Nathaniel Rakich and Amina Brown explain why “The 2024 presidential election was close, not a landslide” at 538/abcnews.go.com. An excerpt:

As we’ve gotten more data and had the time to put the 2024 election in perspective, the truth has become clear: Yes, the 2024 presidential election was close. With more ballots counted, Trump’s national popular vote lead is down to 1.6 points, and Harris could have won if she had done just a couple of points better in just a few states. Any argument that the 2024 election was a “landslide” is misleading. It relies on a combination of recency bias and using the wrong measuring sticks.

High expectations for Democrats in the popular vote, along with the widely circulated maps showing big swings toward Trump in virtually every county in the country, may have played a big role in setting those early narratives that Trump had notched an overwhelming win. Another was probably the media’s repeated warnings before the election that it might take days to project a winner. While that very easily could have come to pass, we may have overemphasized the point. It was also always possible that a winner would be projected on election night, which is of course what happened.

After it took until the Saturday after Election Day for media outlets to project that Biden had won the 2020 election, the relatively early projection in 2024 (ABC News projected him as the winner at 5:31 a.m. Eastern on Wednesday) probably made Trump’s win seem more decisive. But once again, that’s recency bias at play. The 2024 election actually took longer to project than all but three presidential elections since 1976. Apart from the interminable 2000 (when the race came down to a recount in Florida that didn’t end until Dec. 12) and 2020 elections, only 2004 kept us in more suspense.

….All in all, the idea that Trump won an overwhelming victory in 2024 is less grounded in the data and more based on a sense of surprise relative to (perhaps miscalibrated) expectations.

Why perceptions of the 2024 election matter

The debate over the closeness of the 2024 election may seem academic — Trump won; who cares if it was a landslide or not? — but it could have a very real impact on the ambitiousness of Trump’s second term. Boasting about the scope of his win, Trump claimed in his victory speech that “America has given us an unprecedented and powerful mandate” to govern — a narrative that caught on in the media and with many voters, too. In a mid-November poll from HarrisX/Harvard University, 71 percent of registered voters said that Trump had a mandate to govern, including 50 percent who said he had a “strong mandate.”

Trump is just the latest in a long line of presidents-elect trying to convert electoral success into political capital to pass their agendas. There’s just one problem: Political scientists who have studied the idea of presidential mandatesgenerally agree that they’re made up. It’s basically impossible to ascertain what voters had in mind when they went to the ballot box and whether a candidate’s win was an explicit endorsement for a specific policy or approach to governing.

And according to research by 538 contributor Julia Azari, a professor at Marquette University, there is no relationship between how often a president-elect claims a mandate and how big their victory was. In fact, Azari even found that presidents are more likely to claim mandates when they are in a politically weak position, as a sort of act of desperation to claim that their policies have public support.

But research has also found that, much like Tinker Bell, mandates can exist if enough people believe that they do. According to political scientists Lawrence Grossback, David Peterson and James Stimson, when there is a media consensus that an election carries a mandate, Congress responds by passing major legislation. Azari and Peterson have further found that politicians themselves, like Trump, can push Congress to action as well, simply by insisting that they have a mandate. And per Azari, when a president-elect insists that he has a mandate, it is often accompanied by major expansions of presidential power.

In other words, regardless of how close the 2024 election was in reality, Trump’s claims to a mandate suggest that Republicans are planning to govern like they won in a landslide.

Democrats would also likely claim a mandate, had they won the popular vote by 1.6 percent. But that wouldn’t be true, either. And with a margin of victory that small, you can blame almost any issue for Harris’s loss.

Trump should have nominated more Democrats and Independents for his cabinet to give non-Republican voters at least some buy-in. That would have been the smart move. Instead, he went the other way, the “in-your-face, Dems” route, pushed by the hyper-partisan ideologues in his orbit. Any hope that having Musk and Kennedy in his inner circle might temper their influence appears to be unfounded.