Wayne O'Leary

Of Landslides and Mandates

In the wake of the drubbing Democrats took on Election Day, the predominant news narrative is that Donald Trump and his MAGA minions won a massive “landslide,” which in turn produced a political “mandate.” Presumably, therefore, everyone should get out of the way and let the new dispensation be implemented.

It’s true the Republicans won the national election decisively; they took the presidency and both houses of Congress. This has startled observers because we’ve been in political gridlock so much of the time lately, with power divided between the parties, that one-party rule seems the ultimate anomaly.

But remember who initially defined the election as a landslide and claimed it represented an “unprecedented and powerful” mandate. It was Donald Trump, of course, and those who parrot him, principally the fair-and-balanced crowd at Fox News. The Donald never allows objective observers to make such evaluations; he makes them first, and those intimidated by his bluster follow along for fear of being contradicted or verbally assailed. It’s always easier to fall in line than to ask inconvenient questions.

The first such question to be answered is whether the election really was a landslide. As this column suggested previously (12/15/24 TPP), the Trump margin of 2% in the popular vote does not meet the criterion for a landslide victory, which traditionally requires at least 55% of votes cast. Trump’s bare electoral-vote majority, 312 to Kamala Harris’ 226, also does not qualify, nor does the handful of congressional seats “flipped” on Nov. 5, which Republicans mostly won by just a few percentage points — some by a point or less. The expected final result (53 GOP seats to 47 Democratic seats in the Senate and a 220 to 215 GOP edge in the House of Representatives) undeniably represents a decisive win, but not one of historic proportions.

The most eye-opening comparison is with Franklin D. Roosevelt and his New Deal Democrats, whose campaigns in the 1930s set the gold standard for what constitutes a political landslide. FDR’s popular-vote margins in 1932 and 1936 were 57% and 61%, respectively, and his electoral vote totals were 472 in 1932 and 523 in 1936, when Republicans carried only two states with eight electoral votes. The 1932 election gave Democrats lopsided majorities of 25 seats in the Senate and 193 seats in the House, which they expanded four years later to 70 and 242. Those are figures President-elect Trump will realize only in his dreams.

What about a Trumpian mandate, then? A mandate implies you’ve run on a specific platform and received carte blanche from the voters to put it into effect. The Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 is dangling out there, but Trump never actually endorsed it, claiming on more than one occasion that he’d never read or heard of parts of it. He can’t logically present it as his voter-approved program at this juncture.

Of course, since he won, Trump thinks his “mandate” is to do whatever he wants to do. The Donald’s real mandate is, however, a negative one; that is, most voters didn’t especially want him as president, but they wanted his Democratic opponent even less.

So, what does this purported landslide-cum-mandate really represent? The short answer is: We don’t know. If pressed, however, I would suggest three possible answers. The first and most comforting is that nothing much has changed, that 2024 is merely an episode in the quadrennial back-and-forth of American party politics: the outs replacing the ins. This assumes we remain a 50-50 country and that what’s going on is politics as usual.

According to this proposition, Donald Trump, who’s won the presidency in two of the last three elections, separated by a president of the opposing party (two nonconsecutive terms, in other words), is just the new Grover Cleveland; Democrat Cleveland was victorious in 1884, lost to Republican Benjamin Harrison in 1888, then won again in 1892. Trump himself considers his reprise of Cleveland’s twin presidential triumphs a great achievement (the greatest comeback ever in typical Trumpian overstatement) and historically significant.

In fact, Cleveland, a so-called Bourbon (conservative) Democrat who personified the Gilded Age, was gone by 1896, replaced as Democratic standard-bearer by populist William Jennings Bryan, who led his party into the 20th century and the Progressive era. Grover Cleveland became a relative footnote in political history. Today’s Democrats will take that: Trump as a passing figure of transient importance.

They may not be so lucky. A second possibility facing us is that fears about Trump the fledgling autocrat could actually be realized. It seems unlikely, but equally unexpected things have happened in Western societies within living memory. For a modern example, witness Hungary’s descent from democratic republic to neofascist state in the past decade under Viktor Orban. Extreme elements of the MAGA movement consider Hungary a model to be emulated. Still, a truly successful American autocrat would have to be organized, disciplined and focused. Trump, who is obviously in mental and physical decline, has no ideology, and his approach to governing can only be described as helter-skelter.

A more likely scenario, one several scholars have subscribed to in recent years, is that we could be in the midst of a fundamental reordering of the American political system not seen since the Depression decade of the 1930s. Those years saw a formerly conservative regional (Southern) Democratic Party become the liberal New Deal party of FDR, exchanging minority status for national hegemony on the strength of its economic populism and displacing the majority GOP for the next half-century.

A similar structural reorientation may be under way now. The gist of this interpretation is that the positioning of the parties on the political spectrum is changing again — to the GOP’s advantage. The Republicans, capitalizing on their opponents ceding them the working class, are potentially becoming an economically liberal and socially conservative majority party, and the Democrats a socially liberal and economically conservative minority one.

The tragedy for the Democrats is that in the course of dismissing efforts by their own progressive left and the Sanders campaigns to forge a progressive-populist/working-class coalition between 2016 and 2024, they may have irretrievably lost a historic opportunity. The working class has now moved to the GOP — perhaps temporarily, perhaps for a generation. This could make Donald Trump the FDR of our time, at least as a political impresario.

Wayne O’Leary is a writer in Orono, Maine, specializing in political economy. He holds a doctorate in American history and is the author of two prizewinning books.

From The Progressive Populist, January 1-15, 2025

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