The Mandate Against Markets
As I mentioned last week, the District of Columbia’s next mayor is almost certain to be Adrian Fenty, who easily won the Democratic nomination in last Tuesday’s primary. Fenty’s margin of victory—he won 57% of the primary vote—has led to predictable statements about the mayor-in-waiting’s “mandate�. Fenty’s press secretary could have written the lead paragraph to Lori Montgomery’s election “analysis� in Wednesday’s Washington Post:
An unusually strong majority of D.C. Democrats, including both blacks and whites, united behind a single nominee yesterday to replace a retiring mayor, giving D.C. Council member Adrian M. Fenty a broad mandate to pursue change in city government and the troubled public school system.
The argument for election “mandates� is something you never see when the mainstream press reports on the private sector. If Company X has 57% of sales in a market, there is usually criticism of the firm’s “dominance� or “monopolistic� behavior. Rarely is market dominance classified as a “mandate� to pursue new markets or innovations.
In the public sector, however, winning a single election—even one where most of the electorate didn’t participate—confers an absolute mandate to expand one’s political domain. Today’s Post reports that Fenty will seek “direct control� of the District’s school system, which is presently administered by a half-elected, half-appointed school board. Fenty wants to emulate New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who obtained control of that city’s school system in his first term. Ironically, Bloomberg named an antitrust lawyer, Joel Klein, to run the city’s monopoly school system.
But how extensive was the Fenty mandate? The turnout among registered voters was 32% overall and 35% among Democrats. His 57% of the primary vote amounted to just over 57,000 votes in a city with an estimated population of 550,000, so Fenty’s mandate came from just over 10% of the entire population.
Again, there’s a difference between coverage of the private and public sectors. A private business’s “market share� is often exaggerated by arbitrarily eliminating competitors from the market definition. An elected official’s “mandate� is conversely exaggerated by overstating public support. And of course, the lack of competition in the public sector is rarely criticized, even in a blatant one-party state like the District.
