The big beautiful mandate trap

By John Maxwell Hamilton
Real Clear Politics

“So, what I really want you to do is pretend, please, that I’m on the ballot.” President Trump implored Americans across the country to vote for Republican candidates based on his performance in the last two years.

On Tuesday Trump got what he said he wanted. American voters marched into polling places across the country, in red states as well as blue, and gave him a humiliating thumbs down. The House, and stunningly the Senate, are now firmly in Democratic hands.

But before Democrats gloat at their post-election rallies, ramp up committees to investigate the president, and parade pet ideas for rolling back everything Donald Trump has done and then some, they – and all of us really – need to step back and consider the deeper meaning of this election.

As much as Trump wanted the mid-term election to be about him, the drubbing he received reflects a political misjudgment that the president shares with his predecessor as well as other recent presidents.

Both Biden and Trump wanted to believe the public gave them a mandate for sweeping change. Both men, egged on by surrogates determined to push through their agendas, let hubris get in the way of realistic thinking. Both have suffered as a result.

Joe Biden did not arrive in the White House with a carte blanche to go full steam ahead on the wish list of the Democratic Party’s liberal base. Biden won  51.3 percent of the popular vote. His mandate was to steady the ship of state following Trump’s turbulent term. He was to restore normal procedure including rule of law, rebuild confidence in democratic government, and in many voters’ minds pave the way for the next president.

Yet the votes were barely counted when Biden began to think of himself as a new Franklin D. Roosevelt bringing a new New Deal. FDR won in successive landslides, but somehow Biden asserted that he was “in the kind of position FDR was.” He hung FDR’s portrait in the Oval Office, hired a number of people whose forebears were big names in FDR’s cabinet, and envisioned transformative change through trillions of dollars of additional spending.

It took only a few months for Biden’s dream to seem profligate, even by members of his own party. He began with a $900 billion COVID relief package that distributed money to many people who had lost no income and followed with $1.9 trillion rescue plan that pumped triple the amount of money needed to make up the economic output gap caused by the pandemic. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, a Democrat, dubbed it the “least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and presciently foresaw severe inflationary pressures.

The Inflation Reduction Act arguably was a misnomer. If anything, it increased inflation – as Larry Summers warned it would. Biden’s $400 billion student loan forgiveness package enjoyed majority but not overwhelming public support. When the proposal did not get past the Supreme Court, the president found workarounds. These administrative measures became a hallmark of the Biden administration. Meanwhile, his minions relentlessly pursued additional government regulation, which had already piled perilously high.

Where Biden did have a mandate for immediate action, he did not have the courage to act. The best example was the need to stem the flow of illegal immigration, a touchy issue for liberals but common sense for a great majority of the public.

Perhaps Biden’s greatest overreach was to run for a second term. Selfishly thinking that only he could do the job, when other strong candidates stood in the wings, he shoved aside health issues that any sentient voter could see for themselves and stayed in the race until it was impossible for the Democrats to mount a credible campaign with a fresh candidate.

Trump returned to office with even less voter support than Biden and grander illusions about what he could accomplish. He did not come close to matching Biden’s popular vote margin. In fact, he did not win 50% of the popular vote; his margin was one of the narrowest since the 1960s. Nevertheless, Trump proclaimed, “The beauty is that we won by so much. The mandate was massive.”

With ego rather than popular support puffing up his sails, Trump started his presidency with an unprecedented blizzard of executive orders and pronouncements to white-out his predecessors’ policies. Many of Trump’s orders resonated with the public – for instance pushing back on DEI initiatives. Some did nothing to make Americans’ lives better, such as starting the process to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”  

And some were far, far away from Trump’s razor-thin mandate. On the campaign trail, he had denied reading – or supporting – the Heritage Foundation’s radical Project 2025 plan for remaking the government. In office he immediately took steps to implement the plan that he urged voters to ignore by hiring the architect of the report, Russell Vought, as director of the Office of Management and Budget.

Trump lived up to his campaign promise to exert control over the border. But he went off the rails he had laid with voters by sending Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents into cities where the inevitable happened – unnecessary deaths and tragic brutality. Polls show that a majority of Americans believe the surge of ICE officers makes cities less safe, rather than safer.

On top of this, Trump went into wars he promised to avoid and imposed trade policies that made goods more expensive, when he had promised affordability. On this last issue, he has all but mocked the pains Americans experience over rising prices.

At a Texas rally in the waning days of the election, he extolled the virtues of his promised $5,000 check to every American adult, a lame pledge that less than a quarter of Americans took seriously according to a Wall Street Journal survey. He then tossed off the claim that the “Trump dividend” would barely pay for “a hamburger and maybe a small dessert” at his elite Mar-a-Lago club.

Trump-bashers may want to see him as a one-off president who brought this mid-term debacle on himself. It is true that he wilfully anointed candidates who satisfied his vanity but were less well equipped to win. A sizeable share of Republican voters came to view his administration as self-dealing and more focused on redecorating Washington with arches and ballrooms than revamping ordinary American lives.

But the fundamental teaching point in the midterm election is that it is not exceptional. The Big Beautiful Mandate Trap, to coin a phrase, is not going away for any politician in any party. It is a permanent pitfall in today’s political landscape, and it existed before Biden and Trump were elected.

Geroge W. Bush and Barack Obama also came to office with lofty aspirations that exceeded their grasp. Bush pushed a conservative agenda that he could not sustain; Obama pushed in the other direction, giving fuel to the newly formed conservative Tea Party.

Neither of them had the support that Franklin Roosevelt, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon enjoyed of more than 60% of the popular vote. The American people have not delivered a strong mandate to a president since Ronald Reagan won by less than 59% of the popular vote in 1984 while carrying 49 states.

One-term president George H.W. Bush won with a little over 53% of the vote. In both of his victories Barack Obama won by less. In his two races for the White House, each time against two meaningful opponents, Clinton did not win a clear majority of the popular vote. George W. Bush (in 2000) and Trump (in 2016) won the White House with Electoral College majorities but lost the popular vote.

Thin margins have also become a chronic problem at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. When FDR became president, he had a 59-36 Democratic majority in the Senate and a 313-117 Democratic majority in the House. LBJ took office in 1963 with a 66-34 margin in the Senate and 258-176 margin in the House. Today the House is headed for LBJ-sized advantage, but the Democrats cannot do better than  56 seats in the Senate.

As giddy as Democrats feel today, their victories in Congress were less an endorsement of them than a repudiation of Trump. They are disliked less than the Republicans, that’s all. According to an NBC News poll, less than 30% of Americans have a positive view of the party.

As mandates have shrunk, so must political agendas. The definition of a successful president is no longer about making sweeping but impossible change. It is about guiding the country through feasible change in areas where the broad middle of the country resides.

A recent Wall Street Journal survey identified a variety of issues that satisfy the American appetite for change. Among them: banning surprise medical charges from hospitals; addressing the housing shortage by restricting large institutional investors from buying up properties; raising income taxes for the super wealthy; and capping child-care costs for working families, credit card interest rates, and prescription drug prices.

These fixes are not simple. We don’t want pharmaceutical companies to make obscene profits. We also don’t want to disincentivize them from engaging in expensive research that produces the drugs that have prolonged so many Americans’ lives. Capping credit card interest rates must be done in a way that doesn’t make it more difficult for banks to serve low-income families. Restricting institutional investors from buying housing stock polls well, but if done ham-handedly could lead to higher housing costs and decrease the supply of affordable housing.

The key is bipartisan compromise – not maximizing every partisan advantage. Progressive Sen. Bernie Sanders and conservative Sen. Josh Hawley, for instance, back capping credit card interest at 10%. Republicans, independents, and a near majority of Democrats agree with the common-sense rule that people should show a photo ID when voting.

Moreover, the Wall Street Journal found consensus on matters that speak to traditional American greatness. While respondents to their survey supported barriers of entry to illegal immigration, they welcomed paths to citizenship for illegal immigrants who have been here for years and contribute to their communities. It is one thing to protect borders and quite another to tear down the Statue of Liberty.

President Trump hopes to make his redecorated Oval Office into a federal monument so future presidents cannot remove the gold leaf he has lavishly applied to its walls. But no president can fence off change, as he showed by wiping out 78 of the Biden administration’s executive orders on his first day in office.

Perhaps Trump’s elimination of the Agency for International Development is permanent, but foreign aid itself will be revived. It is an essential component of our national security. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert Kennedy has fired thousands of employees and canceled billions of dollars dedicated to scientific research. This, too, will be reversed because most Americans understand these government programs help them and their children live longer and more fruitfully.

When presidents imagine a mandate they do not have, they fail both in the short and the long run. In the short run, policies that have no support are erased. In the long run, the country loses valuable time addressing the needs of citizens.

The great majority of Americans today feel like bystanders in bitterly fought political games that do not put points on the board for them. We need political leaders with a realistic sense of what can be done to make average Americans feel they have a shot at the American dream.

John Maxwell Hamilton is an RCP columnist and author of “Manipulating the Masses: Woodrow Wilson and the Birth of American Propaganda.”