Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election with 49.8 percent of the national popular vote — compared with 48.3 percent for Vice President Kamala Harris — and 312 electoral votes to Harris’s 226. Overall, looking at the 20 presidential elections since the end of World War II, Trump had the fourth-narrowest margin in the popular vote and seventh-narrowest in the Electoral College.
And yet this objective fact about the 2024 election — that it was a narrow result in a closely divided nation — does not seem to matter, all that much, to the nation’s politics.
Two views of the 2024 presidential results predominate in our political discourse.
The first, held by the president, his allies and his administration, is that the election was an overwhelming landslide — a historic landslide — the most devastating victory a candidate has ever won in American political history.
Or as Trump put it: “We achieved the most epic political victory our country has ever seen.” In February, he told audiences at the Conservative Political Action Conference that he had earned “much more” than his 77 million votes and that his poll numbers were the highest “that any Republican president has ever had.” His allies and aides, likewise, repeatedly refer to last year’s election as “historic” or a “mandate” of some sort.
In this vision, Trump’s victory was so total — so complete — that the 2024 election was an enabling act for everything he wants to do. Does Trump want to illegally slash large parts of the federal bureaucracy and impound congressional appropriations? Oh, he had a mandate. Does he want to end diversity efforts, not just in the federal government, but across the entire society? Well, the American people delivered a landslide victory to him.
His every move — his every action — is justified by the supposed scale of his electoral success. Even the Constitution is supposed to bend in the face of his 312 electoral votes, hence his effort to end the 14th Amendment’s guarantee of birthright citizenship by executive fiat, now before the Supreme Court.
The second view of the 2024 election is related to the first. It is the idea that the election, while not a landslide victory for Trump, was an affirmation of the MAGA worldview. You can see the effect of this conclusion in the response of many Democrats to Trump’s re-election.
Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, whose presidential aspirations are as clear as a consommé, immediately pivoted away from his state’s social liberalism to engage with right-wing voices like the late Charlie Kirk, who hosted the governor on his podcast in March. In December, Representative Jim Clyburn of South Carolina said that President Joe Biden should consider a pardon for Trump as a way of “cleaning the slate” for the country. Several more moderate and conservative Democrats in both the House and Senate returned to Congress, in January, to back the Laken Riley Act, which among other things mandated federal detention for unauthorized immigrants accused of certain nonviolent offenses.
And not to be outdone, Democratic strategists have spent much of the time since the election fretting about the party’s unpopularity and distance from a supposedly conservative electorate. The theory of at least one new think tank, the Searchlight Institute, is that liberal and left-wing groups are to blame for Trump’s victory. “The folks who are most to blame about Trump are the ones who pushed Democrats to take indefensible positions,” Adam Jentleson, the veteran Democratic operative who started Searchlight, said last month in an interview with this newspaper.
You can draw a straight line from here to the muted response of many Democrats to the Trump administration’s unlawful rendition of Kilmar Abrego Garcia to a Salvadoran prison. (Abrego Garcia is now in detention in Pennsylvania.) To them, the vocal opposition pushed by liberal activists was a mistake that could only help the president by highlighting his strongest issue. That public opinion could be more nuanced — that voters could be unhappy with the cruelty of the administration’s immigration policies and welcome a response from the opposition — was lost on these Democrats and their allies in the media.
The same dynamic is at work with the president’s militarization of American streets. Operating under the assumption that the public would defer to Trump’s handling of “crime,” many elected Democrats have taken a wait-and-see approach, rather than straightforwardly condemn a clear abuse of presidential power. Even when faced with the unhinged proposal to deploy soldiers to “dangerous cities” so that they could serve as “training grounds” for the military, many Democrats are still afraid to be seen as vocal opponents of the president’s plans.
For Democrats who hold this MAGA-triumphant view of the electorate, the safest choice is to avoid conflict or confrontation on anything that isn’t obviously favorable terrain as shown in focus groups and public opinion polling. And so rather than fight the administration over its refusal to honor congressional appropriations — or over its lawless policies at home and abroad — Democrats are, at this moment, focused on health care in their negotiations with the White House over a government shutdown. They would rather cede vast political territory to the president than risk anything.
I should say there is one other view of the 2024 presidential election. In this vision, the election wasn’t a decisive win for Trump nor an affirmation of the MAGA movement, but a narrow, contingent victory for a former incumbent who was seen by a crucial part of the public as the path back to lower prices and a cheaper cost of living.
The case for this view of the election is straightforward. To start, incumbent parties worldwide lost ground to voter anger over inflation. If anything, the Democratic Party, with its narrow losses, overperformed relative to the international base line.
We also have something of a natural experiment. If, with its decision in the 2024 presidential election, the voting public was casting an affirmative vote to Make America Great Again, then we should expect high approval for both the president and his approach to the most salient MAGA concerns: immigration, crime and the economy. But if the decision was more contingent, then we should expect real public discontent with the president’s ideological crusades and radical agenda of national upheaval.
And that in fact is what we’re seeing. Recent polls from The Economist, Reuters, Gallup, Quinnipiac University and The Associated Press show Trump with terrible ratings with much of the public. Majorities disapprove of his handling of crime, immigration, foreign policy, the economy and trade. And overwhelming majorities reject his efforts to censor broadcasters he disagrees with. No other recent president — other than Trump himself in his first administration — has been this unpopular at this point in his term.
None of this is to dispute that the Democratic Party is in dire straits. It is unpopular with its own voters, unpopular with much of the broad middle of the public, and is so weak in rural areas that it may not be able to win anything other than a bare majority in the Senate, if that. But despite those red-dominant county-by-county maps you sometimes see, Democrats aren’t dealing with a crimson MAGA electorate. They are facing a familiar problem, one that’s plagued American political parties for most of this century: how to build durable ties to a fickle, cynical and often uninterested electorate that is skeptical of the ability of the political system to work at all, much less improve Americans’ lives.
To face this successfully may take a fundamental rethinking of the American-style political party, and a move away from a model of political consumerism — in which parties attract voters with minor message tweaks and appeals to identity and self-expression — and toward one of association, where the party is a participatory organization with purpose and structure beyond electing a handful of ambitious people to office.
But to accomplish this, Democrats need a set of principles from which they will not budge. Whatever compromise or triangulation that happens should be done with a specific aim in mind and a deeply felt idea of where they want to lead the country, rooted in the bedrock of those principles.
As regular readers know, I am very interested in the career of Abraham Lincoln, and here, I think, there are lessons for us in his political approach, exemplified in his 1858 debates with Senator Stephen Douglas of Illinois, the incumbent. Throughout the debates, when Lincoln defends his opposition to the expansion of slavery, Douglas accuses of him of being a racial egalitarian. Lincoln denies it. Douglas accuses Lincoln of wanting Black Americans to commingle with whites. Lincoln denies that as well.
From the perspective of today, Lincoln’s rhetorical concessions to anti-Black prejudice look ugly. They looked ugly to abolitionists of the time, too. But you’ll also notice, if you read the debates, that Lincoln never compromised on his opposition to the expansion of slavery, nor on his view of the Declaration of Independence as a paramount founding document that enshrined the principle of equality in American democracy, nor even his view — in opposition to the Supreme Court’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford — that Black Americans were part of the national community.
Lincoln’s strategy, in that election, which he lost, his subsequent bid for the White House, which he won, and throughout his four years as president, was to try as much as possible not to run ahead of public sentiment, but also not to sacrifice his principles in pursuit of that sentiment. He tried, instead, to keep pace with the public as its leader, and, whenever the opportunity presented itself, he sped up just a little, so that the public could match him instead and follow his path rather than the one it was on.
“Viewed from the genuine abolition ground, Mr. Lincoln seemed tardy, cold, dull and indifferent,” Frederick Douglass observed in his 1876 speech at the dedication of the Emancipation Memorial in Washington, “but measuring him by the sentiment of his country, a sentiment he was bound as a statesman to consult, he was swift, zealous, radical and determined.”
I am not in the business of giving politicians advice. But I will say that if the experience of Lincoln suggests anything, it is that there can be no real success without principle — ironclad and unyielding. You can tweak your message and follow the polls as much as you’d like, but unless you stand for something greater than the sum of your platform, your maneuvers and machinations will be for naught.
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Jamelle Bouie became a New York Times Opinion columnist in 2019. Before that he was the chief political correspondent for Slate magazine. He is based in Charlottesville, Va.
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