Interpreting the meaning of any election is no easy task. In a democracy, the results never speak for themselves. That is as true of the 2024 presidential election as it has been for any other.
This year, as is the case every four years, the battle to say what the results mean and what lessons the winning candidate should learn began as soon as the voters were counted. But, alas, elections don’t speak for themselves.
One of the sad realities of democratic political life is that elections are not very good mechanisms for instructing our political leaders on how they should govern. During a campaign, candidates make all kinds of promises about what they will do if they win. However, voters only get to make an up-or-down choice among those running for office rather than a choice about which policies they favor. That is why the vote is too blunt of an instrument to accurately convey what the electorate wants the winning candidate to do.
Exit polls try to fill the gap by finding out what some sample of voters considered the most important issues and how that consideration correlated with their votes. But such polls are often not very accurate or revealing.
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Vox’s Matthew Yglesias explains that “if we want actual information about voting behavior, exit polls are not very useful.”
“To start with,” he says, “it is difficult to conduct accurate surveys of voters’ opinion. Nothing about conducting an accurate exit poll is any easier than conducting an accurate pre-election poll. If anything, it’s harder.”
“[R[ealistically,” Yglesias concludes, “it’s just not possible to answer certain questions with the level of precision implied by exit poll results.” The most important of those questions is what voters want the winning candidate to do once they assume office.
Generations of political scientists have tried to explain why people vote the way they do and what election results mean. They generally agree that what a candidate says about issues does not determine how voters decide.
Voters screen what candidates say through the lens of their pre-existing partisan affiliations or general ideological framework. As Stanford University sociologist Robb Willer argues, “the values a candidate used to advocate for their policies were more influential on the popular support they received than the policies themselves.”
This is truer than it has ever been in American elections. Political polarization means voters filter everything through a pre-existing partisan lens.
As a Pew Research Center report notes, “’Ideological silos’ are now common on both the left and right. People with down-the-line ideological positions — especially conservatives — are more likely than others to say that most of their close friends share their political views. Liberals and conservatives disagree over where they want to live, the kind of people they want to live around, and even whom they would welcome into their families.”
But none of these facts stop winning candidates from claiming they have received a mandate from the voters. Witness what has happened since the votes were counted in last month’s election.
Early in the morning on Nov. 6, President-elect Donald Trump asserted that his victory provided him with a popular mandate to carry out the policies on which he had campaigned. As the votes came in, Trump said he had won “a massive landslide victory” and “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.”
As journalist Chris Walker points out, in the following days, “Republican lawmakers and conservative commentators … repeated the claim.” Walker reports that “Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) … [said] that ‘The American people have spoken, and they have given President Trump and our House Republicans a mandate.’ … Fox News personality Trey Gowdy similarly stated that Trump ‘won a mandate on Election Night … on the border, the economy, foreign policy’ and ‘to reform and disrupt’ Washington.”
These claims have not gone uncontested.
On Nov. 26, New York Times columnist Catherine Rampell threw cold water on these mandate claims. Rampell wrote that Trump “won the popular vote by a historically slim margin (1.6 percentage points), making it the fifth-narrowest marginof 32 presidential races held since 1900. He also appears to have won with a plurality rather than a majority (that is, just shy of 50 percent).”
“This,” she says, “is hardly the MAGA landslide that Trumpers have made the 2024 election out to be. Most voters, after all, cast a ballot for someone other than Trump.”
Her colleague Peter Baker agrees. He explains, “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.”
But Trump and his allies are not alone in interpreting election results in self-serving ways. Since election results do not speak for themselves, winners almost always speak for them.
Law professor Saikrishna Prakash notes, "The insistence on a popular mandate by any victor is invariably a self-serving claim masquerading as objective analysis.” Mandate-claiming, he argues, is almost as old as the Republic itself.
While he acknowledges that “Where the claim of a popular mandate began is hard to say,” he argues that the origins of claims about popular mandates can be traced back to President Andrew Jackson.
Jackson tried to make his 1832 reelection campaign a referendum on the Bank of the United States, which Jackson thought “was too powerful, corrupt — and unconstitutional.” After his reelection, in which he captured 54 percent of the popular vote, “Jackson said that the people had given him license to wage war against the bank (he never used the word ‘mandate’). In a message to his cabinet, he wrote he ‘consider[ed] his reelection as a decision of the people against the bank.’”
What Jackson did “became a fixture by late in the 19th century.”
From then until now, mandate-claiming has been most ardently employed “by politicians in weak positions, in response to polarized politics and flagging legitimacy.” That may explain why Trump and his allies have so quickly announced the meaning of the 2024 election. If they talk enough about landslides and mandates, they hope to turn their relatively weak positions into a governing colossus.
In truth, as Prakash notes, “some voters support everything Trump espouses. But many of his voters did no more than decide between the two main candidates on offer. Millions were merely signaling that they preferred one candidate, on balance, over the other. And some voters disdained both candidates even as they voted for one of them.”
And, in a reminder of the limits of even free and fair elections, Parkash observes, “While it is true that voters back candidates and that every candidate espoused policies during the election, it is not true that those voting for the winner meant to endorse every policy the winner espoused. To the contrary, this claim defies common sense.”
In the end, let me paraphrase and adapt what British Prime Minister Winston Churchill said in the aftermath of World War II. Many ways of choosing leaders “have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe.”
No one pretends that elections are perfect ways to instruct and control political leaders. In fact they are the worst way of doing so “except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”
Sarat is the William Nelson Cromwell professor of jurisprudence and political science at Amherst College.
