Trump: The Will of the People? (Part 1)

Ever since Donald Trump first took the lead in the GOP primary polls last summer, and especially since winning his first primary in New Hampshire in February, his supporters have been shouting that he has an absolute mandate from the voters, and that all Republicans who refuse to bow to Trump are defying the “will of the people”. “The people” is a little nebulous, but let’s take that to mean that Trump’s impending nomination is the will of the Republican electorate. Is that true?

Let’s start by looking at the overall vote totals for each Republican nominee during the primary, from 1976 through the present contest (the 1976 election was the first Republican primary in which all fifty states held direct elections, and there was a heavily contested primary race).

Year:	Nominee:	Vote Percentage:	Vote Total:
1976	Gerald Ford	53.3%	5.53 million
1980	Ronald Reagan	59.8%	7.71 million
1984	Ronald Reagan	98.8%	6.45 million
1988	George H. W. Bush	67.9%	8.25 million
1992	George H. W. Bush	72.9%	9.19 million
1996	Bob Dole	58.8%	9.02 million
2000	George W. Bush	62.0%	12.03 million
2004	George W. Bush	98.1%	7.85 million
2008	John McCain	46.7%	9.90 million
2012	Mitt Romney	52.1%	10.03 million
2016	Donald Trump	44.2%	13.45 million

So from this comparison, we can see that Trump has narrowly received more votes in the primary than any other nominee in the history of the Republican Party, as his supporters like to brag. Not by much, and the general trend of vote totals for nominees since 1976 shows a gradual increase, presumably due to population growth and other factors, but the accomplishment is still noteworthy.

What also has to be pointed out, however, is that Trump’s percentage of the popular vote is also the lowest of any nominee since 1976—only John McCain in 2008 previously failed to win an absolute majority of votes. Let’s follow this result with another comparison, this time adding together the total number of votes cast in Republican primaries for major candidates other than the eventual nominee. For example, the vote percentage and total given for 1976 will match the number of votes won by Ronald Reagan, as he and eventual nominee Gerald Ford were the only two seriously contesting the nomination that year; however, the figures for 1980 add together the primary votes won by George H. W. Bush and John Anderson. (There were no major primary challenges to incumbent presidents Reagan and Bush in 1984 and 2004, respectively.)

Year:	Major Candidates (Apart from the Nominee):	Vote Percentage:	Vote Total:
1976	Reagan	45.9%	4.76 million
1980	Bush; Anderson	36.0%	4.64 million
1984	Uncontested	---	---
1988	Dole; Robertson	28.2%	3.43 million
1992	Buchanan	23.0%	2.90 million
1996	Buchanan; Forbes	32.2%	4.94 million
2000	McCain; Keyes	36.3%	7.05 million
2004	Uncontested	---	---
2008	Huckabee; Romney; Paul	47.9%	10.14 million
2012	Santorum; Gingrich; Paul	45.5%	8.76 million
2016	Cruz; Rubio; Kasich	50.8%	15.44 million

As the second chart shows, Trump may have narrowly won more popular votes than any other Republican nominee in history—but he also saw far more votes against him than against any other nominee in history. Every nominee faces some degree of resistance from certain segments of the party, but the number of serious resistance votes cast against Trump, with state primaries remaining close through May, demonstrates the unprecedented scale of the pushback—not only from party elites and activists, but by millions of ordinary voters.

Tomorrow I'll look at some of those individual state results in more detail, as well as draw some final conclusions from Trump's overall primary showing.