President-elect Donald Trump has claimed a massive mandate after his 2024 election win even though he did not even secure 50 percent of the popular vote and even though his party faces a razor-thin majority in the House of Representatives.
But in an interview with NPR, Marquette University political science professor Julia Azari argues that Trump is claiming a mandate far vaster than the one he was actually given because he knows he's going to face significant resistance in enacting his agenda.
"We're seeing this fit into a typical pattern where presidents kind of know that they're going to be embattled," Azari said. "They know that their viewpoints will be controversial. And so they use the mandate to try and suggest, all right, it's OK for me to do this or my critics are ultimately not just critics of me, but they're critics of the popular will."
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Azari then said that very few presidents have real mandates given that voters often make their decisions for varied and complicated reasons, and that is even the case with past presidents such as Lyndon Johnson who won a legitimate landslide victory in 1964 where he won 61 percent of the popular vote and carried 44 states.
"Were people really voting for a specific set of policies or were they voting for the status quo?" she told NPR. "Were they voting against Barry Goldwater [the Republican nominee]? It gets very muddled very quickly when you start asking these questions."
Four years after that resounding win, Johnson was so unpopular that he declined to seek another term.
