{"id":18122,"date":"2016-11-23T02:46:38","date_gmt":"2016-11-23T02:46:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=18122"},"modified":"2016-11-23T02:46:38","modified_gmt":"2016-11-23T02:46:38","slug":"trump-mandate-keeps-slipping-away","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/?p=18122","title":{"rendered":"Trump ‘mandate’ keeps slipping away"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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I don’t intend to beat this issue to death, but I do intend to drive home what I believe is an important point about the 2016 presidential election.<\/p>\n

It’s this issue of Donald J. Trump’s supposed “mandate” from the election result.<\/p>\n

You see, the president-elect is trailing Hillary Rodham Clinton in the popular vote total by an increasing margin.<\/p>\n

As of this very moment — at 8:32 p.m. CST on Nov. 22 — Clinton’s vote lead over Trump totals 1,737,744 ballots. They’re still counting ballots in Clinton-friendly states out west. Hillary’s vote lead will approach, perhaps even exceed, 2 million ballots when they’re all done with the counting.<\/p>\n

I am not challenging that Trump won the election. He has 306 electoral votes; Clinton’s electoral vote totals 232. Trump needed just 270 of those votes to be elected. He’s going to become our 45th president in January.<\/p>\n

He won it under the rules.<\/p>\n

Nor am I advocating an end to the Electoral College.<\/p>\n

However, Trump needs to be careful when he talks about “mandate,” and whether his victory awards him sufficient political capital to do all the things he vowed to do.<\/p>\n

Build a wall? Ban Muslims from entering the country? Revoke trade deals? Appoint arch-conservative ideologues to the federal bench?<\/p>\n

Yes, the president-elect won the Electoral College by a comfortable margin, but he’s falling farther and farther behind in the actual votes<\/em> for president. More than half of those who voted for president cast their ballots for someone other than the guy who won. Hillary won’t achieve a majority of all the votes, but her plurality is looking healthier every day.<\/p>\n

That vote deficit must give even a brash braggart like Donald J. Trump pause … or one might think.<\/p>\n

Then again, we’re dealing with someone who broke virtually every conventional rule in the book while winning the presidency. Still, he ought to take great care when declaring a “mandate” to do anything once he takes his oath of office.<\/p>\n\n

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I don’t intend to beat this issue to death, but I do intend to drive home what I believe is an important point about the 2016 presidential election. It’s this issue of Donald J. Trump’s supposed “mandate” from the election result. You see, the president-elect is trailing Hillary Rodham Clinton in the popular vote total … Continue reading Trump ‘mandate’ keeps slipping away<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14],"tags":[74,1424,1551,2139],"class_list":["post-18122","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-national-news","category-political-news","tag-2016-election","tag-donald-trump","tag-electoral-college","tag-hillary-clinton"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18122","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18122"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18122\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":18124,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18122\/revisions\/18124"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18122"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18122"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/highplainsblogger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18122"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}