After the election we’ve just been through and all the punditry all over the electoral map that’s followed, it seems only appropriate that the best advice was given years ago by the front man of a punk group called The Dead Kennedys, even if it doesn’t directly address the cri de coeur of millions of fellow Americans.

Namely: how could anyone but the wealthy, leavened with the minority of the rest of us who are religious and/or political zealots of a certain era, have voted for him? How could Blacks, how could Hispanics, how could young people, how could women, how could the working class, how could Native Americans?¹

Prominent representatives of each of these groups have shown in recent weeks Trump isn’t the only one trigger-ready to settle long-standing scores — he’s just the only one now with the power to do so; the rest is noise. And no matter what or how many lies Trump and his party may have ignited to cover their tracks, no matter how many excuses are made for this or that demo- or psychographic, everyone in this country knew enough that was true about Donald Trump to know he should never be allowed anywhere near the White House ever again (not even as tourist, lest he turn out to be a tourorist).

Didn’t they?

Maybe not.

As America’s historians were already pushing Joe Biden up the ladder as one of our most consequential (in a good way) presidents, an ABC-Washington Post poll found that more than 60% of Americans thought he’d “accomplished little to nothing.”

In October, YouGov, one of the best pollsters in the business, presented 1,100 potential voters, 1,000 of them registered, with 128 policies that either Trump or Harris had said they’d implement — 64 of each — and, without telling them whose policies were whose, asked them to register their agreement or disagreement with each. The top and bottom lines:

• • 89% of the Harris policies included in the survey were supported by more than half the respondents, vs. only 48% of Trump’s.
  • On average, each of her proposals was supported by 67% of the respondents (including 51% of Trump supporters), while only an average of 51% of the respondents as a whole supported the average Trump concept of a plan.
  • Even in areas where his policy prescriptions were strong (the economy and immigration), his ideas were no more popular than hers.

And a separate poll in the same critical month by another highly respected polling partnership, Reuter/Ipsos, clearly demonstrated the impact of misinformation and disinformation on voter preference. On issue after issue, voters with an accurate understanding of the actual (as opposed to alternative) facts heavily favored the Democratic ticket. For example:

And these are only examples, largely limited to misinformation. When it comes to disinformation, in addition to the Russians, Chinese, and North Koreans (all of whom wanted Trump to win) and the Iranians (who shouldn’t be assumed to have been all-in for Harris), all with nothing better to do than prank our election, strongman style, a survey by Harvard’s Kennedy School (n=2,001) found that one in seven of our own fellow vote-eligible citizens have deliberately distributed content they knew to be false. What kind of content? On behalf of who? Well, those who fessed up to doing the electoral version of the deed were more likely to support political violence and have positive feelings toward QAnon, Proud Boys, White Nationalists, and Vladimir Putin. It sure doesn’t sound like they were spreading digital manure on behalf of Antifa or the Deep State, unless, of course, they were trying to create another false flag like J6.

What’s more, in classic Big Lie fashion, as “highly factual, very credible” Brookings noted, the more outrageous lies were especially effective in impacting the result. We may have laughed at and/or shaken our heads at stories of immigrants eating cats and dogs, hurricane relief going to undocumented immigrants, Kamala Harris is a bathing suit hugging Jeffrey Epstein, Tim Walz abusing a male student early in his teaching career, but:

These and other efforts were successful in shaping the campaign narrative because they were disseminated broadly on social media platforms, promoted through funny memes, picked up and publicized by mainstream media outlets, circulated by internet mega-influencers, and amplified by leading candidates during rallies, debates, and interviews…Polling data suggest that false claims affected how people saw the candidates, their views about leading issues such as the economy, immigration, and crime, and the way the news media covered the campaign.

Put more simply, the lies played, the lies played.

 

But that’s only part of the story.  In the present case, defeat is an orphanage, not an orphan.

A Failure Of Trust

As in years past, Democrats relied on the traditional media to do much of the heavy lifting required to change wrong perceptions into right realities and, as has increasingly become the case since at least 2000, if not earlier, this faith was clearly (and this time fatally) misplaced.

Was this because the media was–and is:

• • Addicted to spectacle and horse-races (not policy), or
  • Doing less with much less from its paymasters — replacing investigative journalism with a new value-add, “access,” that requires investigation’s opposite (i.e. bending over forward to be “fair”), which apparently includes the inability to ‘call out’ 95%+ of the political lies being told (all by one party).
  • Allegedly stuck out of the mud by ethical standards dating back 200+ years of normal times, which would at least be adorable if it were easier to tell whether modern adherence to these norms reflected genuine conviction, rather than the deployment of disposiples leveraged for decidedly unethical (and un-American) ends.
  • Dealing with a crumbling Chinese wall between corporate and editorial, and a consequent new dictum, “Republicans buy newspapers, too.”²
  • Presiding over the one part of the economy that really was better under Trump (even during the pandemic), and now, in existential crisis without him, desperately determined to do whatever it could for another Trump fix, aka “Trump Bump 2.0.” Even if that meant baldly violating the very principles it claimed (per bullet #3) to uphold.³
  • As conflicted against its own interests as the working class — via the same masters of the universe, no less, i.e. the American oligarchs who now own them, exemplified by the Washington Post’s decision not to endorse in the presidential race, which cost it 250,000+ subscribers overnight, but benefited other companies owned by the same oligarch on multiple levels.⁴

All of the above (and then some) ring true, because for the media the protections of the First Amendment (and the corresponding duty to keep the voting public well-informed) has become little more than a glorified antitrust exemption. When combined with Americans’ (in)famously short memories, nothing should have been or be considered “already litigated” or “baked in” by the Dems — nothing true, at least.

Instead and indeed, in a nation that’s become increasingly meta and make-believe, an old Hollywood adage should have been — and continue to be — the rule of thumb in electoral politics: nobody knows anything. At least, they didn’t when they voted.

For example:

• • Even before the counting of Election Day ballots, there was a surge of searches in states Trump won by users seeking information on how to change their vote, which continued to grow throughout the week after Election Day, quickly reaching 100 — peak popularity — on the Google Trends scale.
  • Another search that spiked 1650% after the election? “What is a tariff?” joined by closely related queries like “will tariffs cause inflation,” “things to buy before tariffs,” and “who pays for tariffs,” all this in spite of the fact that poll after poll showed majority support for these blunt instruments before the voting took place (56%-41% in this Reuters/Ipsos survey, for example).

Who will be the first group to realize they’ve been had? Will it be all those who voted for him because he promised to curb inflation,⁵ the promise that likely won the election for him, a promise he’s backed away from even before taking office (literally re-stating his commitment to tariffs in the same breath)? It’s already increasing again, btw — inflation, that is.

Maybe it will be the Latinos, whose support for him seems tragically worthy of a new stanza in German minister Martin Niemoller’s famous post-WWII poetic confessional:

Seriously, folks. Vice President-Elect JD Vance has said the new administration plans to deport “at least” 1 million “illegals” a year, which would be fewer than many expected, but still, how about it, Latino Trump-supporting brothers (and sisters): are there 4 million “real criminals” in your midst, in your communities?

Survey says no. An analysis of Texas criminal records conducted this year (2024) show that only 400 undocumented out of every 100,000 are even arrested, let alone convicted, a rate significantly lower than legal immigrants, and even lower than US-born citizens, and we all know when it comes to law enforcement, there’s no reason to believe anyone else’s stats in this area are going to be more robust or accurate than those of the Great State of Texas.

Frankly, back in the good old days when the GOP used to lecture us about “common sense,” we wouldn’t even need to roll this data out; we’d just have to pose one rhetorical question: “why in the heck would anyone who risked everything to get in to our country do the one thing guaranteed to get them kicked out again?”

There may be other crimes than those graphed above, committed by other “illegals,” but the folks actually arrested are, by definition, the “real criminals” who you’all think will be the only targets of Trump’s big roundup. And even if you assume there are 20 million “illegals,” as Trump complains (rather than the official count of 11‐13 million), the arrest rate per 100,000 shown above only translates to 80,000 “real criminals.” So where are Trump and Miller going to get the other 3,920,000 people to put into their conce — “detention camps” (aka Trump’s affordable housing plan) and ship out?

And not for nothing, but this assumes that anyone arrested and charged with a felony — like Trump himself was⁶ — is a “real criminal.” But of course, tax evaders, fraudsters, and the like aren’t the kinds of individuals whose lurid crimes filled your screens on his campaign’s behalf. And when it comes to those kindza “offenders,” the violent felons most of us consider “real criminals,” the arrest rate for the undocumented is only about 100 per 100,000, or 20,000 out of 20 million, leaving 3,980,000 people you — and we — don’t consider “real criminals” subject to corralling to meet the quotas of a man we all know loves big numbers (ed note: e.g. the 60,000 Venezuelan refugees who overwhelmingly supported him have apparently just learned what they get for it — an all-expenses paid trip to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba!).

If not the Latinos, perhaps it will be Trump’s most fervent supporters, the rural evangelistas, who will next bear the cross on his behalf as his chosen lambs of God.⁷ As Ronald Brownstein writes in The Atlantic:

Agricultural producers could face worse losses than any other economic sector from Trump’s plans to impose sweeping tariffs on imports and to undertake what he frequently has called “the largest domestic deportation operation” of undocumented immigrants “in American history.” Hospitals and other health providers in rural areas could face the greatest strain from proposals Trump has embraced to slash spending on Medicaid, which provides coverage to a greater share of adults in smaller communities than in large metropolitan areas. And small-town public schools would likely be destabilized even more than urban school districts if Trump succeeds in his pledge to expand “school choice” by providing parents with vouchers to send their kids to private schools.

Maybe it will be Native Americans. According to exit polls, 65%+ voted for the fauveface.⁸ Perhaps the fact that one of his first official acts was renaming Denali Mount McKinley again will jog their memories?

To be clear. the media had plenty of help from both parties in misinforming the public in Trump’s favor. Perhaps the cardinal and clearest example is illustrated below:

The image on the left is, of course, one of the stimulus checks we all received to help us through the economic consequences of the COVID crisis. The Trump administration was responsible for making that crisis worse in this country than anywhere in the world, despite the fact that we were considered the most prepared in the world to deal with it, with the world’s leading scientific journal declaring that what Trump did (and didn’t) represented “not just ineptitude, but sabotage.”

In light of this, new definitions of chutzpah would seem to be required to account for the fact that Trump, after causing the crisis, and resisting the creation of a stimulus program to deal with the problem he created–until it became clear Congress had enough votes to override his veto, insisted — for the first time in American history — that his name and signature be on every check, delaying when we all received it, along with a letter taking credit for the measure — your tax dollars at work — wrapped around every check.

But that’s not the political malpractice of which we speak. No, that’s represented by the sign on the right — and another set of checks. When Joe Biden came into office he found the six-time bankrupt had left him — just like his investors, every time — holding a bag full of economic disaster that required another stimulus, the American Rescue Plan. Biden took great pride in announcing that he would not be “playing politics” by signing the checks, ensuring he only got credit for the inflation they allegedly caused (but actually didn’t).

Then Biden ended Trump’s four years of “infrastructure week” vaporware by cutting through decades of partisan bickering (as “crumbling” increasingly became the i word’s semantic shadow) to get a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill through Congress. But the significance of the deal was apparently dwarfed in importance, as far as Biden was concerned, by the fact that he was able to get some Republicans to vote for the bill and prove that yes, he could too “work across the aisle.”⁹ Thus when the inevitable signs that accompany such projects were created, there was no mention of Biden or Kamala Harris (who was instrumental in the effort) or the Democratic Congress on them (no, no, that would be “playing politics”).

Instead, every such sign credited the “Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill” that 200 out of 213 House Republicans and 30 out of 49 Republican Senators voted against. Thus we entered an election year in which 60% of Americans thought Biden had “accomplished little or nothing” while not only crediting Trump for the “stimmies” they received, but in many cases believing the money was drawn from his own personal, allegedly vast store of available cash — after all, they were checks signed by the man himself, not by the government ,  and therefore actually have memories of Trump’s COVID conduct that test positive.

Arguably, even worse than what the Democrats didn’t take credit for was the extent to which they allowed the GOP to tar them for things they didn’t do, and weren’t responsible for, with inflation topping the list. In reality, there were seven causes of inflation, and every last one should have — with complete fairness — been laid at the feet of Trump, scat that now serves as a preview of coming detractions and distractions.

But when voters had heard Biden was responsible from a choir of Republicans and their numerous supporters and enablers in the media for three and a half years — unchallenged, not even once, let alone with the dogged consistency required for the Big Truth to overtake and overcome the Big Lie — can they be blamed for looking askance when the Dems finally showed up in the final months with a different story?

And that assumes the Dems actually showed up with said story, which they didn’t. More likely they conducted a few polls and focus groups, concluded resistance to the Inflated Lie was hopeless, and started apologizing instead.

Bragging and pointing fingers; two of the five basic tools in the Trump arsenal. Dems can’t adopt the others — lying, bullying, and chaos — and even boasting and blaming offend the sensibilities of the average Democrats, but in war you have to be willing to do things you wouldn’t do otherwise. And make no mistake about it, this is war, war without the shooting, and we all have to be willing to do whatever else is necessary to keep it that way.

All that said, the ferocious and often ridiculous dunking by the media on the Harris campaign is a sure ‘tell’ they know who really fell down on the job, and lest you find any of the above mean-spirited towards the misinformed, let us add this: After the New York City results came in, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) was startled to learn how many of her constituents had to have cast their ballots both for her and for Trump, two politicians who could not possibly be more different. So she decided — making clear that “this is not a place of judgment. I’m not going to put your stuff on blast or anything like that, or dunk on it. That’s genuinely not the intent. I want to learn from you I want to hear what you were thinking” — to find out why.

As usual, she got a lot of response, which she shared on MSNBC in unvarnished detail. One of her key conclusions was this:

People need to understand that there are people, millions of people in this country, and I was one of them, where you are working two, three shifts a day to try to make ends meet. You’re not reading the newspaper every morning with a cup of coffee…

And sadly, even if you were doing so in 2024, you probably wouldn’t be the wiser. In fact, given the media’s recent decades of bad faith (the latest additions to which we’ll only be scratching the surface of in the first two parts of this series, because we want our primary focus — and yours — to be on what to do about it), you might have even found yourself more inclined to vote for 44.46.¹⁰

That said, we’re saving the rest of our sympathy — in the rest of this series — for a few groups who have been betrayed for decades, in some cases centuries, by many more of our leaders than the singular Donald J Trump.

Divisive Decisive

The media make-believe that left many fellow citizens thoroughly dazed and confused by the time the clock struck 11/5 didn’t stop at the election’s edge, unfortunately, not that we should have expected otherwise. In the Fifth of November‘s’ aftermath, the industry, as the saying goes, continued to really “show its ass,” in no way more so than its description, positioning, and characterization of the results, which gave the distinct impression that, to use Tucker Carlson’s infelicitous lingo, America had been a “bad girl” and been administered a “vigorous spanking” by “daddy.” Even more strongly, it demonstrated the depth of the Fourth Estate’s understanding that in the fast-paced information environment we live in, you can make the first draft, like first impressions, the final draft as well — if you push hard enough with sufficient collective self-discipline — a lesson we suspect they first learned on Election Night, 2000, when Fox News jumped the gun in calling Florida for Bush, the other networks quickly followed suit, and from there, the rest was just history.

Little known fact: the concept of talking points was a creation of the Clinton war room, ironically as a way to help surrogates to put ideas in their own words. It’s associated more with Republicans, of course, because of their comic misappropriation of the idea: instead of using these one-pagers to formulate their own thoughts, GOPers have always, and conspicuously, quoted them verbatim. It’s not that funny, though, when the media does the same, slathering GOP talking points — as unfiltered and unchallenged as the thousands of hours of “earned” media they donated to the Repos in 2016 — into their “analyses.” Nothing/has/changed/at/all. Really.

Can anyone guess what the GOP-preferred one-word talking point description of the results of this election has been? As sure as the word “focussed” or “focussing” will appear somewhere in every New Yorker article, the word “decisive” has become the de rigeur Homeric epithet for Decision 2024. Those who are particularly eager to curry favor with the new boss will throw in a “sweeping” as well, an on-point shout-out/clap‐back for the cognoscenti to the Mueller Report’s best (only?) known phraseology, its Page 1 reference to Russia’s “sweeping and systematic” interference in 2016. Other common descriptors: “resounding,” “commanding,” “runaway,” “dominant.”

“Decisive?” “Sweeping?” “Resounding?” “Commanding?” Runaway?” “Dominant?” Really? Here’s a sports analogy every red-blooded Trump supporter and media pundit sportscaster wannabe should be able to understand. As of this writing, the average NFL game this year has 45.6 points scored. If you divvy up those points in the way that most closely approximates Trump’s 49.8%-48.3% win over Harris, you get a score of Trump 23, Harris 22. If the NFL awarded fractions of a point, it would be even closer.

Below are the ten closest Super Bowls in history. Please let us know in comments if you’ve ever read a media account of any of these games (other than a hometown or home state paper of the winner‐‐no, even then) in which the victory was described as “decisive:”

• • New York Giants 20, Buffalo Bills 19
  • Baltimore Ravens 34, San Francisco 49ers 31
  • New York Giants 17, New England Patriots 14
  • New England Patriots 24, Philadelphia Eagles 21
  • New England Patriots 32, Carolina Panthers 29
  • New England Patriots 20, St Louis Rams 17
  • Baltimore Colts 16, Dallas Cowboys 13
  • New York Giants 21, New England Patriots 17
  • Pittsburgh Steelers 27, Arizona Cardinals 23
  • San Francisco 49ers 20, Cincinnati Bengals 16
  • Pittsburgh Steelers 35, Dallas Cowboys 31
  • Pittsburgh Steelers 17, Dallas Cowboys 13

And this doesn’t include the two games that went to overtime (Chiefs-49ers, Patriots-Falcons) or two decided on the last play of the game (Rams-Titans, Patriots-Seahawks).¹¹ “Resounding?” “Commanding?” “Dominant?” Any takers? For any of these games? No? Then wie gehts, media? Cui bono?

What’s particularly curious about the use of words like “decisive” and “sweeping” is the contrast with how Biden’s victory over Trump was positioned by many of the same media outlets. Biden won by 4.45 points, not less than 1.5 (currently 1.47, according to the Cook Report)¹²; he won by more than seven million votes, not less than 2.3; he won a clear majority of the votes, not less than half; total turnout was higher, and he won nearly four million more votes from a smaller eligible electorate.

Yet how often do you remember his win described as “decisive,” “sweeping,” “resounding,” “commanding,” “runaway,” or “dominant,” rather than “narrow,” a “squeaker,” or “closer than expected?”

And it’s not only Republicans or corporate media types engaged in this strange draft of history. Here’s former Obama aide Ben Rhodes making our entire point in full, mere paragraphs apart in space-time, in a post-election article about authoritarianism. He writes:

The persistent anti-incumbent mood was so strong that it even (narrowly) swept Mr. Trump out of office in 2020, aided by his bungling of a pandemic.

Then, two paragraphs later:

Yet now Mr. Trump has decisively won back the presidency.

Emphases ours, but come on. Even more curious? As we all recall — how can we forget? — in the aftermath of the 2020 election, Trump and his supporters were doing everything they could to cast doubt on the results, frankly with much less basis (as we’ll see) than Democrats have today. If ever there was a time to emphasize how “decisive” and “sweeping” the results were, it was after the 2020 election. Emphasizing instead how close it was? What did — and does — that do but egg on the losers in their belief they were robbed? Hard not to wonder if that wasn’t the intention; if it bleeds, it leads, after all (& damn the consequences) — and that’s only the most innocent of explanations.

Particularly revealing in this regard is how often the closeness of the race was emphasized by how few voters would have needed to switch to change the Electoral College outcome, and with it, the entire election. Typical is this piece by NPR, of all sources, in which the casual reader is clearly led to believe the magic number in 2020 was “less than 44,000.” Yikes! Whew! Except this describes Biden’s combined margin of victory in Wisconsin, Arizona, and Georgia. But Biden didn’t need to win AZ or GA, only WI, plus Michigan and Pennsylvania, and the number of votes that needed to change to flip those three was 127,000. The number that would’ve needed to switch for Kamala to win them? 115,000. The closest of our three most recent elections by this measure? The one that started us down this road to perdition, 2016, where only 80,000 needed to change.¹³

 

Mandate, Schmandate

Perhaps nothing lays bare the media’s election and post-election, post-truth agenda more clearly than the way the Associated Press, the ultimate non-profit, “least biased”¹⁴ news source¹⁵ has repeatedly inserted itself into the interpretation of this election’s results in ways that are hard to accept as non-partisan, as we’ll show in this essay and the next.

Within days after the polls closed, if not sooner, it became apparent that Trump’s victory was ultimately going to fall short of a majority, and as of November 15, the truly non-partisan Cook Report tally of votes was confirming this. More than two weeks later, on December 3rd — a lifetime in terms of crystallizing the interpretation of an election, especially in our country — the AP was still showing Trump with 50% of the vote, as demonstrated by the screenshot we took on that date (by which point the Cook Report showed he was down to 49.83%).

And as you can see, lest anyone believe this display was merely the result of a rounding up from a plurality, AP’s December 3rd count showed Harris with 48.4%, thus clearly indicating that the association’s numbers should be considered as rounded to the nearest tenth. Even as of this writing, with Cook showing Trump having declined to 49.80%, AP continues to cling to 49.9% as his share, at least in the representation they’ve provided to the most likely place voters will find this information, a Google search on “popular vote 2024.” (ed. note: update: interestingly, having apparently served its purpose–locking down perceptions during the interregnum–the map above no longer appears when you do this search)

Why is this important? Well, we could potentially ask the angry MAGA respondents to the November 15 Cook Report announcement (or you could click on the November 15 link above to see for yourself), but is that really necessary? The reality is that in this nation of self-selected individualists from around the world, we’re virtually all descended from one of three ‘psychographics’:

• • People who risked everything for freedom from The Man by coming to our country
  • People who demanded that we live up to the ideal of freedom we promised was the foundation of our creed — and were willing to back that demand with their lives
  • People who had lived here democratically for thousands of years

And for all three of these groups, the meaningful, rubber meets road “consent of the governed” necessary for an American government to successfully execute its vision, has never, and will never, be determined by the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, or any other anti-majoritarian institution. The media can call vote totals the “popular” vote, as if it’s some subset of “the vote,” rather than the vote itself, it can tell us all the reasons why the Electoral College will never be overturned, and even why it shouldn’t be, but the biggest difference between the way Democrats reacted to the results of this election and the way Republicans reacted to the last one isn’t just a reflection of a difference between the parties — it’s also because the so-called popular vote matters to a people raised on core democratic values, democratic values that more than 80% of Americans believed were threatened prior to the most recent election.

Democrats were angry when Trump owed his victory in 2016 to the EC; they are decimated and devastated today (to the point of wondering if they even belong here anymore, or have anything to say) because this time, he won the “popular” vote, too. And truth be told, even if they live in a different reality, deep down Republicans are no different: why else did Trump and his supporters spend his entire first presidency giving out cards and creating other paraphernalia that showed he won more acres of land (and therefore must have really won — no ifs, ands, or buts) rather than showing off the electoral map, while modeling sore winnerdom for our children by insisting the entirety of Hillary Clinton’s 3 million “popular” vote advantage (and then some) had to be the work of dead and dead-to-him/them illegitimate voters and votes? Why else was 2020 GOP denialism focused on the theft of millions of votes (not just the much smaller number that would have swung the EC to his side), as well as the impossibility that Biden could have received 81 million votes (rather than the impossibility that he won the states he won — two of which hadn’t gone Democratic for decades), and/or the various ways Trump’s 74   million supporters had & have been cheated and disenfranchised (rather than the states who voted for him)?

All of the above is why it matters — in the real world and culture we live in — that he didn’t win a majority of the votes, and why the rest of this series will be focused on why the Dems didn’t win the “popular” vote and what needs to happen to change that, not what they could do to carry Wisconsin and North Carolina next time (answer: give Ben Wikler and Anderson Clayton more resources). It also matters because right after our media companies finished talking about how decisive, sweeping, resounding, commanding, and dominant Trump’s win was, it was inevitably time to trot out “the m word,” and start talking up his mandate.

And why does that matter? Well, here’s MAGA bête noir CNN — the GOP’s very definition of “fake news,” despite the role it played in getting their man inside the house in 2016,¹⁶ in an article ironically titled “Trump’s win was real but not a landslide. Here’s where it ranks,” which begins as follows:

Donald Trump can claim a lot out of his 2024 election win:

► It’s a comeback for the ages for a president to go from a pariah after trying to overturn one election to president-elect after the next.

► A rightward shift in election results gives him a mandate to start trying to remake the US government like he promised he would.

Whoa…are they saying what it sounds like they’re saying, that the people who voted for him were voting for Project 2025? Really? Here’s what an NBC News poll conducted in late September¹⁷ had to say about that:

And NBC’s hardly the only pollster to reach this conclusion (eg here are polls from Navigator, UMass-Amherst [late July] UMass-Amherst [late October] on the same topic). In fact, The New Republic¹⁸ reported that the surge in frantic queries from voters about changing their ballots occurred after “Trump allies admitted Project 2025 was the plan all along.”

Seems reasonable, right? And with this as the criterion, let’s look at the rest of what Trump promised. But before we do that, a brief pop quiz: Does anyone remember what mandate the media said Joe Biden — who actually did win a majority of the vote and, in fact. got the most votes in history — had the right to claim in 2020? Us neither, so we did a search on “Biden election mandate.” Here’s what we found among the top Google search results on that keyword string, with an emphasis on headlines, since the media knows as well as we do that this is all that many people read in most articles as they browse:

• • “Biden, still short of outright victory, declares a ‘mandate for action…’” — Politico
  • “Was Biden’s Victory A Mandate? Here’s How His Win Was Both Historic And Narrow” — Forbes
  • “Biden defeated Trump, but Democrats didn’t win a mandate. They ignore that at their peril.” — NBC News
  • “Biden claims mandate as he stops short of declaring victory in presidential race” — Los Angeles Times
  • “Analysis: Biden claims a mandate that will quickly be tested” — Associated Press
  • “Biden’s mandate math” — Axios
  • “It’s a constitutionally mandated ritual that’s typically no more than a curious afterthought following a presidential election, but the ceremonial vote took on newfound significance this year as President Donald Trump and his GOP allies made unprecedented efforts to subvert the popular will of the voters and overturn Biden’s November victory.” — CNN¹⁹
  • “Biden claims ‘mandate’ while election vs. Trump remains undecided” — Fox News

We could go on (and on), but nuff said. Back to Trump. Back to tariffs. As we mentioned, a majority of Americans supported his call for tariffs, so he’s surely got a mandate to impose those, right?

Not exactly.

Because a poll done in mid-December by one of the same organizations that reported majority support for tariffs before the election (Reuters) revealed some important fine print voters weren’t able to include on their ballots:

And it seems that all those post-election searches by the public we cited earlier, on what tariffs actually are and how they actually work, were apparently productive, because a post-election poll conducted by Harris in late November found:

Smart voters —smart, that is, once they had the time to get the information the media treated as a one-day story amid a blizzard of (mis)information (if they covered it at all). Targeted tariffs can be an important industrial policy tool, but across-the-board tariffs of 20% on all imports, 60% (or more) on all imports from our third largest trading partner, and 25% tariffs on our top two, as revenue-generators, no less, are practically guaranteed to be inflationary. They’ve also been known to broaden, deepen, and prolong serious economic depressions.

How about mass deportations? Surely he has a mandate to do that; polls conducted as recently as January 10–12 of this year show nearly two-thirds of Americans (66%) have his back on this.

Except that his ‘permission structure’ turns out to be about as viable as Shylock’s to take his pound of flesh. In October, Data For Progress drilled down on the concept of “mass deportation” to find out what we really understand and mean by it by presenting 1,195 likely voters with nine different scenarios, each representing the history and/or status of a substantial number of “illegals” Trump has said he wants to sweep back across the border. As you can see below, in only two cases of nine do our fellow Americans favor rounding up illegal immigrants who fall into these categories. And when it comes to “the how,” Trump’s plans are just as unpopular, or even more so.

You might look at this and say, e.g., hey, Trump never said he was going to “deport people who are here legally,” oh, but actually he did, repeatedly. The Haitians of Springfield, OH, and others are here legally as part of the Immigration Law of 1990, and both he and his VP have vowed to deport them all anyway.

Beyond this, Trump has also said he would deport anyone who, in his view, “hates America,” which ‘technically’ means not even citizens are safe, since the power to deport lies solely in the Executive Branch. And, in fact, the last time a mass deportation was attempted, the notorious “Operation Wetback” during the Eisenhower years, US citizens were, in fact, deported and dropped in the middle of nowhere near where they came from. In the 1930’s, during the so-called “Great/Mexican Repatriation” under Hoover and FDR, between 40–60% of those deported were Americans.

And if you think real support for his emigration plan is low now, just wait until some pollster decides to apply Reuters’ post-election tariff conditional. When someone asks Americans if they support mass deportations “if the result is inflationary,” which it will be, his already bogus “mandate” on the issue will almost certainly become a knife falling so fast no one will be able to catch it.

So he doesn’t have a mandate for any of his most prominent promises — except the one where his policies will do exactly the opposite of what he promised — but what about the others? How about tax cuts for the wealthy, for example? Mandate? Nope. Quite the opposite.

Sources: 53 polls from 22 organizations, including CATO, Gallup (5), Hill-Harris X (4), Ipsos, Morning Consult (2), New York Times (3), NPR, Pew (3), Quinnipiac, Real Clear Opinion Research, YouGov (5), and others

55% want to see the taxable threshold for estates lowered from $11 million back down to $3.5M, too.

Repealing and replacing Obamacare? Non.

Before Obamacare, private insurance was preferred over a government-run system 61%-34%. Today the choice is within the margin of error, 49%-46%

Rolling back Biden’s climate change initiatives? A hard no in every possible way:

If you’re having trouble getting around the “progress” in the name of the source, and what it implies (in spite of the fact that the firm is in the top 10 percent of pollsters, according to 538), maybe the Republican lawmakers who have been lobbying Trump not to kill Biden’s initiatives in this area can convince you. They’re politicians, after all, which means they always have their ear to the ground and finger in the air. 75% of the public may have no idea how the Inflation Reduction Act is benefiting them (if they did, support for the environment in the chart above would almost certainly be even higher), but their elected representatives do, and they don’t want to catch the blame if the new administration pulls the plug.²⁰

Ending aid to Ukraine? Nyet.

(ed. note: Trump’s recent full-throated embrace [feel free to use your imagination] of Putin is, if anything, pushing Americans further in Ukraine’s direction. YouGov’s most recent poll on the issue finds 62% support Ukraine in the war while only 4% support Russia; those who believe aid to Ukraine should increase or remain the same outnumber those who believe it should be reduced (not ended) by 20 points,²¹ and 61% believe the war should end with Russia out of all Ukraine’s territory)

Eliminating the Department of Education? Bu xing.

Pardoning the J6 Insurrectionists? Nein, danke.

A majority of Republicans opposed the first two pardon categories, and the only actions we, the people, ranked as lower in priority were tariffs (6%), ending Title IX protections for transgender students — done! (5%), withdrawing from the Paris climate agreement — done! (3%), and investigating Jack Smith (1%)

And let’s be clear: when asserting something as consequential as a mandate, even claiming 49.8% support for it is a gross distortion of reality. There are 244,666,890 eligible voters in our country, Trump won 31.6% of them;²² and 341 million Americans in the world in total, only 22.7% of whom voted for the Man In Fulvous. As we’ll show in part 2 of this series, considering non-voters to be de facto Trump supporters is a convenient elite/Republican fiction, while considering the will of those among our citizenry who can’t vote at all as being either inconsequential — or represented by those who can (a la the infamous three-fifths rule) —  is frankly un-American.²³

So what does Trump have a mandate to do? Well, as usual he’s doing his best to stay ahead of the pollsters. Officially and technically, we have no idea (yet) whether we, the people, favor:

• Invading Canada
• Buying or Seizing Greenland
• Seizing the Panama Canal
• Renaming the Gulf of Mexico or Denali
• Suspending all medical research
• Dissolving the National Security Council
• Censoring the CDC (during an avian flu epidemic)
• Taking away Anthony Fauci’s security detail (and others’)
• Suspending funding for US AID
• Killing every “DEI” initiative and firing all “DEI” employees
• Removing (and not replacing) all the inspector generals who provide independent oversight
• Locking US Treasury officials out of the US Treasury
• Pick an EO, any EO
• Whatever happened the day you’re reading this

But based on the chasmic disconnect between the public and the most prominent campaign promises we know about, we have a pretty good idea what the surveys are gonna to say in this family feud.

At the end of the day, as political strategist Anat Shenker-Osorio’s research shows, Trump may not only have no mandate at all, but thanks to what she calls a “credulity chasm” in the electorate, he may, in fact, have what might be better characterized as an unprecedented anti-mandate instead.

When asked about thirteen potential outcomes of the election — based on what Trump either directly, indirectly, or implied he would do if he were elected, an average of more than 8 in 10 of Harris supporters said he’d do each thing queried, while fewer than 3 in 10 Trump supporters, on average, agreed. Some of the things Shenker-Osorio asked about might seem too far-fetched for anyone to have been reasonably expected to foresee them, let alone the average MAGA — the government ending disaster relief funding, for example, or defunding public schools in some states — but have you been following the news? Do you think more than 8 in 10 Harris supporters are clairvoyant? Lucky? Well, do ya?

We’ve joked since 11/5 that if he was smart, Trump would simply take credit for everything Biden had done and spend the next four years golfing in an undisclosed location (executive time!). And during the halcyon days of late December and early January, Trump himself seemed to realize this. As Inauguration Day approached, he began scuttling back from all his top promises like an exposed crab, the receding tide seeming to reveal that perhaps the sticker below had been right all along:

But then he took office, and like clockwork, on every day since, a curious remark made by a Putin spokesman after the election has begun to make more and more sense.

Which inclines us to seek out a silver lining, something we’ve found we have to do from time to time where Trump is concerned — out of sheer self-preservation. For example…

• Silver lining: The selection (and “re-election”) of Trump proves that nothing is impossible in politics
• Silver lining: The rise of Trump awakened the entire country that had been asleep at the wheel to the reality that politics matter (at least it did until 11/5/24; since then it’s seemed like the medication has started to wear off, a la Awakenings)

In the case of what we’ve been discussing here today, we’re hoping for the following national flash of insight (especially in the media), memorialized in sterling:

To Trump and his acolytes, complete capitulation is their due. “Elections have consequences,” and “to the victor belongs the spoils.” The latter was first uttered by a supporter of one of his favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson. But such language appears nowhere in the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution, in part because the man who said it had not yet been born when we declared our independence (and was only three years old when the Constitution was ratified), but mostly because it clashes — violently — with the Founders’ vision.

The Founders considered and plainly intended the president to be a servant of the people — all the people — and frankly, subservient to the people’s representatives as well (the Executive Branch was so called because its primary job was to execute the will of Congress, the House in particular). The scope of work for a servant of the people — all the people — does not include picking winners and losers, presiding over who to reward and who to punish. That is the work of a king. As we look at what seems to be unfolding and consider what our attitude to it should be, we’re reminded of the words of Andrew Jackson himself — a man who fancied himself the people’s president — when told by the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court to do something he didn’t think was right:

“He has made his decision, now let him enforce it.”

It’s abundantly clear that ours was the most mis- and dis-informed electorate in our nation’s history — every time a pollster tests any aspect of the electorate’s beliefs, another veil of ignorance is revealed — and this will remain true no matter how many times Trump mutters or intones “promises made, promises kept” like a used car salesman, distributing lists in support of this claim a la those county count election cards he tossed around the last time he occupied the oval. What do we owe to a man who seems determined to act contrary to the wishes of we, the people, on issue after issue after issue, after having been more vague, obfuscatory, and contradictory about what he planned to do than any major party candidate in our history, to the point where it’s clear many of his supporters had no idea what they were voting for, all the while telling literally countless lies — more than 600 in his first debate with Biden alone?

In Ukraine, where the spirit of ’76 and that of our Founders seems to reside to a greater extent than its place of origin these days, electoral dishonesty has already had its just reward — twice — in the 21st century. In England, prevarication can void the result of an election, and last year Wales became the first country to criminalize lying to gain or retain power, earning it encomiums from around the world, like this from the Toronto Star, which, among its observations, opined that the country had “put the great back in Great Britain.”

In part 2 of this series, we’ll discuss the numbers from November’s election that don’t make sense, the ones that do, and what to do about same — plus all of the above — without ending up in the midst of Maidan on the Mall. Let us know if you’d like to be alerted (by email) when it’s published.

Until then, Donald Trump would be well-advised to remember this:

Especially when a majority of us didn’t even vote for you. What you and your myriad supporters in the media would call a decisive, sweeping, resounding, commanding, dominant, runaway majority, in fact.

 

Creative Politics is the world’s first community-based political incubator, perpetually under construction, as we synthesize the best of liberal and conservative ideals with technology and history to generate policies, strategies, applications, and actions for the post-modern era that are well outside the beltway, and well beyond just talk.  All Creative Politics blog posts are collaborative, living documents, the way Madison and Hamilton would create them if they were writing The Federalist today.  Let us prove it (with credit) by leaving us a comment below.

¹ In addition to all of the above, as part of his end of term killing spree, Trump had the only Native American on death row executed over the objection of Native American leaders across the country–all tribes oppose the death penalty, and violating the principle of tribal sovereignty and jurisdiction (the crime was committed by one member of the Navajo tribe against two other members of the tribe on tribal lands). Back

² Actually they don’t, not anymore. More on that in part three of this series. Back

³ E.g. in 2016, it drip, drip, dripped documents it knew were stolen from the Democratic Party by a hostile foreign power–throughout the campaign, and on a daily basis in the critical month of October.  When a large trove of highly sensitive materials damaging to the Biden administration and Ukraine was purloined by a young MAGA and leaked on a Discord server, they not only published these documents for weeks in similar drip, drip, drip fashion, but provided expert commentary on them–you know, in case the Russians or Chinese missed anything (in general, there have been hundreds of press pieces published during the first “good war” since WWII that would have been considered seditious–substitute Hitler for Putin, Nazis for Russians, our allies or our own military for Ukraine or our own military–had they been published during that war).  But when another hostile foreign power stole documents from the Republicans and the Trump campaign in the run-up to the 2024 election and sent these materials to leading news organizations, they published not a word of any of them. What happened to “the public’s right to know” and “the public interest,” guys?  Did it expire between 2016 and 2024, surrounded by enemies, after a long and productive life spanning more than 200 years?  Or are you’all just the self-serving hypocrites that incidents like this seem to reveal? Back

⁴ A decision which, we’re supposed to believe, couldn’t possibly have had anything to do with antitrust actions leveled by a Democratic administration and seventeen state attorneys general [sixteen of them Democrats] against the $2.3 trillion company he founded that’s been the source of his wealth, or be a protective hedge for that company’s access to the tax dollar trough in the event of a Trump triumph, aka “obeying in advance“), could it? Naaah… Back

⁵ A promise he said he’d realize by cutting energy costs by 50% (while killing all efforts to promote renewables, now the cheapest energy sources on the planet) Back

⁶ More than ninety in all, in fact, and convicted of thirty-four, by grand juries and juries of his peers (and not declared innocent of any). Back

⁷ Maybe he figures they’re all just waiting to be raptured anyway, and won’t mind getting there sooner than later.  In some cases, he might not be wrong–we personally know evangelicals rooting for climate catastrophe for this reason (and can’t wait to wave bye-bye to folks like us, as they ascend and we’re consumed by hellfire.  Doesn’t seem very Christian, does it?  Or these days, maybe it does).  Back

⁸ We’ll have more to say about exit polls–a lot more–in part two of this series. Back

⁹ Unlike his old boss, Barack Obama. Back

¹⁰ While it’s true that the more political news voters consumed via legacy media, the better Harris did…
• As always, correlation is not causation — had the pollsters tested the amount of reading done of any kind, does anyone doubt the results would have been the same, likely even stronger in some cases (e.g. Harris support plotted vs. number of books read)?
• Had the media been meeting the Founders’ expectations (instead of those of their corporate masters), Harris’ support among those who follow political news “a great deal” would have been much stronger than 52–46, and these outlets would not have lost so much of the political news space and audience to social and other forms of new media. Back

¹¹ No doubt some wisenheimer will point out that since the NFL awards points in 2s, 3’s, 6’s, 7’s, 8’s, Trump’s electoral vote margin is the better comparison, which would be an actual argument to make–a bad one that literally misses the point, but an argument at least–if football fans hated touchdowns and field goals as much as they hate the Electoral College (even 46% of Republicans oppose it) and believed games should be won by the team with the most net yardage instead. And btw, here’s yet another sports analogy to explain why the EC sucks (over the history of our country, there have been more than 700 attempts to amend or abolish it – more than any other part of our founding document – in our opinion, it should have died with the 3/5th rule, no amendment necessary): Suppose you’re watching a horse race (as we’re regularly led to believe by the media is all we are doing during a political campaign), a horse race that looks like it will come down to the wire. If you’ve been charged to determine who won the race, which TV set would you use to make the call: one with fifty pixels of varying sizes (a la the EC) or one with 200–300 million (like the “popular” vote)? Back

¹² CNN statistician Harry Enten notes that this margin comes in at 44th out of the 51 elections that have been held since 1824. He goes on to point out that Trump had “very short coattails,” [the source we link from above, Tucker Carlson’s Daily Caller, leaves out the “very,” of course–but others do not) that there were “four states where a Senate Democratic candidate won even though Donald Trump won…the most Senate races that the [presidential] winner’s party lost in states the president won since 2004,” and that “You have to go all the way back before there were 50 states in the union to find a smaller majority for the incoming House majority that Republicans currently hold right now at 221.”  Not to mention the fact that Democrats made truly spectacular gains in two notable “democracy deserts,” the aforementioned North Carolina and Wisconsin, in NC sweeping the executive suite of offices and blowing up the GOP supermajority in the legislature that for years had allowed Republicans to override the veto of Democratic governments, and in WI, picking up multiple State Senate and ten State Assembly seats to wipe out long-standing Republican supermajorities there as well. Back

¹³ And of course in all three cases, the easier route, as Trump recognized in 2020– finding more voters, rather than changing the minds of those who cast ballots–would have required 2x as many votes as any of the numbers above. Of course, even easier, as we’ll discuss in part 2 of this series, would be to reduce the number of voters willing and able to cast ballots for the other side, as Trump, his party, and their foreign supporters amply and unconstitutionally demonstrated in both 2016 and 2020. Back

¹⁴ As determined by both trusted media watchdogs and Americans in general. Back

¹⁵ For both projections of winners and exit poll topical and demographic breakdowns (AP VoteCast). Back

¹⁶ And apparently still incapable of learning that for Trump, loyalty is a one-way back alley. Back

¹⁷ Poll conducted by Hart Research Associates (27th out of 250+ pollsters rated by 538) and Public Opinion Strategies (148th out of 250). To be honest, though, no amount of bias or incompetence can account for a policy that 50 times as many people feel very negatively about as feel very positively. Speaking as an organization with 30 years of experience doing research for the private sector, if we presented this result to a client, they’d probably incinerate every prototype of the product we were testing to make sure it never accidentally made its way into a production line. We’re talking about “Spring Surprise” or “Crunchy Frog” here. Back

¹⁸ According to Media Bias/Fact Check, recommended to us by conservative friends. TNR is “left-biased” (wasn’t always so, btw), but is rated by them as “high for factual reporting due to proper sourcing of information and a clean fact check record.” Back

¹⁹ This is not, of course, an article about Biden’s election mandate at all. It’s the second paragraph of the most popular, linked to CNN article that includes the words “Biden,” “election,” “mandate,” and “2000.” We thought the contrast with the first paragraph of the CNN article we cited above that references Trump’s mandate was curious and instructive. For all we know and can see, CNN never actually credited Biden with a mandate to do anything. At this point, we don’t think they–or any other legacy media organization–is worth the time to find out. Back

²⁰ As of this writing, Trump has suspended funding not only for all projects initiated under the Inflation Reduction Act, but all those initiated under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill as well.  As the Francophones say, on verra qui et qui. Back

²¹ The total percentage of those who said we’re either providing the right amount or not enough is down from the Gallup poll we cited, but that’s likely largely because YouGov, unlike Gallup, provided respondents with a “not sure” option, which 21% exercised. If the “not sures” had. for example, been compelled to pick a side, and, when compelled, had picked sides in the same proportions as those had already indicated a preference, the percentage favoring either an increase or maintenance of aid would actually been 2+ points higher than what Gallup found previously. Back

²² And frankly, based on the media’s fixation on “shy Trump supporters” who always come out of the woodwork when he’s on the ballot, and his own campaign’s boasts that their voters would “walk barefoot on broken glass to vote for him,” it seems highly unlikely that many non-voters would have supported him if they had voted–there’s only so much blood you can get from a stone.  A post-election Hart poll claimed “non-voters” favored Trump 49-37, but this was a poll of registered non-voters only.  In 2020, there were 159.74 million Americans who voted,  168.31 million registered to vote, and 240.63 million eligible to vote, meaning registered non-voters represent only 10.6% of the non-voter population, and are highly unlikely to be representative of the whole, given substantial differences in registration rates by race and age, for example.   Back

²³ As we’ve steadily and increasingly come to recognize from 1868 (that’s right, white men without property weren’t universally guaranteed the right to vote until Black men were) to 1920 to 1924 to 1965 to 1971 and, if there is any justice in a climate-changed world, will come to further recognize again soon Back

²⁴A metric (asking people about what others would/will do) that’s consistently proven more reliable than asking people about themselves. Back

²⁵And among whites who indicated race was a factor for them, the Republican candidate (John McCain) was favored over Obama by 19 points, whereas those same voters split 50/50 between McCain and white Hillary Clinton.Back

²⁶ And that race, gender, and race x gender can no longer be considered disqualifying since Harris came so close to winning despite racism, sexism, the hole Biden left her to dig out of, unprecedented voter suppression, and more Back

²⁷ No matter whose party the governor of the state involved hails from, or who’s the Speaker of the House Back

²⁸ I.e. solutions that either fall apart upon execution or result in daunting unintended consequences you then have to find scapegoats for, AKA the go-to way the post-modern Republican Party has finessed the same problem for years now. Back