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: 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. 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.