The popular mandate

I ran these sorts of numbers a few years ago, so, for the sake of argument, here are this year’s election results as a measure not of votes cast, but of total possible votes (based on the preliminary result of 61.4% turnout).

Conservatives 24.3%NDP 18.8%Liberals 11.6% 

That would give the new government the fourth-smallest mandate in history. Or, put more positively, that gives the new government a larger mandate than the governments elected in 2004, 2006 and 2008.

The mandate won by Robert Borden in 1917—42.8% of all possible votes—remains the undisputed champion of this academic exercise.