No President elect has ever had less of a mandate than Trump
The next time someone tells you that the people have spoken when it comes to Trump, you can tell them that about 6% of the U.S. population of eligible voters voted for him in the Republican Primary. He would need to garner another 45% before he could even claim a simple majority of the voting population voted for him. This is what is considered the will of the people? In fact, 0nly 14% of the eligible voting population chose Trump or Hillary. It is not even the will of the Republican Party. There are about 30 million Republicans in this country and there were 14,015,993 people who voted for Trump. That is still only 46%, far lower than 51%. It is even lower than 46% because millions of democrats voted for Trump. How about the will of the voters in the Republican primary? He has 44.7% of the vote, still not a simple majority. The will of the people is with the 55.3% of Republican primary voters who chose someone else. How do the American people feel about him? Well Donald Trump has 37.5 percent favorable rating. Is 37.5 the will of the people? In fact, Trump had the highest unfavorable rating ever recorded. Who knows where these numbers will be after the inauguration but Clinton, Bush and Obama were at 58%, 59% and 68% respectively, if Trump is under 50%, that’d be a first. Additionally, both candidates were so unpopular that this reddit user says the map would have looked like this if “did not vote” was a candidate.
The will of the people is with those of us who did not want Trump to ever see the inside of the White House. In addition to all this Trump lost the popular vote to Clinton by 2,553,439 votes. There have been five men who won the presidency without winning the popular vote. Since the 1912 election, democrats and republicans have run primary elections to let the voters decide who their nominee is going to be. From 1912 until now, only George W. Bush and Donald Trump have lost the popular vote. George W. Bush won 62% of the primary vote while Donald Trump won only 44.7% of the vote. It is clear that Cruz and Rubio split their votes and the outcome may have been different had one of them not run in the primary. When looking at the general election, here is what Adam Graham at caffeinatedthoughts.com wrote about Trump’s electoral victory.
Historically, Trump’s victory wasn’t a landslide (defined as “an overwhelming majority of one votes for one party in an election,”) either in terms of popular or electoral votes. Trump lost the popular vote and won 306 electoral votes. In Trump’s defense the media has called a lot of wins landslides (such as Obama’s win in 2008) which really weren’t.
For perspective, in the eighteen Presidential elections held between 1920 and 1988, the winner won 380 or more electoral votes fourteen times (and thirteen times won more than 400.) So winning 306 electoral votes is no landslide. One might as well talk about the Kennedy landslide victory of 1960 if you want to crow about a Trump “landslide.”
Here are some examples of electoral landslides from nationalmap.gov. This is the Nixon vs. McGovern election in 1972.
This is the Reagan vs. Mondale election in 1984. Nobody has ever surpassed Reagan’s 525 electoral votes.
Here is the Trump vs. Clinton election of this year. To say that this election is a landslide is laughable. It ranks 46th out 58 in Electoral College share.
It looks even worse for Trump as a cartogram.
In any case, there has never been a president elect who was more thoroughly rejected by his own party and the general public.
