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Let’s go back to the numbers for a minute:
245 million people were eligible to vote in the 2024 general election. 90 million of them (about 36% of the electorate) didn’t vote.
17 million people voted for Trump in the primaries. That is the hard MAGA base. And 76 million people voted for him in the General Election, for a wide variety of reasons.
So the MAGA base represents about 5% of the total population of 335 million. And 23% of the total population voted for Trump in the general. A total of 155 million people voted in this election (this will probably rise to 158 million when all the ballots are finally counted), and Trump got a little under 50% of them (76.5 million), to Harris’s 48% (74 million). So Trump probably won the popular vote by about 2.5 million votes, or 1.6%. This is the third smallest margin of victory in a presidential election since 1888.1 A LANDSLIDE! MANDATE! it ain’t.
What all these numbers mean is that Trump will characteristically overreach on this “mandate,” and that’s good because that will undercut his effectiveness. He already did this with his attempted nomination of Matt Gaetz for Attorney General, and probably will with Tulsi Gabbard for Director of National Intelligence and Pete Hegseth for Secretary of Defense, and maybe RFK Jr. for Secretary of Health and Human Services as well.
But Trump did enjoy a landslide/mandate victory among evangelical Christians. About 80% of white evangelical Christian voters (who represent almost a quarter of the total electorate) voted for Trump in 2024. And this time, nearly two-thirds of Hispanic Protestants and just over half of Hispanic Catholics joined them. That was a big change from earlier elections. In his victory speech on Election Night, Trump said “Many people have told me that God spared my life for a reason, and that reason was to save our country and restore America to greatness.” And on the campaign trail, Trump promised to “protect Christians in our schools and in our military and our government” and in “our public square.”
Evangelical Christians are overwhelmingly against abortion under any circumstances, and Trump delivered three Supreme Court Justices who he knew would overturn Roe v. Wade, and they did. And he moved the US embassy to Jerusalem and supports the complete takeover of the Palestinian territories by Israel, which evangelical Christians believe is necessary in order to hasten the Second Coming. And when the judgment comes, all nations and their representatives will be judged, and those who do not accept the Word of God will be cast into a lake of fire.
There is some kind of Oedipal retributional reckoning going on, with Billy Graham’s son and Bobby Kennedy’s son both kneeling to Trump. Why Christians overlook all of Trump’s decidedly un-Christian words and deeds and anti-Christian social policies and see him as their anointed martyr/savior is an ongoing mystery.
“Put on the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places. Wherefore take unto you the whole armor of God, that ye may be able to withstand in the evil day, and having done all, to stand.” (Ephesians 6:11-13.)
When Mike Huckabee takes office as the US ambassador to Israel, he will bring with him the beliefs of evangelical Christians that Jews should retake the entire area of biblical Israel, including the occupied West Bank and Gaza and the Golan Heights, to bring about events leading to the Second Coming of Christ. Huckabee has opined that “there really is no such thing as a Palestinian,” that Palestinian identity is “a political tool to try and force land away from Israel,” and that a two-state solution is “irrational and unworkable.”
Let’s hope that what’s “irrational and unworkable” is Trump’s desire to quickly transform the entire US government and America itself into an image of himself. I just heard Peggy Noonan say that this election was not really about Trump vs. Harris, but “Path A vs. Path B.” Almost half the electorate decided that they were so alienated by the current conditions that they were willing to roll the dice with Trump again, because whatever he would bring, it would at least be different from what is happening now. In that case, this may have been an entirely unwinnable race for an incumbent party in a post-pandemic economy.
God help us.
1. The only two wins smaller than this one were John F. Kennedy in 1960 and Richard M. Nixon in 1968, while real landslides include Lyndon B. Johnson’s in 1964 by 22.6%, Richard M. Nixon’s in 1972 by 23.2%, and Ronald Reagan’s in 1984 by 18.2%. Peter Baker, “The ‘Landslide’ That Wasn’t: Trump and Allies Pump Up His Narrow Victory,” The New York Times, November 22, 2024.
David Levi Strauss is the author of Co-illusion: Dispatches from the End of Communication (The MIT Press, 2020), Photography & Belief (David Zwirner Books, 2020), Words Not Spent Today Buy Smaller Images Tomorrow (Aperture, 2014), From Head to Hand: Art and the Manual (Oxford University Press, 2010), Between the Eyes: Essays on Photography and Politics, with an introduction by John Berger (Aperture 2003, and in a new edition, 2012), and Between Dog & Wolf: Essays on Art and Politics (Autonomedia 1999, and a new edition, 2010). In Case Something Different Happens in the Future: Joseph Beuys and 9/11 was published by Documenta 13, and To Dare Imagining: Rojava Revolution, edited by Strauss, Michael Taussig, Peter Lamborn Wilson, and Dilar Dirik, was published by Autonomedia in 2016, and in an Italian edition in 2017. The Critique of the Image Is the Defense of the Imagination, edited by Strauss, Taussig, and Wilson, was published by Autonomedia in 2020. He is Chair Emeritus of the graduate program in Art Writing at the School of Visual Arts in New York, which he directed from 2007-2021.