According to that unbiased source, the NY Times, Republican margins of 8, 10 or even 18 pts are not real mandates:
In 1980, when Ronald Reagan bested incumbent President Jimmy Carter by 10 percentage points, the NY Times editors observed that his “mandate,” a word they themselves put in suspicion-arousing quotation marks, had “little policy content,” a position they reiterated four years later when Reagan won reelection over Walter Mondale by a whopping 18 percentage points (a “lonely landslide” and “a personal victory with little precise policy mandate”). Nor could the 8-point victory by Bush’s father over Michael Dukakis “fairly be called a mandate,” asserted the paper in 1988.
Whenever a Democrat has won, by contrast, the Times has perceived things differently. After Bill Clinton’s first victory (by 6 percentage points) in 1992, the editors commented: “The test now will be how quickly President-elect Clinton can convert his mandate into momentum.” When he won reelection (by 8 points) in 1996, it repeated the thought—“There can be no question about his mandate”—and added a little civics lesson: “The American people express their clearest opinion about what they want government to do through their choice of chief executive.”
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/A11901023.htm
