No, Trump Did Not Win in a Landslide--nor Did He Secure a Mandate

Source: thenation

The election math isn’t as bad as we thought. But the coming Trump administration is shaping up to be worse.
s blue Western states and cities finish counting votes, it looks like the popular vote “landslide” projected for Donald Trump last week turned out to be a trickle. When all the votes are counted, he will end up with a margin of roughly two points over Vice President Kamala Harris. Presidents Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and Richard Nixon in 1972 won more than 60 percent of the popular vote; Ronald Reagan in 1984 won 58 percent. Those were landslides.

Don’t get me wrong: It was a bad outcome for Democrats. Trump won all seven swing states, netting himself 312 Electoral College votes (to Biden’s 306 in 2020). Democrats lost control of the Senate; the GOP now has 52 seats, and will likely wind up with 53 when the race between incumbent Pennsylvania Democrat Bob Casey and Connecticut corporate titan David McCormick is finally called (provisional ballots are still being counted). It will probably hold the House, by a slim margin.

So yes, none of this is good news. But it’s not the top-to-bottom repudiation of Democrats as it first looked like, and the way to respond is not to launch a civil war within the Democratic Party. Unfortunately, that has already begun. Centrists blame the doctrine of “woke,” with particular ire for trans Americans (we see you, New York Representative Tom Suozzi); leftists say Democrats abandoned the working class (we hear you, once again, Senator Bernie Sanders). Both positions are wrong. Others point fingers at the Harris campaign. Meanwhile, much of the media hypes Trump’s win as a landslide, which would seem to validate his racist, anti-worker agenda.


Read more: https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/harris-trump-election/