Pratical Politics

As many of us are still coming to terms with the fact of the Harris loss in the latest race for POTUS, many different emotions and actions are out front daily, just as they would be personally if we had lost our gambit to stay in our favorite apartment. But ogres and landlords do win sometimes.
Though Mr. Trump and his buddies have been trumpeting and proclaiming the idea that the Harris candidacy was thoroughly trounced, giving Trump a historic mandate to run the presidency any way he wants, as is usually the case with braggart winners, the numbers don’t justify their loud claims. Mr. Trump, in fact, barely won the popular vote—the latest numbers say that his take was less than 50 percent of the nationwide total.
In his usual bombastic fashion, Trump has continued to claim, in fact, that “America has given his candidacy an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” and that he had won “a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” The early returns had shown numbers indicating that he was winning with well over 50 percent of the popular vote and that he had established a wide lead over his Democratic rival. But with the new data coming in, it is now clear that “after all of the 2024 votes are counted—only five popular vote winners of the presidency in history will have prevailed by smaller percentage margins than Trump.”
Counting votes in the U.S.A. takes time. It is now two full weeks after the Nov. 5 election and voting tallies are still coming in. There are are over 155 million votes to tally up in American presidential elections, and at this time, very close to the end of all the tallies, Mr. Trump does indeed still lead in the balloting (and he did win all of the necessary swing states for the Electoral College), but by less than 50 percent of the total. The latest count in fact shows that Mr. Trump’s bragging rights are much slimmer than he expected. He is at 49. 8 percent of the vote, with Mrs. Harris at 48. 3, according to the Cook County Political Report, which is recognized as one of the official national collectors of such data (76,806,388 for Trump; 74,253,871 for Harris).
But like the incident of having his first Press Director—Sean Spicer— constantly and illogically claim that Trump’s 2016-2017 inauguration crowd was the largest in presidential history—even larger than the 1964 March on Washington—in spite of clear evidence that that was a fabrication, Mr. Trump will probably continue to claim—in spite of the real numbers—that he achieved a landslide victory over Mrs. Harris, and essentially trounced her. Some people win as badly as they lose, apparently, and must claim some sort of total victory to soothe themselves, even when the real numbers clearly do not support their point of view.
Put another way, Mr. Trump has won a lower percentage of the popular vote in 2024 than “Mr. Biden did in 2020 (51.3), Obama in 2012 (51.1), Obama in 2008 (52.9), George W. Bush in 2004 (50.7), George H.W. Bush in 1988 (53.2), Ronald Reagan in 1984 (58.8), Reagan in 1980 (50.7), or Jimmy Carter in 1976 (50.1)”. And, though truth is often irrelevant to him and his minions, Mr. Trump’s electorate numbers put him way below those of former presidents who actually won what could be described as “unprecedented and powerful” electoral mandates: “Richard Nixon’s 60.7 percent in 1972, Lyndon Johnson’s 61.1 percent in 1964, or Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s 60.8 percent. “Beyond all that, however, there is now a mad dash by the Democratic-led Senate to get as many federal judges confirmed before Inauguration Day as possible, as that is seen as a real battle line. The Democrats fully expect a large number of legal battles during the Trump administration, and relying on Trump-appointed judges has so far not been a winning move.
Professor David L. Horne is founder and executive director of PAPPEI, the Pan African Public Policy and Ethical Institute, which is a new 501(c)(3) pending community-based organization or non-governmental organization (NGO). It is the stepparent organization for the California Black Think Tank which still operates and which meets every fourth Friday.
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