November 07, 2004
Election perspective
Several things recently in the press had me wondering about the recent election. First I was listening to Bush and Cheney claiming their mandate. Secondly I was thinking about all of the press about the polarized and evenly divided nation. I decided I wanted an historical perspective so I looked up the numbers from half a century's elections and plugged them into an Excel spreadsheet and graphed them.
The first thing I was striken with was what it took to unseat an incumbent president. The normal re-election margin was wide in the popular vote and runaway in the electoral vote. Watergate and resignation unseated an un-elected Gerald Ford. The hostage crisis and a very popular Ronald Reagan unseated Carter. It took 3rd party candidate Ross Perot getting 19% of the popular vote for Clinton to unseat George Bush. In this light, President Bush's recent win was very narrow for a sitting president.
I was also impressed with how much the electoral college magnifies the margins in most elections, though that doesn't seem to be the case in GW Bush's elections. No one has been that close in memory, so the discussion about the evenly divided country seems to have merit. I don't know how much of a mandate the administration can claim but I think it is a moot point given the Republican gains in the congress.