rriage, and abortion. The administration, their humble servant, has a solemn duty to execute their wishes. And so President Bush has promised to move forward with ambitious but still only vaguely outlined plans for Social Security privatization, tax simplification, and restrictions on lawsuits. "I have political capital and I intend to spend it," he declared.

Amazingly, much of the media seems to be buying the Republicans' mandate line. Just a day after the election, a front-page New York Times article, entitled "President Seems Poised to Claim a New Mandate," argued that President Bush "can claim that an apparently insurmountable lead in the popular vote vindicated his policies, his persistence, his personal qualities and his political strategy." U.S. News & World Report was more blunt: Bush, according to one headline, is the "man with the mandate."

This is patently absurd. Leave aside for a moment the sheer brazenness of Republicans' claims in light of their contempt for the vote total in the 2000 election. (When the Bush campaign lost the popular vote in 2000, Dick Cheney reported that the "notion of sort of a restrained presidency because it was such a close election, that lasted maybe thirty seconds. It was not contemplated for any length of time. We had an agenda, we ran on that agenda, we won the election--full speed ahead.") Leave aside as well the inherent implausibility of suggesting a vote for Candidate A over Candidate B implies support for each item on a laundry list of specific initiatives. Students of elections know well that voters don't choose candidates solely because of their positions on particular issues, much less their complete roster of stances.

And leave aside the fact that this election was the opposite of decisive. Although many pundits are saying that Bush trounced Kerry, the election was in fact exceedingly close by historical standards. In October, the American Political Science Association released the predictions of seven leading models of presidential elections. As an incumbent president running at a time of decent economic growth, Bush's average predicted vote was around 54 percent, meaning he significantly underperformed historical expectations.

Put aside all that. There is a more fundamental objection to Republicans' claim of a clear mandate for an ambitious domestic agenda: It is, put simply, a bait and switch. If one can bear to recall events of only a week ago, the Republican campaign was based on two main pillars: fear and mud. Overwhelmingly, the "positive" case for Bush's reelection rested on the relentless drumbeat of the war on terror. Cheney's remarks typically focused not on domestic issues but on veiled or explicit references to the lurking threat of nuclear incineration. Meanwhile the second pillar of the Bush campaign was to destroy Kerry's image as a credible alternative through any means necessary. Gross distortions of his record and proposals, shameless efforts to rip his words out of context, and the lowest forms of surrogate-based character assassination were central to the campaign. The GOP may well have waged the most negative campaign by an incumbent president in modern political history. As The Washington Post reported back in May: "Scholars and political strategists say the ferocious Bush assault on Kerry this spring has been extraordinary, both for the volume of attacks and for the liberties the president and his campaign have taken with the facts. Though stretching the truth is hardly new in a political campaign, they say the volume of negative charges is unprecedented--both in speeches and in advertising."

Karl Rove would not have needed to campaign that way if he believed he had a popular domestic agenda. He knew that he did not. Indeed, in the one setting--the three presidential debates--where popular attention was focused on the major issues of the day and the differences between the candidates, the popular verdict was clear: Kerry defeated Bush decisively. In fact, everything we know about American opinion suggests that Bush is out of step with the public on all the issues he is now putting at the top of his "to do" list.

During the election campaign, polls found that most Americans continue to be highly skeptical of the Republican tax-cut agenda and convinced that they have not benefited from it. In the final debate, Bush had to resort to the fudge of pointing out that the majority of his tax cuts went to "low- and middle-income Americans"--and while they did, the majority of benefits from his tax cuts did not.

On Social Security, administration officials have had four years to develop specific proposals. They have held back precisely because once an actual proposal is outlined it becomes clear what a dreadful deal it will be for most Americans. Indeed, when surveys mention the potential downsides of private individual accounts, public opinion has remained rock solid against privatization--and there is no evidence of a strong shift in favor of Bush's stance. A year ago, for example, the Los Angeles Times found that only a quarter of Americans supported private investment accounts in Social Security if it meant a reduction in guaranteed benefits--a feature of all leading privatization plans. The same basic story holds for other domestic policy issues. The point isn't that the majority of Americans aren't conservative on some topics--they are. The point is that their views have not changed fundamentally, and they remain overwhelmingly hostile to the top domestic priorities on which the administration is now claiming a mandate.

But what about Republican gains in Congress? Here, the argument for a mandate is equally dubious. Tracking polls that looked at which congressional party voters preferred showed consistently that average voters favored the Democrats. In fact, this year Democrats led every one of the final ten daily preelection tracking polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports--by an average margin of between two and three points. But the views of middle-of-the-road voters mean less and less in congressional races. Incumbency continues to provide an enormous advantage. Moreover, thanks to sophisticated partisan gerrymandering, more than 90 percent of House seats are now completely uncompetitive. In Texas, Tom DeLay engineered an abnormally timed redistricting that cost Democrats five seats. Without it, House Republicans wouldn't have gained at all. Meanwhile, in the Senate, five retiring Democrats from the South left the field clear for Republican pick-ups in the one part of the country the GOP clearly dominates. Outside the South, Democrats actually gained one net seat.

Against the backdrop of September 11, the Republican strategy worked well enough to gain a narrow victory. Yet winning narrowly on a campaign of mud and fear, and a strategy of hard-nosed partisan gerrymandering, does not a popular mandate for the conservative policy agenda make. Republicans like to compare the current president with Ronald Reagan. But in 1980, Reagan made clearly specified tax cuts the centerpiece of his campaign. And when he won a decisive victory, he could credibly claim a mandate to implement his pledge. That is simply not the case today.

Given how conservative the modern Republican Party has become, it's hardly surprising that administration officials are planning to go after the key pillars of the domestic social contract. And given Bush's long trail of similarly audacious rhetorical leaps, his claim to an agenda that represents the "will of the people" is also predictable. What it's not, however, is credible.

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Jacob S. Hacker is a political science professor at Yale University. Paul Pierson is a political science professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Their book, Off Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, will be published by Yale University Press in 2005.

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