No mandate, no repudiation in election

Nobody asked me, but I find all talk of a mandate for Donald Trump and a repudiation of Hillary Clinton (and President Obama) ridiculous. Just consider the percentages, culled from various sources, that went to presidential candidates.

Among all eligible voters, Clinton received 26.5 percent and Trump received 26.3 percent. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson accounted for another 4 percent between them.

That means that some 43 percent of eligible voters did not show up at the polls. Close to 100 million of our fellow Americans didn’t cast a ballot for president, according to the United States Election Project, which tracks voter registration and turnout. (For perspective, the turnout rate was higher in the last three elections, and surpassed 60 percent in 2004 and 2008, according to the USEP.)

So while Trump’s victory came in electoral votes, it did not come in the popular vote, where he finished second to Clinton.

If you include “no vote” in the equation, Trump finished third overall.

Nonetheless, he’s going to be the next president of all the people.

But mandate? That’s what House Speaker Paul Ryan called Trump’s victory. But you can’t lose the popular vote and claim a mandate. You can’t run a divisive campaign as Trump did, playing to the worst instincts of the electorate — offending at least as many voters as you turn on — and expect to wake up with a mandate.

On the other hand, when the president’s party holds majorities in the House and the Senate, you don’t really need one to get your way.

And there’s little, aside from intramural disagreements and a determined fight from Democrats, that would keep Trump and Republicans in Congress from trying to do what some believe the majority of Americans want: the complete repeal of the Obama agenda, a sweeping repudiation of the last eight years.

But that’s not what any objective assessment of the numbers demonstrates.

Clinton won the popular vote. That’s not a repudiation of her or of Obama — who, by the way, won both the popular vote and the Electoral College in 2008 and 2012, giving him genuine mandates that congressional Republicans never acknowledged and did everything to undermine.

Similarly off-base is the idea that Clinton was undone Tuesday by a furor aimed at the “liberal elites.” There’s more to it than that. The furor that came up from the nation’s gut was aimed at Washington and Congress — the whole lot of them — and there’s no coincidence in Trump having no prior political or military experience. That might have been his greatest appeal.

Which brings me back to where I was last Sunday in this space. I still wonder what my fellow Americans want. With all that anger directed at Washington, you’d think voters would want new blood in Congress, which in poll after poll gets abysmally low approval ratings. You’d think there would be more movement against incumbents of both parties.

Since the election, there have been all kinds of explanations offered for Trump’s electoral victory and Clinton’s losses in battleground states. We’ve been warned against making too much of the fear-mongering, racism and nativism expressed by Trump during the

Maryland’s news station

campaign. That’s not what his victory was about, we’re told. It was about “economic anxiety” in the heartland. It was about people in fly-over country feeling ignored by the Washington elites. It was about the lack of good jobs. It was about the heroin epidemic.

People seemed to buy Trump’s argument that the nation was in utter collapse, and what we needed was a businessman who lost millions in casinos to fix it. And this at a time when data indicates steady, if not stellar, improvement in the economy, particularly for the middle class, after the mess Obama was handed in 2009.

OK. Even if most of those who voted for Trump did so for all these other reasons — and not because he spoke of Mexicans as “rapists” and suggested a ban on Muslims entering the country — we’re still left with a nation divided along racial lines. Look at the electoral maps. Look how we’ve sorted ourselves out. Look at the vote: Trump’s main support came from whites; Clinton’s came from a combination of whites and minorities, but not enough of both to counter Trump’s energized supporters in key states. And close to 100 million stayed out of the election altogether.

You might have to go back a century or more to find the nation as polarized after an election.

We’ve lived with racial and increasingly bitter ideological divides for a long time, and their existence, pronounced in the election of 2016, is a source of bitter disappointment for anyone who hoped for a postracial nation after Obama.

Now we have Trump, pledging to heal and unite after he spent so many months offending and dividing. On this count, we must wish him good luck.