Do presidential mandates exist?
At Donald Trump’s victory party in a convention center in West Palm Beach, Fla. he announced to the crowd, “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” He was about to win the electoral college by a sizable margin and yet he only won 49.9% of the popular vote, a mere 1.5 points ahead of Kamala Harris.
That’s not even a majority, let alone a mandate.
Candidates have long take advantage of the lack of formal definition of mandate to legitimize their policies. After Andrew Jackson won the election in 1832, he claimed a mandate allowed him to dissolve the Second Bank of the United States. It is convenient to claim that the electorate has given you a blank check on your policies but is it ever true? How much of the vote should someone receive before they can justly claim a mandate?
Assumptions: For the purpose of this article, I will use popular vote percentage as the key metrics in determining a mandate. The electoral college may be how presidents are elected but it shouldn’t be how a mandate is determined. Who, historically, has been widely (not just self-declared) to have a mandate?
The Electoral College exaggerates victories
The quirk of United States Presidential elections is that they are not determined by who gets the most votes, but who earns most of the Electoral College. Since all but two states have a winner-take-all system, narrow wins in key states are amplified in the Electoral College. This system is what allowed George Bush in 2000 and Donald Trump in 2016 to ascend to the presidency without receiving the most votes. In 1936, Franklin D. Roosevelt won 98.5% of the votes in the electoral college. That sounds like almost unanimous approval, and yet he only won 60.2% of the popular vote. The greatest gap between the popular vote and the Electoral College was 40 points when Ronald Reagan won in 1980. He barely won more than 50% of total votes and yet he swept 90.9% of the Electoral College.
Can a bell curve help us find the threshold for a mandate?
A mandate should be a unique event — not one claimed by every winner. Looking at the bell curve, can we determine the threshold to be sufficiently uncommon?
If presidential elections were grades, a candidate would need to earn at least 57.3% of the popular vote to be in the the top quarter of the class. Personally, I don’t think you can claim a mandate if your vote percentage starts with a five. If we increase our threshold to the top 10%, then a winner would need at least 60.2%.
Only Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1936, Richard Nixon in 1972 and Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964 have won over 60% of the popular vote. Personally, that still doesn’t sound high enough to claim a rubber stamp on 4 years of policies but 61% is nonetheless the ceiling.
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