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There is, at this writing, a better-than-even chance that Democrats will recapture the House of Representatives. They also have a shot at the Senate. If either or both happens, Democrats will declare victory. That’s fair.
They will claim a mandate. They will describe their win as vindication of their candidates and their ideas. Unfair. And dumb.
About “mandate” and “vindication”: As Inigo Montoya famously says in “The Princess Bride,” “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”
To be fair to the future probably victorious Democrats of mid-November 2026, both parties overstate the extent to which voters want them to aggressively promulgate their policy agenda. “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate,” Donald Trump declared after winning the 2024 election with 49.7% of the popular vote. Joe Biden claimed “a mandate for action” while the 2020 votes were still being counted. “I earned capital in this campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it,” George W. Bush said after earning 51% of the vote in 2004 — four years after the Supreme Court installed him in a judicial coup d’etat and while his Iraq War was spinning out of control.
Victory is usually clear-cut. Mandates and endorsements are ambiguous — especially in a two-party system like ours.
“We really don’t know why voters cast their ballots,” Julia Azari, author of “Delivering the People’s Message: The Changing Politics of the Presidential Mandate,” told NPR. “And one thing we do know about elections, and it’s very much true in 2024, is that elections seem to be kind of a broad referendum on the status quo.”
She left out an important qualifier. Figuring out why people vote the way they do is especially hard in a two-party system. In a multiparty representative democracy — there are 80 to 90 of them, far more common than our unusual duopoly — it is much easier to discern what people want. In a parliamentary system, left libertarians and animal rights activists and nativist nationalists don’t have to choose between nonvoting and voting for a party they barely agree with. Whatever you believe, there’s probably a party for that.
Where there are only two choices on the ballot, it is impossible for most citizens to select a party with whom they mostly agree. People vote for the party they disagree with least. Or they vote against the party they disagree with most — in 2024, most Kamala Harris voters voted against Trump more than they voted for her. Or they don’t vote. Restrictive two-party setups like ours have lower voter turnout than multiparty systems.
Strategic voting is also a thing in multiparty democracies. French leftists and liberals routinely turn out for centrist candidates in order to fend off the far right in the second round of presidential elections. But it’s sporadic and specific to circumstances.
Americans routinely cast anti-ballots because they hate the other party more, a phenomenon social scientists call “affective polarization.” Studies show that incumbent candidates are far likelier to be the target of negative voting than challengers.
It is hardly surprising that a challenging party or candidate would claim a sweeping electoral mandate. In the U.S., however, that ignores reality. More often than not, the number of negative voters exceeds the margin of victory in a given race. A successful candidate can and perhaps should interpret his win as a rejection of his opponent. He cannot and should not claim a mandate.
Misinterpreting voters’ intent is a major contributing factor to our toxic political culture. Yet it is rarely discussed or analyzed. In a two-party system, disgruntled voters have only one way to express their anger at the polls: voting against the incumbent for a challenger who will become the next incumbent to be voted against, and on and on and on. We’re trying to send a message. We wind up flailing like a dying fish.
Such a system serves the two parties. Defeat and exile are temporary. Sooner rather than later, the party out of power returns to majority rule. Voters, on the other hand, are perpetually dissatisfied because, first and foremost, they are never heard. Historically, representative democracies have failed when autocrats could make a credible case that traditional parties were unable and unwilling to address citizens’ concerns.
If Democrats win the 2026 midterms, they will have to contend with their lack of a veto-proof majority as well as a hostile president and Supreme Court. With gridlock the likely order of the day for the next couple of years, Democrats would be wise to frame whatever victories they achieve as a repudiation of Trumpism, and nothing more.
Polls clearly show that Americans disapprove of the Republicans’ handling of the economy, health care and execution of mass deportations. Those are opportunities. If Democrats concentrate on those issues, and resist the temptation to overreach on transgender rights, affirmative action and other identity-politics agenda items, they can set the stage for a reset. Knowing the Dems, of course, they’ll mess this up too.
Ted Rall, the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, is the author of the brand-new “What’s Left: Radical Solutions for Radical Problems.” He co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and The TMI Show with political analyst Manila Chan. Subscribe: tedrall.Substack.com.
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Rall doesn’t comprehend he’s living in a Jewocracy (where both parties are funded/directed by a united clique of Jewish capitalist-communist billionaires terming themselves ‘conservative’ or ‘liberal’ for the goy zombies) masquerading as a ‘democracy’. No matter what party ‘wins’– Jews/wogs win & whites lose. now you know brah
A.A.
It’s not hard to gauge the voter’s intent. It’s hard to gauge the fixer’s intent.
Especially if elections are rigged and the only two choices are in fact the same choice with cosmetic differences.
The choice is perennially between good-cop and bad-cop, both sold out to the same establishment, whose media misrepresent everything, as they pretty much always have. In 1854 the Republican Party was founded to take on the corruption of the Democratic establishment that the old Whig Party would not, and six years later they won the residency (much to the consternation of the deep state of the day). That is not going to happen again, you can be sure. I recall reading a piece on voting habits in which many said they chose a candidate because they liked the red color of his bumper stickers. I hate to even think it but maybe the elitist Framers were right, that the right of having a say in the management of the republic ought to be extended only to those who have demonstrated success in managing their own affairs, though a better litmus test must surely exist than the accumulation of private property under crony capitalism.
I am OLD. Like 80 something. I have voted in every Presidential election since Goldwater.
In that time, I have voted FOR presidential candidates
twice; Reagan for reelection and Trump 2024 (sort of). In all other cases, it was a vote AGAINST.
I don’t vote for most names on the ballot. If I can’t vote FOR, I just don’t vote.
You honestly believe you have a two-party system? Are you that naive?
Yes, You have two (or more) options on the ballot. But the first choice is a group of traitors loyal to criminal jews occupying Palestine. And the second option is …precisely the same thing. What choice is there, between the lesser of two evils?
All you have is the illusion of choice, the illusion of control over a system that regards you as nothing more than an obstacle.
Democracy does not work. It is designed not to work.
It is simply designed to fool people into thinking that their opinion matters. What is the point in giving the vote to millions of people who simply are not intelligent enough to comprehend what they are voting for?
The Athenians, who invented democracy three thousand years ago, realised it does not work. They abandoned it. And went back to the civic nationalism they had practiced for centuries.
This is the reason that America was never meant to be democracy. Does anybody remember when the country used to be a constitutional republic?
The ONLY thing that your vote does is simply keep the whole charade going.
The enduring mystery of Rall is how he managed to get in so much trouble with his utterly vanilla opinions. Like, Don’t claim a mandate? Unless you just fell off the turnip truck in Transcarpathia, your sole message to Dems is Go Fuck Yourself. Also to their GOP counterpart muppets.
You can’t vote your way out of this. You live in a failed state (a term of art used advisedly, you can look it up.) You need international solidarity and recourse to rebellion to destroy it.
The Democrats naturally will claim they have a man date, as they are the party of the homo-sexuals.
It’s odd the Red Tail, as I affectionately call him (that’s his Indian name), seems to think it matters what carney is running the carousel; the gaily painted horsies go up and down, Red goes round and round and nothing ever improves for the grey men dully rotating on this hell ride – but Red cheers nuttily, voting with wild abandon on which new carney will be chosen to start another 4 year cycle.
It’s really, really odd to observe someone who professes to not be a rube peddle this BS.
OFC the Ds will retake the house; it’s great kayfabe for the hapless dullards, the terminally gullible, and Ted.
Voting is nothing more than choosing whose hand holds the club with which you are beaten.
Actually, our elections are stage managed computerized frauds. Unless the PTB lose their nerve and honest voting breaks out.
(Ted knows this, he’s a social engineer.)
An interesting yet schizophrenic post. One the one hand Mr. Rall warns the Democrats about claiming a “mandate” and purports to give them advice on how to ‘not mess it up,’ on the other hand he is more down-to-earth when he points out that’s it’s all a charade and the two parties just alternate as one screws the voters over, they get voted out, then the opposition screws the voters over, rinse, lather, repeat.
I think I am about done with voting. It really doesn’t much matter, does it? The only thing that does seem to have happened is that Biden’s handlers opened the border to a foreign invasion, and Trump has stopped it. Sure, he has done it tone-deaf to optics, and exempting his billionaire buddies, and there is no way he is going to deport the numbers of foreign invaders that he claims he will (although the publicity surrounding these rather crude deportations may actually serve a useful deterrent purpose). But that is a major non-trivial difference.
Of course, if Trump keeps this up we may eventually start to get some power back to labor (supply and demand being what it is), and it’s likely that under pressure from his fellow crony capitalists and their eternal lust for cheap labor, he may re-open the border. We will see. But in the mean time, the 2024 election did actually matter in one major way. Maybe I won’t stop voting, at least for a bit longer…