Bush's Mandate

[dazzleman]

Practically speaking, a president has a mandate to do whatever he can get through Congress.

If an idea is popular enough, Congress will pass it, because they won't want to face the wrath of voters who wanted it passed.

So I think it's pointless to argue about whether a president has a mandate or not.  If he doesn't, he'll find out soon enough.

Some examples:
George H.W. Bush - based his 1988 campaign on the Pledge of Allegiance and swipes at harebrained liberal ideas like unsupervised furloughs for murderers, and proposed almost nothing specific.  Then he wasn't able to get anything through Congress.

Jimmy Carter - ran on a platform of honesty.  Proposed a whole bunch of general ideas, but little specific.  Got almost nothing passed despite having a Democratic Congress in both houses for the full four years.

Ronald Reagan - ran on a specific platform of tax cuts and defense spending increases.  Pushed both through Congress.  In his second term, he ran on "morning in America" but as an exception to the rule, he did pass major tax reform in his second term.

This time, Bush made non-specific proposals regarding social security reform and tax reform, and of course promised to keep up the pressure on terrorism and win in Iraq.  That is his mandate as far as it goes.  I am generally aware of what he wants to propose re social security, and would support it if the details make sense.  I have no idea what how he wants to reform taxes.

[dazzleman]

Bush had much less appeal in the Kerry counties, on average,  than Kerry did in the Bush counties.

I was thinking about this one, and I'm not sure you're right.  Thinking about it, I would say that in a close election, the person whose votes are distributed more "efficiently" can win the electoral vote and lose the popular vote.

This is what happened with Bush in 2000.  Gore won the popular vote, but his votes were concentrated more in places where he was very strong, whereas Bush's votes were spread out among more states that were carried with smaller margins (excepting the thinly populated mountain west).

This time, the results were reversed.  A swing of 65,000 votes in Ohio would have allowed Kerry to win the electoral college even while Bush had a popular vote margin 7X bigger than Gore's margin in 2000.  This suggests to me that in general, Bush carried his states more strongly, while Kerry penetrated into a larger area relative to his vote count.  This is borne out by the fact that while Bush's vote total increased significantly from 2000, his electoral vote count did not.  Kerry almost maintained Al Gore's electoral vote count, with a smaller share of the popular vote relative to Bush.  It seems then that this time, Kerry had a more efficient distribution of his votes, which translates into less appeal in the Bush states than Bush had in the Kerry states.  (I hope this all makes sense!).