What is Obama's Mandate?

Echoing Eduwonk, there's no use guessing who will be tapped as the next Secretary of Education. It'll be relatively low on the list of nominations, so things like whether Obama has the right balance of Chicago people, governors, Republicans, and other political calculations make the whole speculation moot. Other decisions come first, and those will shape who becomes Ed Secretary. Taking a look at the exit polls shows this election was about two things--George W. Bush and the economy. They do not suggest Obama won (or McCain lost) based on specifics of their education, health care, tax, or energy policies. Obama won pretty much across the board:

- he won both the rich and poor (and most of the middle)
- he won all levels of education
- he won whether voters had investments in the stock market or not
- he won voters who said race was an issue and those who said it was not
- he won both supporters and opponents of the bailout bill

On issues, the economy was by far the most important; it was more important than the threat of a terrorist attack or appointments to the Supreme Court. Sixty-three percent of voters identified the economy as the most important issue, followed by Iraq (10%), health care and terrorism (9% each), and energy policy (7%). Those numbers aren't even close, and Obama won all of them except terrorism. (Update: in 2004, the highest priority issue, moral values, tallied only 22% of the electorate. This year's 63% picking the economy as the number one issue was two points higher than 1992, about which James Carville said, "it's the economy, stupid.") So President-elect Obama's mandate is pretty clear: fix the economy. That isn't a simple matter by any means, but he'll be given wide latitude to fix it as he pleases, at least for a few months. We'd be silly to think that education is the primary issue on that front, especially K-12.

The best hope for the edusphere should be that he makes the college affordability argument as often as he did during the election. He could start with this or this.