(FORTUNE Magazine) – There's no disputing the final count. Bill Clinton won 43% of the popular vote and 370 electoral votes, while George Bush took 38% of the vote and 168 electoral ballots. Question is, does that margin qualify as a mandate? No, say some Republicans, who note that a majority of voters cast their ballots for someone else -- including 19% of them for Ross Perot. But other strong postwar Presidents gained the White House with less than half the popular vote: Harry Truman in 1948, John F. Kennedy in 1960, and Richard Nixon in 1968. And all three of them, along with Jimmy Carter in 1976, won by electoral college and popular vote margins that were far narrower than Clinton's. Indeed, had Perot, the strongest third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, not split the change vote, Clinton would likely have scored a popular as well as an electoral landslide. Even so, his showing was the strongest of any Democratic challenger since Franklin Roosevelt in 1932. (L.B.J. in 1964 ran as an incumbent.) So, sure, he can claim a mandate. Now comes the hard part: defining and selling it to Congress.

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