Trump’s world claims the Republican has an overwhelming popular mandate to carry out his agenda. Not so fast!
Hundreds of voter registration officers in San Diego are working through the night to count the votes.
(Michael Ho Wai Lee/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
After Tuesday’s shocking election results, Trump and his team have gone to great lengths to argue that they have an overwhelming popular mandate to fundamentally reshape American society and governance.
Like so much else coming out of Trump’s world, it doesn’t pass the smell test. Yes, Trump won the Electoral College, but of smaller magnitude than the vast majority of presidents of the last century. For example, the hapless Warren Harding, whose corruption seemed unprecedented at the time, but who would surely have blushed with shame at Trump’s fraud and capture operation, received 404 Electoral College votes. Herbert Hoover, one of America’s greatest presidential losers, won 444.
More importantly, Trump’s world claims public support for his mandate because he allegedly won the popular vote by a landslide. To be clear, he did not. The numbers that the media so carelessly relays and prints to back up Trump’s claims are based on incomplete vote counts.
Yes, as of the end of the business day Tuesday night, Trump won by about 4.6 million votes and received more than 50 percent support. But because California, Oregon and Washington have universal vote-by-mail — because they accept any ballot delivered to a drop box before polls close on Election Day or mailed on Election Day — their vote counting process is especially long.
As a result, by midnight Tuesday, when it was clear that Harris had won all three states, the final vote tally was still unknown.
Even on a Thursday night more than 40 percent the votes in California were still not counted. In Oregon, 20 percent has not yet been calculated. And in Washingtonalmost 15 percent remained to be calculated. Elsewhere in the west in Las Vegas and Phoenix, large numbers of votes still needed to be added.
Once all those extra votes are added in, Trump’s claim to an overwhelming popular mandate will look a lot less overwhelming. Yes, he will still have more votes than Harris, but not as many as he claims.
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My calculations put Harris at 73 to 74 million votes, while Trump is likely to get 75 to 76 million. So, yes, he will outperform Harris, but not by the 4 or 5 percent he advertises. He will lead her by 1-2 percentage points — as some national opinion polls have accurately predicted — and his total will probably fall to just below 50 percent by the end of the day.
Similarly, the GOP lockout of the House of Representatives, which the party broadcasts to all and sundry, may or may not happen. But even if that happens, if all the votes in California’s 13th, 27th, 41st and 45th congressional districts are counted, it’s likely that Democrats will pick up enough seats to shrink the GOP majority to a slim one. quite possibly a smaller majority than the tiny one they currently own.
None of them should minimize the scale of this electoral disaster. But a couple of questions should be raised. One of them is the obvious absurdity of an Electoral College System which time and time again renders the overall voting results in the nation’s most populous state completely irrelevant. Even if Harris’ results were big enough in the west to give her a majority, it wouldn’t matter one bit. She would still lose the all-important Electoral College because of Trump’s laser-targeting of key demographics in those states. If that were to happen, it would be the third election in a century in which a Republican president did not receive a majority of the popular vote.
So, if we can’t work out a way to reform the Electoral College, how do we ensure that the will of the people and the election results match?
The second question is more pragmatic: In the short term, with the Electoral College going nowhere anytime soon, how can California and, to a lesser extent, Oregon and Washington speed up vote counting so that their final tallies become part of the electoral narrative?
After all, making the voting process so inclusive that states accept postmarked ballots before the end of the business day on Election Day is all well and good, but it means that history sidesteps them when the media has already formed a dominant narrative about the election results.
Yes, by the time California, home to one in eight Americans, finishes counting votes, Trump’s national support will look far less impressive than it did Tuesday night. But, unfortunately, almost no one is aware of this.
When I asked the outgoing Cathy Porter about it, she argued that instead of California limiting when ballots can be received, the rest of the country should adopt the inclusive voting policies championed by the three West Coast states.
“Especially at this point where we’re seeing attacks on voting rights, I think the model of California, Oregon and Washington should be the national model,” she said. “In general, it’s not that it’s slow. It’s just that we (California) allow people to vote in every safe legal way possible until the 8th in the evening on election day. And if you mail it, it will take a while to get there.’
Porter explained that in her first election, it took nine days for her to be declared the winner. In the second, it took six days.
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However, she is also keenly aware that most of the race-dependent media wants quick results and has no patience for weedy explanations about California’s lengthy vote-counting process. The day after the election, Porter reached out to several talk show hosts to ask them to interview her about the California vote totals and discuss how Trump’s numbers weren’t as impressive as his team made them out to be. One by one, she says, the shows turned Porter down. “It’s a problem,” she admits. “People like to learn quickly, and they cut some corners to do that.”
For my money, this is a huge problem. After all, no one remembers footnotes. Trump’s people have sent a message that he has an overwhelming popular right to implement all his horrible, bigoted proposals. Based on the ongoing vote count in California, this is simply not the case. Yet by the time the votes in California are fully counted, the country will have shifted and most people will no longer pay attention to the minutiae of these state-by-state elections.
Surely there is a better way to do this than counting votes, which take so long that by the time it happens, it is no longer associated with the election itself in the public’s mind or in the media.
We cannot retreat
We now face a second Trump presidency.
There is nothing to lose. We must use our fears, our grief, and yes, our anger to oppose the dangerous policies that Donald Trump is unleashing on our country. We rededicate ourselves to our role as principled and honest journalists and authors.
Today we are also preparing for the future struggle. It will require a fearless spirit, an informed mind, wise analysis and humane resistance. We are faced with the adoption of Project 2025, a far-right Supreme Court, political authoritarianism, rising inequality and record homelessness, a looming climate crisis and conflicts abroad. Nation will expose and propose, develop investigative reporting and act together as a community to preserve hope and opportunity. NationThe work will continue — as it has in good times and bad — to develop alternative ideas and visions, to deepen our mission of truth-telling and in-depth reporting, and to expand solidarity in a divided nation.
Armed with 160 years of courageous independent journalism, our mandate remains the same today as it was when the Abolitionists were founded Nation— to defend the principles of democracy and freedom, to serve as a beacon in the darkest days of resistance, and to see and fight for a bright future.
The day is dark, the forces are building tenaciously, but it’s too late Nation editorial board member Toni Morrison wrote “No! This is just the time when artists go to work. No time for despair, no room for self-pity, no need for silence, no room for fear. We speak, we write, we make language. This is how civilizations heal.”
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Katrina Vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, Nation
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