President Obama and the Democrats won the popular vote, so who has the mandate?

[Procrustes Stretched]

Ooo...a tough guy. Impressive.

Nobody has a mandate. Unless you say so of course...

I tend to use:

2: mandate: an authorization to act given to a representative <accepted the mandate of the people>
Mandate - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

When a candidate campaigns on an issue and his opponent(s) campaign against it...and a winning vote is given to the candidate on that issue...any honest person would see a mandate to act on that issue.

If it isn't in the law of the land, you can't do it. Define all the words you like, you have no mandate.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --The Ninth Amendment

 

[eflatminor]

I tend to use:

2: mandate: an authorization to act given to a representative <accepted the mandate of the people>
Mandate - Definition and More from the Free Merriam-Webster Dictionary

When a candidate campaigns on an issue and his opponent(s) campaign against it...and a winning vote is given to the candidate on that issue...any honest person would see a mandate to act on that issue.

If it isn't in the law of the land, you can't do it. Define all the words you like, you have no mandate.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --The Ninth Amendment

Correct...but a "mandate" isn't one of those rights. Want to try again?

 

[Katzndogz]

No one has a mandate. Winning by such a narrow margin does not confer a mandate.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

If it isn't in the law of the land, you can't do it. Define all the words you like, you have no mandate.

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --The Ninth Amendment

Correct...but a "mandate" isn't one of those rights. Want to try again?

message to wingnut world: no one says mandates are constitutional rights

 

[TakeAStepBack]

The constitution has the mandate.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

No one has a mandate. Winning by such a narrow margin does not confer a mandate.

Winning while running on a specific issue while the opposition runs against it, is a mandate to enact that issue.

Obama does not say he has a mandate to do anything he wants to do...Obama is not a Republican

 

[eflatminor]

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. --The Ninth Amendment

Correct...but a "mandate" isn't one of those rights. Want to try again?

message to wingnut world: no one says mandates are constitutional rights

Still waiting for you to point it out in the law.

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

Correct...but a "mandate" isn't one of those rights. Want to try again?

message to wingnut world: no one says mandates are constitutional rights

Still waiting for you to point it out in the law.

 

[eflatminor]

message to wingnut world: no one says mandates are constitutional rights

Still waiting for you to point it out in the law.

Ah! You found it. Oh, no, not so much...

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

President Obama and the Democrats won the popular vote, so who has the mandate?

 

[Procrustes Stretched]

What saved Boehner’s majority wasn’t the will of the people but the power of redistricting. As my colleague Dylan Matthews showed, Republicans used their control over the redistricting process to great effect, packing Democrats into tighter and tighter districts and managing to restructure races so even a slight loss for Republicans in the popular vote still meant a healthy majority in the House.

That’s a neat trick, but it’s not a popular mandate, or anything near to it — and Boehner knows it. That’s why his first move after the election was to announce, in a vague-but-important statement, that he was open to some kind of compromise on taxes.

House Democrats got more votes than House Republicans. Yet Boehner says he’s got a mandate?

Before the election, I highlighted a report arguing that Republican control of state legislatures would end up earning them about 11 seats because of redistricting. The fact that the House total barely budged in a very good year for Democrats nationally — and in which House Democrats won the popular vote — suggests that this probably played a role.

This is especially clear if you take a look at the share of House seats won by Democrats in states where Republican-controlled legislatures redistricted in 2011 and 2012, and compare that to the share of the vote President Obama won.

How redistricting could keep the House red for a decade

If you’ve been reading Wonkblog, you know that most election models predict that Republicans will maintain control of the House, even as Obama retains the presidency. There are a lot of things that explain that. But one under-discussed factor is redistricting following the 2010 Census.

Every 10 years, that process winds up pitting members of Congress against each other and results in bizarre, geographically incoherent districts (the term “gerrymander” comes from Massachusetts governor and future Vice President Elbridge Gerry drawing a district that looked like a salamander). But because Republicans control more statehouses than Democrats, that process tends to favor the GOP.

Why redistricting could doom House Democrats

Political scientists and statisticians have gotten pretty good at modeling presidential and Senate elections. Most presidential models — including the continuously updated ones of Drew Linzer, Nate Silver and Sam Wang — show Obama winning comfortably.

Linzer’s prediction — 332 electoral votes for Obama to 206 for Romney — is especially notable given that the underlying model is Alan Abramowitz’s “Time for Change” model, which explains an astonishing 97 percent of variation in results of past elections. Silver has also developed a model for the Senate, which has Democrats poised to take 52.4 seats, and a 87.6 percent chance of keeping control overall. Wang predicts 53 seats for Democrats, with the 95 percent confidence interval of 52 to 55 seats — so basically no chance of a Republican takeover.

Why Democrats probably won&#8217;t take back the House