Joe Biden’s victory may or may not have been a mandate but his win was both historic and narrow.
Political scientists define a “mandate” as the authority voters give to an elected representative to carry out his or her platform. Presidents and politicians from either party will often pontificate about how clear or decisive that “mandate” is, but in reality there’s no clear definition for what a “clear” or “decisive” mandate constitutes.
This year, Democrats won the presidency, but lost seats in the House and gained just one net seat (so far) in the Senate. Biden is poised to become the first Democratic presidential candidate since Grover Cleveland in 1885 to take office without control of both chambers of Congress, unless Democrats can pull off a sweep of two runoff Senate races in Georgia.
It will be hard for Biden to claim he has a decisive mandate, and difficult for Democrats to push through their agenda should Republicans maintain control of the Senate.
The Democrat is on track to win both the highest percentage of eligible voters in almost 50 years and the largest portion of the overall vote since former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, according to the WashingtonPost.
Biden currently leads Trump by more than four percentage points in the popular vote (50.8%-47.4%), nearly double Hillary Clinton’s final popular vote margin in 2016.
The Democrat won the largest number of popular votes in history (77,750,000 and counting) and is on track to beat Trump (Republican) by a larger margin (more than 5 million votes) than any winning presidential ticket since 1996, with the exception of the Obama/Biden ticket in 2008 (Trump won the second largest number of popular votes in history: 72,426,000 and climbing.)
In the Electoral College, however, Biden’s victory is much less impressive: the Democrat is on track to win the same amount of electoral votes as Trump, 306, in percentage of electoral votes won (56.88%). More…
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