You may recall that in the immediate aftermath of the election, there were many people using the words landslide and mandate to signal an overwhelming victory by Donald Trump, a victory so massive, in fact, that now he gets to do whatever he wants to do. Now, of course, anybody who looked at the data was suspicious of this, as we suspected that millions of votes had not yet been counted, and a lot of those votes were not going to go in favor of Donald Trump. Now I want, I want to be clear Trump won Trump one, fair and square, after looking at every claim I’ve received about different irregularities, they do not seem to have been substantiated empirically. And Trump won, and nothing I say here changes that. But I want you to think back to Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012 genuinely larger victories, winning both the Electoral College and popular vote, and the total lack of respect for whatever mandate Barack Obama might have been able to claim. And now consider the latest data from the 2024 election, Donald Trump has now dipped below 50% of the popular vote. He won the popular vote, but he won it with most voters voting for someone else. Trump won what’s called a plurality of the vote, not a majority of the vote. It’s very difficult to argue that you have a mandate and that you won in a landslide when most of the voters voted for someone else, that’s number one. Now number two, it’s also important to compare the latest numbers to those of Hillary Clinton in 2016 now, of course, Hillary Clinton, Hillary Clinton lost electorally in 2016 whereas Donald Trump won electorally both in 2016 and in 2024 but recall that Hillary Clinton won by 2.1 percentage points in 2016 in the popular vote, and Trump’s lead right now is only 1.7 percentage points. Trump’s victory in the popular vote is even smaller than that which Hillary Clinton had in 2016 and even in the raw vote totals, Hillary Clinton won by about 2.8 million votes back in 2016 Donald Trump winning right now by somewhere between 2.5 and 2.6 million votes. What does this say? Well, it says two things. Number one, any policy, any executive order, any appointment, any you’ve got to let me get Matt gates confirmed at any justification, any claim whose justification is the mandate or landslide victory that Trump obtained, which supposedly says that everybody wants Trump to do whatever he wants must be rejected out of hand, because, empirically, it’s completely bogus, just completely and totally bogus, And we just say most of the people who voted voted for someone else. But there’s another sort of aspect to this, which is that I know that there are people who are demoralized and despondent, people on the left as a result of what took place in this year’s election, and I get that that makes sense. A lot of us say those four years under Trump were so crazy. We were globally humid, humiliated. He was the laughing stock of the world, and our fellow Americans have now chosen, he didn’t steal it, right? He won. Our fellow Americans have now chosen to give him another four years. That is demoralizing and depressing, and you would be right, but there is still great reason to stay engaged and to resist what it is that he is doing. And even though it can be difficult, even though it can be exhausting, we have to remember that even among voters, most of the people who voted voted for somebody else, other than Trump. So we set our sights on 26 we start to think about 28 but we don’t forget that we can still do a lot, even right now. And you know it some of these nominations that Trump made, it’s not clear they’re going to be confirmed. Continuing to turn public opinion against some of these unqualified selections is a worthwhile activity that could have real, tangible results. People will suffer if Matt Gaetz is Attorney General, if Robert F Kennedy Jr becomes Secretary of Health and Human Services, there will be real world suffering as a result of that. Now we’re already starting to see some voters regret their Trump votes. He’s not even been sworn in yet, and there are people saying Elon Musk seems to be in charge, or at least having a voice. I didn’t vote for Elon Musk. There’s a great media piece about that. Or people who were saying, you know, I voted for him. I didn’t think he was really going to start deporting anyone I know, but it’s. Seems like he’s really going to deport people. I know I regret voting for Trump. We’re going to hear more and more of these anecdotes, but we don’t need the anecdotes, because once again, if you zoom out with Trump, Trump dropping below 50% of the popular vote, most voters voted for someone else, and that is a very good reminder that we stay engaged and we stay active. Here. I.
