The 2.4% solution: What makes a mandate?

Despite that the popular vote margin in the 2004 presidential election was only 2.4%, George W. Bush claimed to have "earned political capital" and Republican National Chairman Ken Mehlman characterized the outcome as "a mandate." While it seems from the size of the electoral margin that such claims are overstated, we look "under the hood" of the election to see whether any particular policy issue - such as the war in Iraq, gay marriage, social security privatization, or any of the others - was sufficiently dominant to justify the characterization of the election as a mandate. We find that the election result sources overwhelmingly to predispositions in the voters' minds before the campaign, with pre-existing party identification the most important factor in both aggregate and individual analyses. Retrospective evaluations favored Kerry, and Bush gained little from his conduct of the war on terror. In its net effect, the campaign was largely a wash, although Bush was more favored on individual traits. Among the policy issues of the campaign, only taxation had a measurable effect, providing a small boost to Bush; the vaunted social issues of abortion and gay marriage were statistically insignificant. The election results suggest that the United States has developed a new national party system of stable and very close competition, but without presidential policy mandates.