--- title: Donald Trump and the Republicans Have No Mandate description: The President-elect lost the popular vote and Republicans lost Congressional seats—Democrats should stop mourning and start acting canonical: https://time.com/4608547/donald-trump-republicans-no-mandate/ author: Jesse Ferguson article:opinion: true article:content_tier: free article:published_time: 2016-12-21T13:10:06.000Z article:modified_time: 2026-08-04T08:04:20.680Z article:section: Ideas og:title: Donald Trump and the Republicans Have No Mandate og:description: Democrats should stop mourning as if they lost the minds of the American people og:url: https://time.com/4608547/donald-trump-republicans-no-mandate/ og:site_name: TIME og:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte6e5ac3e343d896f/6988b3a5f887dc9189e988b9/donald-trump-republicans-popular-vote-mandate-democrats-hillary-clinton.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 og:image:width: 4302 og:image:height: 2420 og:image:alt: President Elect Trump Continues His "Thank You Tour" In Grand Rapids, Michigan og:type: article twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: Donald Trump and the Republicans Have No Mandate twitter:description: Democrats should stop mourning as if they lost the minds of the American people twitter:image: https://static.time.com/v3/assets/bltea6093859af6183b/blte6e5ac3e343d896f/6988b3a5f887dc9189e988b9/donald-trump-republicans-popular-vote-mandate-democrats-hillary-clinton.jpg?branch=production&width=1200&quality=75&auto=webp&crop=16:9 ---  # Donald Trump and the Republicans Have No Mandate > Sponsored content. 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Named editors include Richard Hall (The Brief), Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs (Inside TIME), Eliza Berman (Worth Your Time), Philip Elliott (D.C. Brief), Justin Worland (Future Proof) and Harry Booth (In the Loop). Health Matters is written by TIME's health desk. #### How do I sign up for a TIME newsletter? Go to time.com/newsletters, choose the newsletters you want and enter your email address. There is no cost and no subscription requirement. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-nl-network-2026q3/newsletters?i=c7b40be8-179b-4125-b0ca-bc4f12cbaabb&cr=time-nl-network-2026q3-v1) ## Video: TIME 2016 Person of the Year: Donald Trump [Watch (HLS stream): TIME 2016 Person of the Year: Donald Trump](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/Q0tBuF3M.m3u8) (4:12)  _Published 2016-12-07. The 2016 Person of the Year is Donald Trump, the President of the divided states of America._ by [Jesse Ferguson](https://time.com/author/jesse-ferguson/) ## Jesse Ferguson Dec 21, 2016 1:10 PM UTC  President-elect Donald Trump looks on during "victory tour" event at the DeltaPlex Arena on December 9, 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. President-elect Donald Trump looks on during "victory tour" event at the DeltaPlex Arena on December 9, 2016 in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Drew Angerer—Getty Images by [Jesse Ferguson](https://time.com/author/jesse-ferguson/) ## Jesse Ferguson Dec 21, 2016 1:10 PM UTC The time for mourning is over, Democrats. We’ve had over a month. No, [Election Night](http://time.com/election-day-photos-2016/) wasn’t fun. Trust me, I spent two years on the campaign that lost; I share the grief and responsibility. [Donald Trump](http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2016-donald-trump/) is the next President, and a reasonable amount of [bedwetting](https://twitter.com/davidplouffe/status/757689065168900097?lang=en) is warranted. But, it should be fear for our country—not fear that we lost the American people along the way. We didn’t. This election wasn’t a rejection of all things we believe in. This isn’t a country that no longer resembles the one we knew. This isn’t a country where hate trumps love. Some failures are big and systemic. Some are unpredictable and idiosyncratic. 2016 is much more the latter. For a moment, imagine you didn’t fully expect Hillary Clinton to win. It’s the morning after the election. Your favorite morning show host tells you this: * Hillary Clinton got essentially as many votes as Barack Obama did in 2012 and won [the popular vote](http://time.com/4608555/hillary-clinton-popular-vote-final/) by nearly 3 million votes—winning by a margin greater than Kennedy’s successful race in 1960, Nixon’s in 1968 or Jimmy Carter’s in 1976, among others. * Democrats successfully reelected every Senate incumbent and even gained two seats. In fact, despite Republican control of the Senate, a majority of the members of the Senate didn’t even vote for Donald Trump. * Democrats actually gained six seats in the House despite facing gerrymandered maps and defying the historical norm of winning Congressional seats while losing the White House. Now how would you feel? It doesn’t mean we won the White House and still doesn’t mean we did everything right. Far from it. There is a lot of justifiable blame and needed introspection. But it does mean we still represent the country and that’s a trust we can keep if we work at it. Now imagine that same news cast reminded you that there hasn’t been a Democrat elected to succeed a two-term Democratic President since 1836\. And that there was a late-breaking intrusion in the race [from the FBI Director](http://time.com/4550453/hillary-clinton-james-comey-fbi-emails/), as well as successful foreign espionage [by the Russian government](http://time.com/4600177/election-hack-russia-hillary-clinton-donald-trump/), according to the CIA, to influence the election. I don’t bring these facts up as excuses. I say them to show that this election wasn’t a popular rejection of Democrats at large or even Hillary Clinton in particular. Nor was it an affirmation of Republicans and Donald Trump. But unfortunately, Democrats don’t feel the way described above. Why? Because we expected better. We believed the hype—both the media’s and our own—that we would win. I’m not blaming anyone else. I believed it, too. But just because you epically lost an expectations game doesn’t mean you epically lost an election. Let’s not fall victim to what Republicans are trying to do. They want us to forget what actually happened. That’s how they will build the perception of support for an agenda that voters rejected. President-elect Trump has already started to repeatedly claim a mandate for his agenda and a landslide for his win. Neither are true. Republicans have the right to govern but they don’t have a mandate for their policies. If we don’t start to make that point, each and every day, then we will wake up in a few months and find out Republicans have taken the country in a new direction. If we don’t fight back against unfounded claims of a mandate, or navel-gazing that this election was a total rejection of our party, we will be wondering why the Republican agenda has gained momentum in just a few short months. I accept my role in what went wrong. Everyone should. Nothing written here is meant to deny that. We lost when we should have won. And it’s terrible. We should spend time analyzing and thinking and strategizing. We should figure out how to reconnect with voters we struggle to reach while energizing the coalition we have built. We should improve our infrastructure and be ready for the next one. But we should do this because it’s important, not because we think everything we did and everything we stood for is broken. Right now it feels like Democrats around the country are attending a funeral or a wake. The problem is that we’re mourning a patient who is very much still alive. ## Transcript MUSIC ] Every year we choose the Person of the Year who is the individual who has had the most influence on events for better or worse. The Tod argue that anyone had no influence that Donald Trump over the events of this year. [ MUSIC ] I didn't get Beyonce and Jay Z and Goose Bernstein to get crowds, I had just me. And ideas that people wanted to hear. But there is a profound argument about whether his influence was for the better or for the worse. And that really is the challenge that faces the country came through this election season more divided conspicuously publicly than at any time through any election cycle that most of us Can remember. [ MUSIC ] We're gonna have a lot of jobs put back. I think we're gonna have a lot of fuel companies leaving our country. I believed we will be successful with defeating ISIS or bringing them down to a level where it's almost the same thing. And I hope I'm judged from the time of the election as opposed to from January 20th because the stock market has had a tremendous bounce and people are seeing very good things for business in this country. [ MUSIC ] One of the things that was remarkable in going to see him, to interview him, is to be in that Penthouse which is the most austiontacious, imaginable marble and mirrors, and gold. And see him in the suit and the diamond cuff links. There is a kind of distance that repressed him about, of how is it that the billionaire is the tribune of the working man? He said, he thought that it had to do With that he wasn't a phony, that there have certainly been wealthy politicians before. Doing some cases would bend over backwards to make themselves appear like the common man, or do anything that they could, eating the corn dog at the Iowa State Fair, wearing a flannel shirt in New Hampshire. I think he had a very strong instinct that his wealth and that flamboyant display of his wealth Was not a liability that it was actually an asset. [ MUSIC ] Donal Trump is very comfortable sitting down and answering questions, although he very frequently does not remotely answer the question that you asked. In one sense it feels very undisciplined and in another sense maybe it's very disciplined in that He knows what he will and will not talk about and is unabashed in completely changing the subject. Do you feel changed by your election, and how you do think, if I play this tape back in four or eight years, the office will have changed here? Well, it's a It's a very humbling experience, I can tell you, as somebody that loves this country, it's a very large country, but it's also an even more powerful country than the numbers, because, if you look at China, and India, and you have others with more people, but, when you look at what we do in this country, it's The most incredible place on earth. [ MUSIC ] A lot of people think that Person of the Year just because the nature of the name is an honor. And certainly there have been years where we have recognized people's whose influence has been altogether, unassailably worthy. Normally, that's not the case. I know there are a lot of people who disagree with so much of what Donald Trump said and are very apprehensive about what his presidency means for them and for the country. I think I would challenge them to suggest that someone else this year had more influence than a way greater Surprise than what he did in 2016. 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