From 1940 to 2000, the average percentage of voters in presidential elections from the voting age population in America was around 53. For the elections from 1940 to 1968, the percentage is higher (an average of 59%), but it dropped on average over 6 points when the electoral franchise was made mandatory from the age of 18 by the 26th Amendment to the Constitution. The six highest turnouts in American presidential elections were (winner first and in descending order): Kennedy-Nixon 1960, Clinton-Bush-Perot 1992, Johnson-Goldwater 1964, Nixon-McGovern 1972, Eisenhower-Stevenson 1952, and Nixon-Humphrey 1968. The five lowest turnouts were: Truman-Dewey 1948, Clinton-Dole-Perot 1996, Roosevelt-Dewey 1944, Bush-Dukakis 1988, and Bush-Gore 2000. Corrected for the 26th Amendment factor, the vote in 1948, the lowest for the period, was 44.7%.

Some of these results have easy explanations: McGovern was too much of a radical for America to swallow; Eisenhower was a brilliant soldier and he was running as a Republican after five consecutive terms of office for Democrats; Dewey never generated much excitement and Truman benefited from being the incumbent (no reasons here to rush to vote); neither Dole nor Perot enthused voters; Roosevelt was a shoo-in; Bush the elder, Dukakis, Bush the younger, and Gore were also unexciting. Kennedy and Johnson rode the crest of liberalism in America. Some results are frankly contradictory. Humphrey lost because he did not disavow Johnson's war in Vietnam, but Nixon beat a genuine peacenik like McGovern.

In the period covered, there were six landslide votes: (1) Roosevelt over Dewey, (2) Eisenhower over Stevenson, (3) Johnson over Goldwater, (4) Nixon over McGovern, (5) Reagan over Carter (1980), and (6) Reagan over Mondale (1984). Of these overwhelming victories (the large margins are usually reflected in the electoral votes), only (2) and (4) occurred with exceptionally high voter turnouts. In the other landslides, the turnout was close to average, hence low. This could mean that America's turn to conservatism was not as massive as it might appear, but Clinton won twice when the basically conservative Perot took support away from the Republicans. On the other hand, had Gore not had Ralph Nader nibbling at his liberal base, he might have made an easy meal of Bush junior and the turnout in 2000, around 51%, was more average than low.

Summarizing this brief exercise in psephology, in no presidential election in the last 63 years have more than 62.8% of legally enfranchised Americans voted for president. In twelve elections, the adjusted results have been 55% or less of the electoral age population. Certain elections can be considered to have marked watersheds or to have manifested significant general changes in public-opinion orientation: the end of the Democratic domination of the presidency in 1952, the liberal surge that allowed Kennedy to become president despite his Catholicism (1960), the conservative turn represented by Ronald Reagan (1980). Only in the case of Reagan was the turnout somewhat below the six highest turnouts for the period, but only barely, so basically it can be said that he had a solid mandate for change, as did Eisenhower. Kennedy did not markedly campaign on change. Eisenhower had done little to alter the Post-War political consensus, itself a Rooseveltian heritage. The only major issue that seemed to divide Americans then, apart from the Southern attachment to extreme racial discrimination, was who could get tougher on communists. The scion of a very wealthy Catholic family, Kennedy could stare down any charge of softness on communism.

In the fifteen presidential elections covered in this survey, there was only one in which the direct or popular vote majority did not tally with the electoral vote majority and that was in 2000, when Al Gore obtained more votes than George W. Bush. In addition, the turnout for that election was 50.7%, well below the average for the previous fourteen elections covering a span to 2000 of 56 years. In other words, if ever a president has been elected during this lapse of time with the least semblance of a mandate it was this Bush. His father won indisputably but did not pretend to go beyond the Reagan program, except on abortion, on which issue he veered to extreme conservatism. Clinton never had a mandate and he acted accordingly. Yet his electoral victories were clear-cut.

Paradoxically, perhaps as a sort of compensation for having entered the White House to less than universal hurrahs, Bush began his term like a hurricane named Ronald. The only historical grounds that could have justified Bush's extreme conservative activism was the assumption that the USA was still very inclined to that view, as had been the case in the past with the landslide that put Reagan in the White House. However, that had taken place eighteen years earlier and there was no conclusive electoral indication that America was still wedded to Reaganism.

Bush went all out for a program for which he had not obtained unequivocal popular support. A more sensible person in his position would have chosen, as Clinton had, to play it by ear. There were no compelling reasons to believe that his stop-soaking-the-rich philosophy was what American voters were thinking about when they gave him the slimmest of electoral-vote majorities and did not even give him a popular vote endorsement. Bush was formally within the democratic rules of the political game. He espoused a policies version of the Jacksonian "to the victor belongs the spoils" attitude. But he was going against the grain of democracy, which is supposed to reflect public opinion and not interpret it as one wants to.

The terrorist attack on 9/11 and Bush's forceful reaction to it changed the political coordinates over night. In face of that tragedy, it is difficult to imagine any other reaction than the grieving yet defiant one that Bush assumed. But it was Bush who had the chance to assume it and this made him what he had not been before: the near-unanimous choice of Americans as the living symbol and the spokesman of their country for the rest of the world. The American victory in Afghanistan, in which Bush showed resolution, further shored up his growing stature. The irony was that Bush became a hero-president because he began his term by shooting off his mouth and by being completely wrong about America's need for the sort of invulnerability he was preaching. He became the man who could do no wrong because he showed how completely wrong he could be. It was as if the naked emperor first elicited laughter because of his foolishness and then admiration for his splendid physique.

Bush duly got the mandate he did not have before in the Congressional elections of 2002, when he pulled the trick of increasing his party's vote in a midterm election. As in the glory days of Reagan, the Republicans controlled both houses of Congress. The voter turnout was also the lowest in history, as if Americans did not particularly appreciate Bush but feared that voting against his party would be unpatriotic. Democratic politics in America had become reactive rather than reflective. To some extent democracy has always been a game of smoke and mirrors, as the elder Bush once described political skulduggery, but there was always a strong link between what the public wanted and what the public got. With Bush the younger one got the impression that the public did not know what it wanted and that the president was leading country in one direction or another through sheer chutzpah and American disorientation, the latter egregiously manifest in that, as polls show, Americans still seem to believe that Saddam Hussein had something to do with 9/11. Government of the people, by the people, for the people might no longer be exactly what the words say. Or at least America might have gotten a touch of amnesia about those ideals.