According to John Locke, “the government is not legitimate unless it is carried on with the consent of the governed.” What constitutes such consent? What percent of the (voting-age) governed would constitute consent of the governed? 

Update: Record levels of turnout of 66.5% projected for presidential election of Biden vs. Trump. (Washington Post article).

Turnout for the 2012 Presidential election was 126 M out of about 219 M eligible voters (57.5%; as of 11/7/12; also see, American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate), a lower turnout than 2008. Barack Obama won with 62,049,770 votes (49.25% of turnout; 28.33% of eligible voters) to Mitt Romney’s 58,757,388 (46.63% of turnout; 26.83% of eligible voters). One of the most significant aspects of the election was the record Latino vote, the fact that Latinos voted overwhelmingly for Obama (75%), and 500,000 Latino voters will mature to voting age each year for the foreseeable future.

John Nichols, in the Nation Magazine, notes that this margin of victory was greater than the margin of victory for Kennedy (49.71%), Nixon (43.41%), Carter (50.07%), or Bush (50.73%) and implies a progressive mandate. Basing a mandate on margin of victory makes some sense, but it’s interesting to view these elections in terms of the percent of the voting-age population the candidates attracted (31.35%, 26.41%, 26.81%, 28.04% respectively). Obama was elected by about 26% of the voting-age population, a figure not very different from most other Presidential elections (see table below) and actually less than every president in John Nichols’ list. In any case, being elected by about 1/4 of the voting-age population hardly inspires use of the term “mandate”. Indeed, the fact that every president since 1960 has been elected by less than 38% of the voting-age population, leads one to wonder about how democratic our democracy is and how legitimate our government is.