Title: Donald Trump & GOP Congress: 2016 Election Mandates | National Review
Headings: Does Donald Trump Have a Mandate?
Does Donald Trump Have a Mandate?
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Three Kinds of Presidential Mandates
The People’s House
The Senate of the Republic

Content: Unlike the GOP electors in Alabama, these electors did not run as Kennedy electors, but five of them voted for JFK in the Electoral College, so he’s usually counted as getting all the votes cast for them. The closeness of Kennedy’s victory made him cautious, but no more or less so depending on how one counted those votes in Alabama. George W. Bush, of course, narrowly lost the popular vote, a fact exacerbated by the Florida recount — yet four years later, Bush won a popular majority. If Trump is seen by the voters as a good president, he may do the same — and if he’s seen as a bad one, that will be his undoing, not the popular vote in 2016. Until Barack Obama, every modern president to win reelection did so by expanding his voting coalition. A second kind of mandate is a voting-coalition mandate: what Trump’s own voters wanted from him when they voted for him. It can be hazardous for a president to deliver something very different in office than promised (think of George H. W. Bush and “read my lips,” or LBJ and Vietnam). What the 61 million (and counting) Trump voters expect is debatable: Beyond building a wall on the Mexican border and taking a tough line on trade with China, there aren’t a whole lot of campaign promises he talked about with much consistency and concreteness.