The Election Wasn’t a Realignment—or a “Mandate”
There is a lot of talk about how the election result is a great realignment and/or a “mandate” for Trump’s policies. The available evidence doesn’t support such notions.
When all votes are fully counted, it looks like Trump will have won the popular vote by 1.5 points and have 1-4 point margins in the 7 swing states. That’s not the kind of large margin of victory typically associated with realignment elections in which large blocs of voters shift from one party to another (e.g. 1932 or 1980). It’s actually a narrower victory than Bush won in 2004 or Obama in 2012. Few would argue either of those wins was a realignment or a mandate. Biden in 2020 won the popular vote by a bigger margin (about 4.5 points) and had nearly the same electoral vote margin (306 for Biden in 2020; 312 for Trump this year). For those keeping score, I wrote at the time that Biden didn’t have a mandate either. Trump’s popular vote margin may actually be a little smaller than Hillary Clinton’s was in 2016 (yes, obviously, she lost the electoral college).
House and Senate results are consistent with the above. The GOP will have only a narrow House majority (probably about 220-215). The Republicans gained only 4 seats in the Senate, despite a very favorable map, and actually lost 4 of 5 swing-state Senate races, despite Trump winning all five of those states on the top of the ballot.
Around the world, there has been a big backlash against incumbents because of inflation/price increases. As I noted in a preelection post, this is standard “retrospective voting” (punishing incumbents for perceived bad conditions), and it was weighing heavily against the Democrats. The others who faced elections all got clobbered or are about to be. The Democrats actually greatly outperformed these background conditions by losing only narrowly.
It is true there has been a bigger shift in the Hispanic vote than elsewhere. Exit polls suggest Trump lost it by only about 53-45 (some polling data shows a weaker performance for Trump). However, that means he got about the same share of the Hispanic vote as….. George W. Bush in 2004—the last time the GOP ran a presidential campaign with this highly favorable background conditions.
Also, it has long been clear that Hispanic identity is highly fluid and diverse, and therefore that the group is far less politically monolithic than, e.g., blacks. Many second and third generation Hispanics don’t even identify as “Hispanic” or Latino on surveys. It’s possible the GOP will be more competitive for Hispanic votes
Article from Reason.com
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