ABSTRACT
In the aftermath of his surprisingly ‘decisive’ re-election victory, there were many attempts to define President Bush’s second term mandate. Focusing on the absolute number of votes George Bush received and the historically unusual gains by the President’s party in both houses of Congress, his allies boldly pronounced that the President’s victory vindicated his pre-emptive interventionist foreign policies and gave him the presumptive right to initiate new conservative domestic programmes remaking social security and cutting discretionary domestic spending. On the ‘blue’ side of the partisan divide, Democratic critics denied the existence of any foreign policy or domestic mandate, arguing that a swing of 70,000 votes in Ohio would have given the victory to the challenger, John Kerry, and that the electorate was more polarized than it had been since the 1960s.
