I was thinking recently about the idea of political mandates because of the ongoing debates in American politics: fiscal cliffs, gun control, debt and deficit etc. Much of last weekend's talk show banter was about what President Obama would do now that he could run government without running for office.
Remember, in the first term of a presidency, actual governance decisions only happen for about a hundred days until the President is once again thinking about the next election. The election cycle in the U.S. is such that every two years, there are important Senate and House races that could potentially shift the balance of power. The President might not have to run again for four years but he needs his party members to scoop up as many seats as might be up for grabs in the Senate and in the House. For the President himself (I do hope one day I can write "herself") the second term win must feel like a great relief from the prospect of having to live through the grueling days of a campaign.
Yet, a second term "mandate" could potentially give the President a feeling that "his side" has won. I know that Barack Obama speaks a great deal about working together with Republicans but because there is a perception that he won the election soundly, pundits are suggesting that he is in the driver's seat in terms of policy options. President Obama did win the Electoral College by a significant margin. He won 332 of the 538 Electoral College votes. A "score" of 332 to 206 looks pretty decisive and it probably feels that way too.
But... if we are to look at the popular vote Obama won 52% and Romney won 48%. That win does not look so decisive. It means that 59,134,475 (yes, that says 59 million-plus voters) did NOT vote for Barack Obama. In fact, in a poll published in The National Post just before the American election in November a greater percentage of Canadians would have voted for Obama (78%) than did the actual percentage of American voters.
The Canadian system is worse than the American system in this regard. Almost everywhere throughout our electoral process, you see the popular vote skewed in all kinds of strange ways. First, of course, we don't elect our Prime Minister. We elect our representative (federally and provincially) by a "first-past-the-post" system. In this system, the 'mandate" to govern can be given to an individual who received much less than 50 per cent of the votes in any riding. The governing party can merrily take the majority of the seats in the House with - yikes - only 39.6 per cent of the popular vote (that is what the Conservatives got in 2011). 60.4 percent of the people did not vote for the Conservative Government. Now I am picking on the Conservatives here because they happened to win the last election but this has been true throughout our political history.
I raise this because I think that every government needs to "check" the assertion that winning an election is a 'mandate" to carry out their particular brand of politics. There should be a profound humility in being given the chance to govern and I wish that occasionally a politician would begin a speech with, "I know that 60.4 per cent of you did not vote for us so how can I accommodate your concerns?"
Truthfully, the popular vote numbers would not be an issue of such great concern if the chasm between the ideological left and the ideological right had not widened so deeply. This is true in both the United States and in Canada. This gulf that exists should make us rethink this connection between the popular vote and the seat allocation. The loss of a political centre means that winners "win really big" and losers "lose really big". This is especially true in Canada where the governing party has much more opportunity to do as they please without real accommodation of opposing views. Whatever it might mean to have a "mandate" in politics it should not be assumed that winning the election is a carte blanche on a singular approach to public policy. After all, I didn't vote for you.
