As the dust settles upon the 2024 elections, the landscape appears grim. Donald Trump ran one of the most vile, racist and misogynist campaigns in the modern political era … and won. Along with the White House, the GOP also won a Senate majority and held onto another slim majority in the House.
For the more than 70 million Americans who voted against Trump, this electoral defeat is deflating. Trump represents an existential threat to our civil rights and basic freedoms. Members of his previous administration believe he is a fascist.
He has promised to deport millions of immigrants, terminate those parts of the U.S. Constitution he dislikes, roll back environmental regulations, and impose tariffs that leading economists agree will drive up inflation and destabilize our economy.
The incoming president intends to weaponize the Department of Justice against his political opponents, criminalize student protestors, end the Affordable Care Act as we know it and force women around the country to navigate an increasingly complex web of state-level restrictions on basic reproductive freedoms.
And still … Trump won. He won all seven battleground states and, for the first time, has won the popular vote. Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign failed to break through a decentralized disinformation ecosystem that peddles the same racism and xenophobia as Trump, that promotes lies and conspiracy theories to millions of Americans to generate anger and outrage at the expense of ideas and public policy.
Meanwhile, the political punditry class is stumbling over itself to explain the election’s outcome. So far, they’ve blamed a too-woke Left, a Democratic elite out of touch with ordinary Americans, and a shift among Latino voters toward the GOP. These pundits point to the GOP’s electoral trifecta as definitive proof of a mandate for Trump and his party to govern as they see fit. And Trump agrees. But you should not.
Neither Trump nor his Republican party have won any such mandate from us. The electoral map, with its red and blue states, obscures a basic fact about elections: People, not geographies, vote. Donald Trump undoubtedly won more votes than Kamala Harris, but he still remains historically unpopular.
Split-ticket voting allowed Trump to sweep all seven battleground states, but also allowed Democratic incumbents to hold onto several contested Senate seats in Michigan, Wisconsin, Nevada and Arizona. Meanwhile, the Republican House majority is no larger than it was in the last Congress, and it remains deeply fractured.
But perhaps the strongest evidence against a Trump mandate comes down to basic math. The University of Florida’s election lab concluded that this country is home to nearly 265 million Americans over the age of 18 years old. Just under 245 million of them are eligible to vote, and of those voting-eligible Americans, only 63% of them cast a ballot this November. In Mississippi, where I live and work, voter turnout was less than 60%, the lowest in 20 years.
Among those who voted nationwide, barely half chose Trump. Nearly half chose Harris. The margins between the two candidates narrowed since Election Day, as millions of votes remained uncounted in states like California, Washington and New York until some time after Nov. 5.
All told, Donald Trump won the presidency with just 30% of the nation’s eligible vote share. That’s no mandate at all. Instead, it’s a reflection of decades-long efforts by the Republican party to ensure widespread voter suppression and apathy as a means of securing power.
As many of us come to terms with the unique combination of cruelty and incompetency that will surely define this second Trump administration, we must not fool ourselves into granting them carte blanche.
Our democracy provides no such mandate to any would-be dictator and their lackeys. Nor does our right to self-govern begin or end only on an election day every few years. In our democracy, the ballot is but one tool for ensuring control over our shared fate.
And in the aftermath of this election, where barely 30% of eligible voters placed Trump and his party back into power, the rest of us must make use of every remaining tool available to limit how they wield that power.
Few American figures better understood the importance of this toolkit for counteracting tyrannical power as Frederick Douglass. In 1857, 20 years after escaping his own enslavement, Douglass was invited to speak at an event commemorating the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.
In his speech, Douglass reminded his audience of the importance of confronting power so as to remind those who wield it of their limits. It is worth quoting Douglass’s words at length:
“If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing up the ground; they want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue ’til they are resisted with either words or blows, or with both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.”
As Douglass reminds us, power instructs those who wield it. If we believe Trump and his Republican party have a mandate, then they will act as though they do. Instead, our collective task now and for the foreseeable future is to instruct them by any and all means of the limits to their power.
This MFP Voices essay does not necessarily represent the views of the Mississippi Free Press, its staff or board members. To submit an opinion for the MFP Voices section, send up to 1,200 words and sources fact-checking the included information to voices@mississippifreepress.org. We welcome a wide variety of viewpoints.