Trump wants to abolish the Education Department. History shows us that's a bad idea.

This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 12 episode of "All In with Chris Hayes."

President-elect Donald Trump is the first Republican candidate to win the popular vote in 20 years. The last time that happened was then-President George W. Bush in 2004. Bush's win was seen as a decisive victory by the pundits, securing re-election by just under 3 million votes out of the 111 million cast and he took the popular vote by just over 2%. 

But that’s a pretty close margin, just barely above 50-50. In fact, that’s a point one new senator-elect from Illinois, Barack Obama, made on that election night before the race was even called.

“I think that what’s important as we move forward, regardless of what happens at the presidential level — and I give the same advice to John Kerry or President Bush — I think it’s really important at this stage to recognize that this is a 51-49 country or a 50-50 country,” Obama said on Fox News. 

“Whoever is in power has to show a certain humility and a recognition that they’ve only convinced half the people. For us to move together, we need a much higher percentage of folks moving in the same direction," he continued.

The 2004 presidential race wasn’t even called until the morning after Election Day because of a close vote in the swing state of Ohio. If the state had gone the other way, Bush would have lost the election, despite winning the popular vote. It was even crazier because Democrats had a massive voter turnout operation that had hit its numbers in Ohio and elsewhere but Republicans turned out their voters as well, especially in rural areas.

So how did Bush win? And how were Republicans able to run up such big numbers in the rural areas? 

Well, remember, this was still only three years after 9/11, Americans were still rallying around the flag. Bush had claimed the mantle of wartime president and declared “mission accomplished,” even as it was already clear that the invasion of Iraq was becoming a disaster.

Immediately after that loss, Democrats began soul-searching and finger-pointing and wondering: How had they grown so out of touch with middle America? In the search for answers, many pored over a just-released book by writer Thomas Frank called “What’s The Matter With Kansas?” 

In it, Frank detailed how Republicans used culture wars and wild accusations against liberals as a bait and switch to win over working-class and rural voters and get them to vote against their economic interests.

As Frank explained on C-SPAN just months after the election: 

Against this backdrop, Republicans painted Democrats as terrorism-appeasers, as out-of-touch bleeding-heart liberals in urban enclaves and campus antiwar protests. And they interpreted Bush’s re-election as a broad mandate for all of their craziest policy ideas.

The president himself said as much, “When you win, there is a feeling that the people have spoken and embraced your point of view and that’s what I intend to tell the Congress,” Bush declared during his first press conference after the election.

“You ask, do I feel free? Let me put it to you this way. I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and now I intend to spend it.”

That second-term agenda meant an expansion of the war on terror overseas — and at home. It was a bonanza of privatization of government functions. But the centerpiece of this agenda, one championed by the conservative Heritage Foundation, was a plan to privatize all or part of Social Security, to make the federally guaranteed benefit more like a workplace retirement account. It was a long-standing Republican dream.

Bush claimed the Social Security program was in crisis and would be insolvent in just more than a decade. However, voters were not interested in hearing that. In fact, the harder Bush and Republicans pushed, the less popular Social Security reform became in polls. 

And so, Democrats on Capitol Hill did something rare, they dug their heels in and fought Republicans tooth and nail. One aide to then-House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi recalls that nervous colleagues would ask her when the party’s alternative Social Security reform plan would be released, and Pelosi responded: “Never. Does never work for you?”

Even with a Republican House and a Republican Senate, even with the “political capital” that he gained in his re-election, Bush could never even get his plan for privatizing Social Security to a vote on Capitol Hill because it was so radioactive. It was an unpopular idea that no one had asked for, outside of the Heritage Foundation, of course. It even contributed to Democrats taking back the House and the Senate in 2006. 

The reason I’m mentioning all of this now is that I think there’s something similar brewing with Trump. In a video Monday, the president-elect laid out his plans — as embodied in Project 2025 — on how he will essentially overhaul the education system.

That plan, of course, is to abolish the Education Department. It’s a goal, like privatizing Social Security, that has been a fever dream of Republicans for decades. It also requires congressional approval. The Heritage Foundation already has a plan for liquidating the department and assigning its functions to other departments, it’s all drawn out in that Project 2025 blueprint. 

But there’s a problem for Republicans: it’s wildly unpopular. A UMass Amherst poll from late last month found that “Six in 10 ... respondents oppose eliminating the Department of Education and firing civil servants and replacing them with political appointees loyal to the president.”

All of this is rumored to be happening despite the fact the Education Department oversees all of the $1.6 trillion in federal student loans that Americans have borrowed. It also enforces civil rights in education and collects vital statistics on enrollments, staffing and crime that schools nationwide rely on.

It administers billions in federal grants to support America’s poorest schools, including for students with special needs. If you have a student in your family who relies on special education or has an IEP, an individualized education program, you should thank the Education Department for that. It is the funding source for every IEP in the country. I wonder how many millions of voters are in families that rely on those IEPs. 

Now, the reason Republicans have dreamed of abolishing the Education Department but never actually done it is because it will disrupt the lives of millions of voters in ways they will remember come the next Election Day.

That’s why I find the lesson of Bush and Social Security reform illuminating here. Then, just as we do now, we have a Republican president-elect, winning a majority of votes. And then as now, they want to act as if they have a sweeping mandate to remake a federal institution on which millions of Americans rely. 

Well, based on recent history, I’m sure that’s a fight Democrats would love to have.