defeat in the midterm elections if they enact legislation destroying Obamacare or increasing tariffs in ways that will impose shattering burdens on millions of voters.”
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