Will Trump or Harris be constrained by their margin of victory?

OPINION:

It is a depressingly safe bet that, irrespective of who wins — or who thinks they should have won — there will be violence in the streets after the presidential election.

Close elections tend to breed hard feelings and, especially recently, a sense that the results may not be on the up and up. That is especially true when both sides intentionally minimize expectations about their willingness to abide by the decisions of the voters. I was just asked what might happen if Vice President Kamala Harris refused to certify her own defeat. I was able to truthfully say that I didn’t know. Nor does anyone else.

The more recent and more significant problem associated with close elections, however, is the historical and traditional expectation that the aggressiveness of the winning side in pressing their policy preferences will, in some measure, be related to the magnitude of the electoral victory. In other words, until fairly recently, voters assumed that if you won a close race, you would — in an effort at proportionality — adjust your policy aspirations accordingly.

That self-moderation was in evidence as recently as the Clinton administration. As a reminder, Bill Clinton did not receive 50% of the popular vote in 1992 or 1996. In 1994, his political boat was swamped in a tidal wave of Republican victories in the House and Senate.

Mr. Clinton took the prudent course and moderated his policies accordingly. Working together, the Republican Congress and Mr. Clinton reformed welfare and passed federal budgets with surpluses for four consecutive years (the only time that happened in the 20th century).

The system works if you follow its norms.

President Barack Obama took a decidedly different approach to losing congressional majorities. Rather than work with Congress and adjusting to voters making him part of a split government, he threw a bit of tantrum and concluded that he had a pen and phone (whatever that might have meant) and was prepared to use them.

Fast-forward a bit and we land at the Biden administration, which passed two significant (and comically misnamed) laws — the American Rescue Act and the Inflation Reduction Act — with no Republican votes. Those laws are likely to cost the United States somewhere north of $4 trillion over the next decade, and because they are so large and were so partisan, they are going to be exposed to revision, rework and repeal.

It’s a bad way to run a government.

Relying only on your own team or only on the administrative state to achieve your policy goals ensures that the anxiety surrounding elections is intensified, as voters realize that elected officials have no intention of respecting the concept of an electoral mandate. The possibility of moderation is dead.

So long as one has the power of the presidency, one has a legitimate and moral right to use all of it without reference to those who might have voted for someone or something else.

Such an approach maximizes the chances of postelection violence as voters anticipate the consequences of the winner-take-all approach.

The dozen or so years before the Civil War saw three separate occasions when the House of Representatives was unable to function because it could not choose a leader (sound familiar?). In those same years, sentiments about slavery in the North had hardened to the point where it was impossible to imagine a political solution to the problem.

When President Abraham Lincoln was elected with slightly less than 40% of the vote in 1860, his attempts to reassure the South were fruitless, in large measure because it was clear that he was imbued with missionary zeal on the question of slavery and would eventually conclude that the size and composition of his electoral victory was immaterial.

Think about this election for a moment and ask yourself two simple questions:

Will either of these candidates be constrained in any way by the size of their electoral margin? Is that a good thing or a bad thing for the United States?

• Michael McKenna is a contributing editor at The Washington Times.