Donald Trump Has NOT Won a Majority of the Votes Cast for President

Story by John Nichols. November 19, 2024.

  • Trump’s Popular Vote: Donald Trump’s popular vote percentage has fallen below 50% as more votes are counted, particularly from Democratic-leaning states.
  • Narrow Margin: Trump’s margin over Kamala Harris has significantly narrowed, with Trump leading by just 1.68% of the vote.
  • Historical Context: Trump’s popular vote percentage is lower than many past presidents, including recent ones like Biden and Obama.
  • Mandate Claims: Despite winning the Electoral College, Trump’s claim of a powerful mandate is weakened by his narrow popular vote margin.

“America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate. . . a political victory that our country has never seen before, nothing like this.” – Donald Trump declared in the early morning hours of November 6, 2024, after all the polls had closed. Indeed, he claimed that he had won. Trump was excited by the numbers showing him with well over 50 percent of the popular vote and establishing a wide lead over his Democratic rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

Unfortunately, for the president-elect, the United States takes time to count 155,000,000 million votes—give or take a million—and the actual result will rob Trump of his bragging points.

Trump can no longer claim that powerful mandate. By most reasonable measures, the beginning point for such a claim in a system with two major parties is an overwhelming majority vote in favor of your candidacy. Trump no longer has that.

Over the weekend, as California, Oregon, Washington, and other western states moved closer to completing their counts, Trump’s percentage of the popular vote fell below 50 percent. And his margin of victory looks to be much smaller than initially anticipated. In fact, of all the 59 presidential elections since the nation’s founding, it appears that—after all of the 2024 votes are counted—only five popular vote winners in history will have prevailed by smaller percentage margins than Trump.

Trump’s popular-vote advantage has declined steadily since election night.

As of Monday afternoon[^61[ Percentage
Trump 49.94%
Harris 48.26%

Trump’s still ahead of Harris in the popular vote. He also maintains a lead in the decisive, though absurdly anti-democratic, Electoral College— slightly less than Barack Obama’s in 2012, slightly more Joe Biden’s in 2020—based on a pattern of wins in battleground states. So, the failure to win a majority won’t cost Trump the presidency. But he’s lost his ability to suggest that he trounced the Democrat. In fact, she’s now trailing him by just 1.68 percent of the vote.

Let’s put this in perspective: Trump is winning a lower percent of the popular vote this year than

President Year Percentage
Lyndon Johnson 1964 61.1%
Franklin Delano Roosevelt — 60.8%
Richard Nixon 1972 60.7%
Biden 2020 51.3%
Obama 2012 51.1%
Obama 2008 52.9%
George W. Bush 2004 50.7%
George H.W. Bush 1988 53.2%
Ronald Reagan 1984 58.8%
Reagan 1980 50.7%
Jimmy Carter 1976 50.1%
Trump 2024 49.94%
Trump 2016 48.2%

And, of course, Trump numbers are way below the presidents who won what could reasonably be described as “unprecedented and powerful” mandates. As Trump’s percentage continues to slide, he’ll fall below the thresholds achieved by most presidents in the past century.

Candidate Year Percentage
Trump 2024 49.94%
Harris 2024 48.26%
Trump 2016 48.2%
Gerald Ford 1976 48%
George W. Bush 2000 47.9%
Mitt Romney 2012 47.2%
Trump 2020 46.8%
Trump 2016 46.1%
John McCain 2008 45.7%
Michael Dukakis 1988 45.6%
Nixon 1968 43.4%
Clinton 1992 43%
Carter 1980 41%
Bob Dole 1996 40.7%
Walter Mondale 1984 40.6%
George H.W. Bush 1992 37.4%

Yes, some of those historic results were influenced by the presence of strong third-party contenders. But most were not. And the bottom line is that the gap between Trump and Harris is narrower than the difference between major-party contenders in the vast majority of American presidential races.

Why make note of all the presidents who ran better than Trump? Why discuss the narrowness of his advantage over Harris? Why consider, in addition, that the Republican majorities in the House and Senate will be among the narrowest in modern American history? Because it puts the 2024 election results in perspective—and, in doing so, gives members of both parties an understanding of how to respond when Trump claims that an unappealing nominee or policy should be accepted out of deference to his “powerful” mandate.

Trump, simply put in a two letter word that you don’t understand;

Trump’s victory was:

  • Not “epic”
  • Not “historic”
  • No “landslide”
  • No “decisive victory”

That won’t matter to Trump, who claimed a mandate even when he lost the 2016 popular vote by almost 3 million ballots. Four years later, Trump refused to accept his defeat by more than 7 million votes, and denied that majority support for Biden in the 2020 election amounted to anything akin to a mandate.