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: Depending on how you count it, we’ve had either four or five prior presidents who did not win the national popular vote, and while that was a modest initial political liability for those presidents, their later success stood or fell on what they did with the office if they were able to win the Electoral College cleanly. The first two, however, didn’t pull off clean wins in the Electoral College: John Quincy Adams in 1824 needed the House of Representatives to pick him as the president after there was no Electoral College majority, and it was the “corrupt bargain” struck with House Speaker Henry Clay — who threw his support to Adams and became Secretary of State — that gave Andrew Jackson the ammunition to hobble Adams’s administration and defeat him four years later. Rutherford B. Hayes lost a majority to Samuel Tilden, if you take at face value the vote counts in Reconstruction and post-Reconstruction states where the election was marred by widespread violence and intimidation. But a backroom deal seated Hayes’s electors and gave him the presidency in exchange for an end to Reconstruction. He served one term, ultimately honoring his pledge not seek reelection in 1880. Benjamin Harrison narrowly lost the popular vote in unseating Grover Cleveland in 1888, and was then defeated by Cleveland in 1892. But that was simply a series of very close races in a 20-year stretch when neither party earned a majority of the popular vote for president; in the interim, Harrison undertook an ambitious agenda in office. John F. Kennedy, in the razor-close 1960 election, may actually have lost the popular vote depending on how you count votes cast for independent “Dixiecrat” electors in Alabama.