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: But this will be a delicate dance for Democrats who depend on turnout from voters now demanding a hard line against Trump. Advertisement
A legislative mandate gets more complicated if Trump (as expected) pushes some legislation and nominees that appeal more to Democrats than to Republicans; in those cases, he will need both Democrats willing to put policy gains above partisanship and Republicans willing to do the opposite. Advertisement
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The People’s House
The White House isn’t the only source of power in Washington, of course. There’s also the Republican Congress, which has a much greater claim to a mandate than the newly elected president. Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives for the fourth consecutive cycle, and in the Senate for the second straight cycle. In so doing, they decisively laid to rest the popular Democratic claim that the GOP Congress is solely a creation of lower-turnout midterm elections. In the House, the GOP held 247 seats after the 2014 election, the largest Republican House majority since 1928, and successfully defended all but a handful of them in 2016: pending a runoff in Louisiana’s fourth district (where no one candidate got a majority but Republicans got 68 percent of the vote) and the final call of Darrell Issa’s