Following Donald Trump’s election victory, the president-elect said the people had given him “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” What that mandate is and what feature of the election produced that mandate are unclear.

Trump appears to be saying the election results were an indictment of progressive Democratic policies and an endorsement of all his campaign promises. So what makes him think that he has received such instruction?

If the thought is that Trump’s victory was so decisive that it signaled a clear endorsement of his politics, then the justification for the existence of his mandate is already on shaky legs. Many, including myself, said prematurely that Trump won by a landslide. In reality it was a very close popular vote – a mere 2% margin, with Trump not even securing half of the total votes.

Perhaps the mandate is supported by the fact that voters also gave Republicans control of the Senate. During a GOP meeting, House Speaker Mike Johnson said, “Republicans in the House and Senate have a mandate. ... The American people want us to implement and deliver that ‘America First’ agenda.” The Republican sweep can be interpreted as voters giving them the ability to bring this agenda to life.

Still, they don’t have overwhelming control. The GOP has a slim majority in both chambers — 220-215 in the House and 53-47 in the Senate. So, if there is a mandate, it must be produced by a simple majority, or in Trump’s case, just more votes than any of the other candidates.

Under these conditions, it’s substantially less likely that there is any such directive. Republican claims of receiving a mandate make it seem like the country is significantly united in repudiating Democratic policies and ordering the implementation of Trump’s plans of mass deportations, tax cuts and tariffs.

The problem with treating a simple majority as producing a comprehensive endorsement is that it treats the vote of a slight majority as representative of the political desires of the population at large. Doing so also makes it so that the electorate is actually transmitting inconsistent mandates.

The president was elected but so were all of the Democrats and dissenting Republicans in Congress. Presumably, if any margin of victory is a comprehensive endorsement, because of differences in policy preferences, they will have received their own mandates to resist Trump’s agenda — this makes mandates seem self-defeating.

When the electorate is treated as a mandate-granting monolith, as Trump and other Republicans are doing, the monolith gives contradictory orders: Implement a vision, but also undermine that vision. If Trump’s mandate is supposed to be a bona fide directive from “the people,” then what are we to make of all of the other directives “the people” have distributed to other members of government?

If this makes no sense, it’s because there is no neat concept of the “will of the people” to be used in Republican claims — at least none that can be used to justify a total implementation of Trump’s agenda regardless of how much it runs up against the limits of presidential powers.

Winning an election does not produce a mandate that has anything to do with individual policy decisions, irrespective of the margin of victory. If a president has a mandate, it is to hold office in a way that respects the Constitution and the fact that they are the president of every American, not just half of them.

Another issue with a Republican claim of a mandate is that it mistakenly assumes that a vote for a candidate is an endorsement of all of their policies. For many, this was a vote for what they perceived to be the lesser of two evils. A recent poll suggests that 47% of voters felt that they chose a candidate simply because the alternatives were worse.

This can hardly be thought to be sweeping support for Trump’s policies.

Trump actually received fewer votes than he did in 2020, when he lost the election. The reason he won was not because he expanded his base but because Harris lost many of Biden’s votes. In other words, Trump won because of voter apathy and dissatisfaction with both candidates.

Those who wish to say that election victories indicate an order from the people don’t seem to understand that the very reason we are a federal republic is that governing is about elected officials deliberating and weighing policy options. We have representatives for individual congressional districts because governance is about taking into account the contrasting wills of the population.

With all of this in mind, it’s exceedingly implausible to believe that the election resulted in an exhaustive mandate for Trump and the GOP.

Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group. He is a doctoral candidate in philosophy at the University of Rochester. You can reach him at rafaelperezocregister@gmail.com.