You Do The Math - Mandate Shmandate

President Obama thinks he won the election based on his "let's tax the rich a little more" stance, like they did in Clinton's era.  (If only that were true, Toto, I could click my tax returns together 3 times and
magically rise above the poverty level when the Democrats give back my withholdings, those thieves of the poor.)

And even though the House Republicans decided to compromise, and reduce or eliminate lots of deductions and write-offs, which would effect higher wage earners a heck of a lot more than the rest of us, Obama still says he's waiting for them to pass a spending bill.  Gee, why didn't he complain to the Democratic controlled Senate for the last few years when they didn't pass any spending bills?

Because he thinks he has a mandate, that's why.  But, he doesn't know he's a flash in the pan in the grand scheme of things.  In the last 4 years his vote dropped from 69.50 million to 62.31 million, rounded to the nearest one tenth of one percent.  That's a drop of 10.35%.

However, the population keeps going up.  According to the Census Bureau, it was 305.359 million on November 1st of 2008, but had jumped to 314.787 million by November 18th, as of the writing of this blog.  See www.census.gov and look in the bottom, left corner.

That's not quite fair, since we are allowing 17 more days of population growth.  Projecting backwards, the population was probably less by a mere 1 part per 1000 (down to 314.687 million).  Check the month by month data here to see why I did this:
(http://www.census.gov/popest/data/state/totals/2009/tables/NA-EST2009-01.csv)

This should be fair enough, considering that the number of registered voters should be a greater percentage of the population every year, thanks to an ever aging population.

Doing the math:

2008:    69.50 / 305.4 = 22.76%
2012:    62.31 / 314.7 = 19.80%

From this perspective, Obama lost 13% of his chunk of the population.  Too bad Romney had less support than McCain did 4 years ago.  Republican support dropped from 59,9 to 58.9 million.

2008:    59.9 / 305.4 = 19.6%
2012:    58.9 / 314.7 = 18.7%

From this perspective, the Republicans lost 4.6% of their chunk of the population.  Obama lost nearly 3 times as much support as the Republican this time around.

Other "flashes in the pan" were Republicans Nixon, Reagan and Eisenhower.  Check the raw vote, showing how the Republican party lost lots of support after these three "two-termers" left office.  Compare that to how the Democrats lost lots of support while Obama was STILL in office.

Here's a trending chart, where voter support is smoothed out over the years.  Clearly the Democrats are continuing to increase their support in the last 20 years, while the Republicans had better times prior to that.  However, it's still as close as it was 60 years ago.

So, how does Obama think he actually won the right to raise taxes?  Because that's how Democrats think.