Man dates
By 
This is the second time a Republican presidential candidate has gotten a plurality of the popular vote, which means Republicans are claiming a WORLD HISTORIC MANDATE. For example, ElonSwamy’s Wall Street Journal blog in which they outline their plan to destroy the federal administrative state:
Thankfully, we have a historic opportunity to solve the problem. On Nov. 5, voters decisively elected Donald Trump with a mandate for sweeping change, and they deserve to get it.
They will get it good and hard, all right, and I suppose on some level they deserve it. But this election was about “muh eggs are too expensive and immigrants are taking muh jerbs and eating muh pets,” not “we must enact Mr. Robert Nozick’s Anarchy. State and Utopia,” This election was a rejection of Joe Biden, however fairly, but not some kind of triumph for the Republican Party:
Trump, in the wee hours of that Wednesday morning, called it an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” And prominent Republicans have spoken as if the voters’ verdict is justification to do pretty much whatever Trump wants — to launch into a far-reaching overhaul of American government and confirm extreme Cabinet picks with extensive baggage, for example.
But as the fuller election results roll in, that claim begins to erode.
And a more holistic look — at races not just for president and the Senate but also for the House and state legislatures — reinforces the reality that voters actually didn’t shift toward Republicans that much.
We learned a while back that Republicans lost most of the swing-state Senate races — four of five. They flipped the chamber because they won in three red states that Trump carried by double digits.
Then we learned that Trump didn’t even win a majority of the popular vote, and his popular-vote margin over Vice President Kamala Harris (currently at 1.7 points and falling) ranks on the low side for recent history. He still won — and swept the swing states in a surprisingly decisive electoral-college result — but a majority of voters didn’t support him.
And now it’s increasingly evident that Republicans could actually lose ground in the House. Democrats’ gains in California’s razor-thin 13th District race suggest they could flip that seat and actually wind up with a net gain of one seat. If they did, the likely result (a 220-215 GOP majority) would be the second-smallest House majority in history — not exactly the stuff of overwhelming mandates.
These results are particularly unimpressive in a context in which incumbent parties are getting routinely slaughtered all over the world. As with 2004 but worse since Republicans are going to govern even further from the right and probably get more done, I don’t think voters are actually going to like what’s going to get done to them. But by the time the backlash hits there will be a lot of damage that can’t be undone.