I've been too sick and busy with teaching and research to try to fact-check all the election interpretations out there, so let me recommend the excellent "Truths and Myths about the 2008 Election" series by John Sides of GW and The Monkey Cage, which distills the relevant political science for a general audience:
1. The Fundamentals Mattered
2. OMG THE BRADLEY EFFECT OMG THE BRADLEY EFFECT OMG!
3. Party Loyalty Matters
4. There Is No Realignment
5. Be Very Careful When Talking About a "Mandate"
Two other important points:
1. Phil Klinkner on why it's doesn't appear that John McCain lost because of the economic crisis (as many Republicans and journalists have suggested).
2. Kevin Drum, Matthew Yglesias, and others have done good work debunking hype that group X was the key to the election because it swung a few points toward Obama. The relevant question is whether the group swung more toward Obama than the national swing. Similarly, as Andrew Gelman showed, all the hype about results in specific states obscures the fact that Obama's vote percentage was a relatively uniform swing from John Kerry's totals in 2004.
The mandate debate that Sides covers above is particularly relevant since I've blogged so much on the subject. Though liberals are claiming that Obama has a mandate as I predicted (the Campaign for America's Future tried to claim one before the election even took place), prominent Republicans like former Bush Treasury Secretary John Snow and conservative pundits like Robert Novak are pushing back. Even Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the results were "not a mandate for any political party or any ideology." (DNC chair Howard Dean and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi have also sought to downplay expectations.) Given the relevant political science on the question, which finds that mandate effects in legislative voting require a near-unanimous consensus among elites, it's almost impossible to imagine Obama getting unusual levels of Republican support in Congress during his first months in office (unlike, say, Reagan in 1981 or the GOP in 1995).
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