Explaining the 2024 election's exaggerated mandate vibes

Ezra Klein poses a question that, as someone who has written extensively about mandates for essentially my entire adult life, I think is pretty important. Why does the narrow victory of the 2024 election seem to feel like a much larger political win – and political shift?

Part of the answer to this question is the relentlessly promoted narrative, driven by Trump’s unusual comeback, the unexpected nature of his political project in general going back to 2015, and popular vote victory. But politicians and media often promote mandate narratives, and they don’t always take hold like this. I attribute the success of the 2024 narrative to two related factors: the degree of political alignment behind Trump, and the psychology of winning.

As I think about what makes the Trump era feel different and more threatening to American democracy than past moments, I keep coming back to the way that powerful forces are politically aligned behind Trump and Trumpism. It’s think tanks, business interests (including, it must be said, corporate media), and the courts. What makes this moment uniquely dangerous isn’t the norm violations or the racism – nothing there is good, but neither is it new. What distinguishes this point in time from the Civil War or the tumult of the 1960s and 1970s (a time of serious political violence!) is that different power centers aren’t competing or frustrating each other – they’re aligned. This didn’t just happen; it’s the product of a multi-decade effort to consolidate power – across branches and levels of government, as well as public and private sectors – in a system designed to decentralize it.

Much of what drives this alignment is the interest in gains of power or resources. But I think part of what is driving some unusual actors into line – possibly including some Democrats who have made public concessions to aspects of the Trump agenda – is that it feels good to be part of a winning team. And it’s been a long time since that has felt available in American politics. Acting like a proper opposition party means confronting that you lost. The 2016 election’s ambiguous result – Electoral College and popular vote split – allowed both parties to feel like winners and losers as convenient. Perhaps more importantly, the Biden era rarely felt like winning for Democrats. The Dobbs decision undoubtedly contributed to this. But it’s also a feature of why Democratic politics seems to fall short in the “messaging” wars. Biden came to office with a lot of problems to solve, and addressing problems requires talking about what the problems are, who is affected, and why they came about. This produces a very psychologically unsatisfying discourse not well-suited to the current media environment. And solutions are often slow and riddled with tradeoffs. Even if they address the underlying problems, they don’t solve the messaging issues. Much of this can be applied to the Obama era as well – if the goal is actually governing, the psychological high of winning an election doesn’t last long.

In other words, the false sense of a 2024 mandate is the product of long-term forces that shape our politics. That doesn’t make it any more real, or any more durable. I agree with Klein that there are lots of ways this can fall apart: overreach, infighting and the reality of a very divided American public. But the 2024 election and the response to it have already illustrated a lot about how stories about election results are really stories about the larger state of politics.