Hillary Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States-there, I said it. Yes, it's possible that in the next two weeks some story so shocking, appalling and horrifying could come out about her that it would throw the election to Donald Trump. But given her clear lead in the polls and her vastly superior ground operation, it would have to be a truly monumental scandal, of the kind Republicans are always dreaming about but can never deliver no matter hard they try. Unless she turns out to maintain a dungeon in Chappaqua where she conducts gruesome medical experiments on kidnapped runaways, this race is unlikely to move enough to keep her from the White House.
But if and when she does win, you can count on Republicans to insist that she has no "mandate" to enact her agenda. Instead, they'll insist, not only should she put aside the policy proposals she ran on, but it wouldn't hurt to support some of what Republicans want-just as a show of good faith. After all, they'll say, the country doesn't really like her; it was only because she ran against Trump that she became president at all. So it would be terribly presumptuous to go legislating and regulating willy-nilly. And doesn't America need unity now more than ever? She wouldn't want to be a divider, would she?
It's important to understand that Republicans will say this no matter how large Clinton's victory is. They'll say it if she squeaks out a win by a point, and they'll say it if she wins by 10. But mandates are baloney.
We have a closely divided country, and no president is ever going to get the support of any kind of supermajority. Even if the president is doing a terrific job, partisanship is intense enough that the best approval rating she can hope for is around 60 percent at most. (President Obama is currently at 56 percent in Gallup's poll; it's the highest his approval has been since he was just five months into his first term, during the honeymoon period.) If the president could only pursue her agenda when nearly all Americans were behind her, she'd never be able to do anything.
Of course, Democrats might well be crying "No mandate!" if the shoe was on the other foot, but it'll be particularly rich coming from Republicans. If ever there was a newly elected president who lacked a mandate, it was the last Republican one, George W. Bush, who got fewer votes than his opponent and was put in office only with the intercession of a friendly Supreme Court. But that didn't stop him from following through on his priorities, most especially his beloved tax cuts, which helped turn the budget surplus Bill Clinton bequeathed him into a significant deficit. I don't recall Republicans telling him that he should dial back his ambitions because he lacked a mandate.
The truth is that the people who have to approve or reject the president's agenda don't give a damn about mandates one way or the other-they'll support what they want to support and oppose what they want to oppose, whether because of their sincere beliefs or the political demands of their districts and states. For example, after Sandy Hook, the government had a mandate to pass universal background checks, which polls showed were supported by nine out of ten Americans. But that didn't stop Republicans from killing the bill that would have created them, mandate or not. They certainly aren't going to be concerned about whatever mandate Clinton might have gotten just by winning the presidency. How often does a member of Congress say, "I really don't like this bill the president is proposing, but he did win a comfortable majority in the election, so I'm going to have to vote for it. He does have a mandate, after all"? Basically never.
Yet that's the assumption of the mandate talk: that if the president had achieved some hypothetical margin of victory, then the opposition party would be obligated to step aside and allow her to pass whatever she wants. That will never happen, no matter which party controls the White House.
The truth is that what determines a president's mandate is the kind of majorities she has (or lacks) in Congress. If she has majorities in both houses that's all the mandate she needs, and if she doesn't, things become much more complicated. That's why in the race's final days, Clinton is putting more emphasis on helping Democratic candidates for Senate and House; she knows that if Republicans control either one, her ability to get the legislation she wants passed will be approximately zero. You can bet that Republican members of Congress will declare that their mandate is to stop her from enacting her radical socialist agenda.
And let's be honest: Hillary Clinton doesn't need much of a mandate to move forward on her agenda, which is extremely progressive but hardly revolutionary. What she wants is mostly tweaks, modifications, and reforms to the status quo. She's not proposing any gigantic new government programs, or even sweeping changes to existing ones. You can complain all you want about there not being enough discussion of issues in this race, but it isn't as though she's going to shock the electorate by trying to push through some extraordinarily ambitious changes they had no idea she had in store.
So when Republicans start complaining that Clinton has no mandate, remember that what really matters is power: If they have the power to stop her, that's what they'll do, and if she has the power to roll over them, that's what she'll do. "Mandates" have nothing to do with it.
