In re: Mandate

In the middle of a reasonably interesting what-if discussion about the CBS memos -- what if the forgery had been more convincing, that sort of thing -- Beldar supposes that 1% of the voters may have switched to Kerry. This would not have altered the outcome of the election, his gut tells him,

But it might well have undercut the basis on which Dubya has been able to claim having a broad mandate, however, with resulting significant weakness in his second term.

The rest of the post aside, this particular point is just ludicrous, but at least we can use this to infer the boundaries of what constitutes a mandate: 51/48 = broad mandate; 50/49 = no mandate. Considering that Bush acted like he had a broad mandate when he had actually lost the popular vote by half a million, I fail to see how this would make any practical difference, particularly given the accomodationist tactics of Congressional Democrats until very recently.