Trump won the presidential election, but not ‘by a lot!’
In his recent ill-considered call for the impeachment of U.S. District Judge James Boasberg, an Obama appointee, President Trump boasted on Truth Social, “He [Boasberg] didn’t WIN the popular VOTE (by a lot!), he didn’t WIN ALL SEVEN SWING STATES, he didn’t WIN 2,750 to 525 Counties, HE DIDN’T WIN ANYTHING!” Trump did win the popular vote, but it wasn’t “by a lot!” In addition, the “presidential coattails” that usually come with a big win just weren’t there.
To be sure, given the fallout from the Jan. 6 raid on the U.S. Capitol, two impeachments (both failed in the Senate), the multiple civil and criminal charges brought against him, and a near-assassination, Donald Trump’s 2024 victory was one of the most remarkable comebacks in U.S. political history. Even so, it wasn’t a big win.
Start with the popular vote. Trump won it with 49.8 percent, but that wasn’t a majority. With Democratic nominee Kamala Harris’s 48.3 percent and the 1.9 percent who voted for third-party candidates, more Americans voted against Trump than voted for him.
Failing to win the majority of voters isn’t just a Trump problem, it’s a Republican problem. In the 1988 presidential election — nearly 40 years ago — Republican George H.W. Bush, the sitting vice president, won a majority of the vote: 53.4 percent to Democrat Michael Dukakis’s 45.6 percent, nearly an 8-percentage point spread. That’s a big win.
Since 1988 only one Republican presidential candidate has won a majority of the popular vote: George W. Bush in 2004 with 50.7 percent.
Of course, Bush won the presidency in 2000, and Trump won in 2016, but both won with electoral votes while losing the popular vote.
Now compare Trump’s 1.5 percentage-point victory over Harris with Democrat Barack Obama’s 7.2 percentage-point victory over Republican John McCain in 2008. And Obama’s 3.9 percentage-point victory over Republican Mitt Romney in 2012. Then there’s Democrat Joe Biden’s 4.5 percentage-point victory over Trump in 2020. Moreover, Trump was facing some of the weakest Democratic candidates — Hillary Clinton in 2016 and the failing Biden, replaced by Kamala Harris in 2024 — since, well, Dukakis.
Trump also points out that he won all seven swing states: Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. But in two of the states, Michigan and Wisconsin, Trump had less than 50 percent. So more voted against him in those two states than voted for him.
And then there’s the issue of presidential coattails — i.e., when a big win for a presidential candidate helps the party’s down-ballot candidates. Did Trump’s victory have coattails?
Of the seven swing states, five had Senate races, which, like a governor’s race and the presidential election, is statewide. Of those five Senate races, only Republican David McCormick of Pennsylvania pulled out a victory — and only by the slimmest of margins, 15,115 votes out of more than 6.8 million cast.
The other four Senate seats went to Democrats, though all were close except for Arizona. In North Carolina’s governor’s race, Democrat Josh Stein beat Republican Mark Robinson by nearly 15 percentage points. The House race was essentially a wash. In short, there were no coattails.
Here's why it’s important to have a realistic view of the election. In 1992, Democratic presidential candidate Bill Clinton won with 43 percent of the vote versus Geroge H.W. Bush’s 37.4 percent. Third-party candidate Ross Perot got 18.9 percent.
Clinton and his team entered the White House claiming they had a mandate from the American people to make big changes, including tax increases and reforming the U.S. health care system. But 57 percent voted against Clinton, implying voters weren’t really behind his agenda.
Clinton’s first months in the White House were marked by confusion and chaos. It was so bad that Democrat Clinton hired longtime Republican strategist David Gergen in May 1993 to bring some order and stability to the White House. Even so, Clinton went forward with trying to restructure the health care system, which became very unpopular. The result was that in the 1994 midterm elections, Republicans took control of both the House and Senate for the first time in 40 years.
Trump won by a larger percentage than Clinton, but still less than 50 percent. He has also unleashed some confusion and chaos surrounding his policies and what he plans to do next. His popularity has fallen but is still within historic norms, but so was Clinton’s at this point.
Impeaching judges and rattling markets is not a winning strategy. Tackling the border and whipping inflation is. If Trump has a mandate from the voters, that’s it.
Merrill Matthews is a public policy and political analyst and the co-author of “On the Edge: America Faces the Entitlements Cliff.” Follow him on X@MerrillMatthews.
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