Trump Doesn't Have a 'Mandate'—Let Alone One on Abortion

While mail-in ballots are still being tabulated three weeks after Election Day, one thing is clear: The race was actually pretty close. Donald Trump won the presidency by about 230,000 votes across the so-called Blue Wall states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Trump may have won the popular vote, but only by about 1.6%—and he didn't crack 50% nationally. He got 4 million fewer votes than Joe Biden did in 2020.

This is not a mandate, despite Republicans claiming it was a landslide victory. Trump beat a candidate who campaigned for about 100 days and who didn't do much to distance herself from a deeply unpopular incumbent.

Yet Senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) appeared not to understand this fact during his Sunday appearance on Meet the Press, when he claimed that Trump had a mandate:

The top two reasons Trump voters chose him were immigration and the economy, per a Navigator poll released on November 21, but even that doesn't mean Trump has blind support to enact the militarized mass deportations he's planning.

I bring up talk of an alleged mandate to highlight this recent story in The Guardian in which anti-abortion leaders said they would push the Trump administration to enact nationwide abortion restrictions and bans.

Kristan Hawkins, president of Students for Life, told the outlet she wants Trump to enforce the 19th-century Comstock Act to prohibit sending abortion materials in the mail, and have the FDA rescind its approval of the abortion drug mifepristone. These actions could effectively ban medication abortion nationwide, and they could also threaten procedural abortions done in clinics. Meanwhile, Marjorie Dannenfelser of Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America said her organization would be pushing for fetal personhood—the far-right legal theory that fertilized eggs have a right to life under the 14th Amendment. Courts granting personhood to embryos and fetuses would not only ban all abortions, it would also imperil IVF as currently practiced.

These policies are incredibly unpopular, but look at how Hawkins describes the posture of anti-abortion activism like hers:

The election ultimately proved to be a mixed bag for abortion rights: despite Trump’s victory, voters in seven states passed ballot measures to amend their state constitutions to protect abortion rights. In Arizona and Nevada – both of which Trump won – those measures passed with a whopping 60-plus per cent of the vote.

Still, Hawkins feels like the 2024 election issued a clear mandate to her movement and the US government.

“Americans want less abortion. They don’t want more,” Hawkins said. “No matter what type of color lipstick you want to put on this pig, you’re still talking about abortion.”

Actually, people in the U.S. want the government out of abortion decisions. It just wasn't their top issue when deciding whether to vote and for whom. Only deeply cynical people could look at all the polling data and results from the abortion amendments and argue that Trump has some kind of national demand to restrict abortion. He doesn't! Remember this when Trump and anti-abortion groups try to jam it down all of our throats all while insisting this is what the people want.

Also:

• Speaking of unpopular laws, I wrote for Refinery29 about how Louisiana classifying mifepristone and misoprostol as controlled substances will kill women miscarrying or giving birth. Now, Texas Republicans are looking to copy the dangerous law.
• I recently returned from a lovely vacation in Portugal, where, like most of Europe, there is universal health insurance that covers abortions. If they can do it, so can we.
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