The Mandate

Barack Obama's mandate from this election is a simple one. “Do Better.”

The Republicans have grasped for a number of other explanations – from the demographic (“If we had Marco Rubio on the ticket, we'd have done enough better with Latino voters to overcome the perception that Republicans simply want to deport every Hispanic from the country”) to the meteorological (“Superstorm Sandy won the election for Obama by allowing him to look presidential”) – but the simple fact is that Americans usually re-elect the incumbent.

Since 1912, a full century past, there have been exactly four incumbents who were not re-elected. WH Taft in 1912, Hebert Hoover in 1932, Jimmy Carter in 1980, and George HW Bush in 1992 (I am not including Gerald Ford on the list because he was merely finishing the Nixon's term – and was thus covered with the stench of Watergate – though the other three “accidental incumbents” were also re-elected, which I think strengthens my position.) Four. In a century. We are biased in favor of the incumbent.

In fact, looking at those four elections, they weren't even close. Bush in 1992 is the only of the incumbents who managed to get more than 100 electoral votes – which is my definition of a landslide. Historically, it seems that re-election campaigns were almost always landslides – one way or the other. The undecided voter is really just the reluctant voter, who needs to be given a good reason to vote for the other guy.

(I believe that something has changed in American elections in the past generation, though. The last four re-elections: 1992 – challenger wins handily but not by a landslide (first time since 1892), 1996 – incumbent re-elected but not by a landslide (first time since 1948 for that result), followed by 2004 (narrowest re-election ever) and now this year's narrow popular vote victory for Obama. This doesn't change my basic premise, that we prefer to re-elect the incumbent, but it is telling us something which I am not going to try to decipher it here.)

President Obama did not articulate a new vision for the next four years during the campaign, so he cannot claim that the American people have asked him to pursue any particular philosophy – though he has already tried to claim that the voters want higher taxes on the wealthy (and in fairness, that was a constant refrain in his campaign, though the exit polling indicated people voted for him in spite of rather than because of that position).

He wasn't re-elected by an overwhelming, or even a whelming, margin, which would allow him to claim that the policies of the first term were vindicated.  He first ran on Hope and Change, and now he was re-elected by people who decided that now they don't want too much change.  

Call it “better the devil you know” or call it “the American people are sheep who don't understand that they are ushering in the decline of Western civilization,” the point is that Obama was narrowly (by historical standards) re-elected by a populace that usually re-elects its President.  

Do Better.