Is there really any such thing as a presidential mandate, as we understand them? My take is that Trump does not have a mandate, and was never going to. Ditto for Clinton. The whole idea was anathema to the founders, who wanted to keep the executive as throttled as possible (Think kings.)
But for a long time there has been increasing power in the executive. But a mandate? With fewer than half of voters? No.
A “mandate” doesn’t have any official weight. It’s just a reflection of the fact that the American people chose one individual to represent them. A President can only invoke a mandate to the degree he can argue that the voters support him and elected officials who oppose him will lose support from those voters.
True, there is no official place. But it does carry weight when it is pronounced and acted upon. I think a president should keep or try to keep promises he made while campaigning. But a mandate, to me anyway, suggests an overwhelming will of the people. 46% or whatever doesn’t seem to fit that bill.
I agree that Trump shouldn’t be able to claim he has a mandate. But let’s face facts: he’s told bigger lies than that. He’s already halfway into the process of denying he came in second with the popular vote. He’ll have himself convinced he carried all fifty states by his inauguration.
A mandate, as I understand it, is a political artefact, not a legal one. In a system where power is separated between different individuals or institutions, a mandate is essentially an argument along the lines of “I was elected on an explicit platform of doing X so, while constitutionally you have powers which enabl you to prevent me doing X, you should not exercise those powers in that way because MANDATE”.
In these sense, it’s possible to have a stronger or weaker mandate. In the US context, a President elected on a minority of the popular vote might be said to have a weaker mandate than one elected with a thumping majority - or, at least, his opponents may think so. A president elected on a poor turnout, likewise. Or, he doesn’t have the same mandate to do things that weren’t featured in his election platform. In a multiparty system, a party that didn’t secure a majority of the popular vote but is in power due to a post-election coalition agreement might not be seen to have the same mandate as one that secure a majority. And so forth.
Honestly tho, given how the GOP (and anti-Clinton liberals) claimed that Bill Clinton’s pluralities precluded him from having a mandate, I don’t know how a guy who didn’t even have a plurality (Donald Trump) claims a mandate.
Additionally, given how almost no US elections anywhere for POTUS, gov, House, Senate (except in Louisiana) have a hard threshold, absolute percentage of the vote shouldn’t matter. Margin of victory is the only thing that means anything in a one-round FPTP system like the US. That’s why W. claiming a mandate in 2004 solely on the basis that he was the first person to get >50% of the vote since 1988 was bunk; he won by 2.5% nationally. Bill Clinton beat Dole by 8.5% nationally 8 years earlier. Hell, while Reagan did in 50.7-41 in 1980, had he won with 49.7-40, Republicans would still have claimed a mandate, and they’d have still been right. Hell, Trump called his plurality victories where he still had a big margin of victory “landslides,” thus landslide and mandate only ought to refer to margins of victory, not necessarily vote percentages.
I also don’t buy it when parties argue things like “54% of the country voted against Trump,” or “55% of Republicans voted against Trump” because most people voting for someone other than the main rival are essentially voting “present” or “neutral” when they knowingly cast votes they know won’t matter.
I think a ‘mandate’ is what your guy has when he wins and what the other guy never has when he does. It’s not an objective term for something concrete, it’s just meaningless fluff equivalent to saying ‘go my guy’ or ‘boo your guy’. I’ve never heard someone say something like “Well, Bush won, I really wanted Kerry to win, but Bush has a mandate now” or “I was really hoping for Dole, but Clinton has the mandate now”, it’s always “who I was voting for won, he now has a mandate”.
In a way. A candidate campaigns on certain issues. If enough people agree on the issues, he’ll get elected. It then behooves him to follow up on those issues.
That’s what cost Bush 41 his job. He promised no new taxes. He then implemented new taxes. The people got pissed off.
A presidential mandate is like fiat currency. It only means something as long as people believe that it does. If the president can convince congress that they will lose voter support if they oppose him then he has a mandate, otherwise he doesn’t.