On Election Night, with characteristic modesty, Donald Trump claimed an “unprecedented and powerful mandate.” He certainly won the contest legitimately, if more narrowly than many observers initially thought. His popular-vote margin over Kamala Harris has dropped from around 3 percent on the evening of November 5 (or about two-thirds of Joe Biden’s margin in 2020) to 1.62 percent today. That’s about a half-percent smaller than Hillary Clinton’s national popular-vote margin over Trump in 2016. To make some other comparisons: Barack Obama won the popular vote by 3.9 percent in 2012 and 7.2 percent in 2016, and George W. Bush won the popular vote by 2.4 percent in the very close 2004 election.

Unlike Obama and Bush, moreover, Trump did not win a majority of the national popular vote. Though it looked like he was over 50 percent on........

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