Election Wrap-up I: "Squeaker?"

During his post-election bloviating (as to be distinguished from his pre-election bloviating), Dick Morris made a statement about the election results that has been echoed by many conservatives:

I predicted a Romney landslide and, instead, we ended up with an Obama squeaker.

I've also seen reference to how Obama "eked" out a slim victory, and various pundits refer to the fact that this victory fails to bring with it an electoral mandate, due to the closeness of the final result, as well as the fact that the GOP retained their House majority (the subject of an upcoming post). Karl Rove is a great example of this:

He ran a campaign utterly devoid of a governing vision because he offered little in the way of a prospective agenda. And because his campaign was unprecedented in its negativity and ugliness, it will be doubly hard for him to reach across the aisle.

This despite the fact that he had this to say following the 2004 (ie. Swiftboating) election:

[When] you expand your representation in the House and the Senate, in an election where the president ran on the record and on the stuff he says he's going to do in the future, you've got a mandate...This is the first president since Franklin Roosevelt to win reelection while adding to his party's numbers in the House and Senate. The country is still close, but it has moved in a Republican direction and this election confirmed that.

 So what is the truth here? Did Obama win narrowly? Was it an across the board blowout? Something in between? For the purposes of this examination, we will extrapolate final vote totals as did the Examiner website, using current percentages and remaining vote out to estimate what the rest of the vote looks like. Since the remaining vote is concentrated in Democratic strongholds and blue states (California has undoubtedly the largest outstanding count), this should if anything understate the extent of Obama's victory. Let's look at the stats:

• Obama is likely to win, in the final popular vote count, by a bit over four million votes. This compares to the 2004 Bush re-election raw popular vote advantage of just over three million votes. As a percentage, Obama will likely win with 50.8% of the popular vote, barely besting Bush's 50.7%. Both of Obama's election victories had higher electoral vote counts, higher raw popular vote counts, and higher margins as a percentage of the total vote, than did either Bush victory. This is hilarious when you consider that the Wall Street Journal declared Bush's 2004 victory "by any measure...a decisive mandate," while Obama merely "won one of the narrower re-elections in modern times."  I can only assume that they are "unskewing" the final results as they did the preliminary polls.
• This victory means that President Obama will carry the largest popular vote majority for an incumbent president since Ronald Reagan's 1984 blowout. He also joins a short but illustrious list of candidates to win both terms with majorities of the popular vote. Since vote totals were first tabulated back in 1824, only Andrew Jackson, Ulysses S. Grant, William McKinley, FDR, Dwight D. Eisenhower, and Ronald Reagan have matched this feat. 
• While the credit certainly belongs not to the President alone, the Democratic Party has also expanded their majority in the Senate and narrowed the gap in the House. As Rove pointed out, Obama is only the second President since FDR to accomplish this. 

There is, of course, no real meaning to the concept of an "electoral mandate." A President is always constrained by that which he can get through both chambers of Congress. Political scientists largely agree that the so-called "mandate" is merely a social construction, and has no empirical basis. That having been said, one of that enduring problems of the Democratic Party is meekness in the face of victory (as opposed the the GOP strength of recalcitrance in the face of defeat). The GOP is loudly proclaiming the absence of a Presidential mandate (as John Boehner proudly boasts of his anti-tax mandate) in order to try and blunt the effectiveness of a second term. There is little reason to let them get away with it.