Although presidents routinely claim to find mandates in elections, and they have clear political reasons for doing so, political scientists who study public opinion and elections are pretty skeptical that there is ever much meaning to be found in the election returns. If the claim that elections will or have settled this is taken to mean that we should start looking at the what voters were thinking, then I fear the claim would never be sustained (and neither side is likely to be persuaded by the evidence offered by the other). See, e.g., Dahl, "The Myth of the Presidential Mandate" Political Science Quarterly (1990); Stanley Kelly, Interpreting Elections (Princeton U. Press, 1983).
More realistically, elections might settle these kind of disputes by either removing one side or the other from effective power, or convincing one side or the other that they will be personally electorally threatened if they don't change positions. The difficulty now is that there is a fairly closely divided electorate and a very polarized party system. Neither side is likely to win a decisive victory (if decisive now means filibuster-proof supermajorities), and neither side is likely to view its immediate electoral prospects as threatened by sticking to its guns. I'm skeptical that elections will settle this impasse. Keith Whittington -----Original Message----- From: Discussion list for con law professors [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Levinson Sent: Thursday, May 29, 2003 7:17 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Judicial Watch suit against the Senate's filibuster (Someone else asked in another post about my evidence for the claim that President Bush campaigned on the confirmation issue in 2002 -- it was all over the media at the time, so I didn't think it necessary to provide citations. But I list a few here: The claim was not that Bush campaigned on the issue. Rather, it was that several of the close elections could be attributed to voters preferring Bush's nominees. I would like to see any evidence that the electorate in, say, Georgia, Missouri, or Minnesota cared one way or the other about judicial nominees. As I recall, Max Cleland was beaten because he was deemed unpatriotic for raising questions about the Homeland Security Bill, and so on... sandy
