Brad DeLong makes an excellent point: 32,100,000 Americans voted for Democratic candidates, while 24,524,000 voted for Republicans. That’s 57% for Democrats and 43% for Republicans (which shows the influence of Republican gerrymandering at the state level–Democrats get 57% of the vote, but win 53% of the elections in the House). Now, remember, Bush supposedly had a “mandate” in 2004 from winning 51% to 48%, and many Republicans even argued he had one in 2000 after losing the popular vote by half a percentage point.

Clearly, “mandates” aren’t all they’re claimed to be most of the time. Winning by more than 10% would seem to me to be about the minimum for a mandate, though a much greater margin would be more defensible, of course. I don’t believe that there is an actual mandate out there, but if you want to claim that anyone in politics has had one in the past six years, Congressional Democrats have it now. Certainly, if you ever claimed Bush had one, you’d look pretty silly trying to say that the Democrats don’t now, having won a greater margin of votes than Bush ever did.