Mexico’s Thin Margin
Cato
By David Boaz on Int'l Economics & Development
NPR keeps reporting that conservative Felipe Calderon seems to have won the Mexican presidential election “by the thinnest of margins.” Thin, yes. But I wouldn’t call it “the thinnest.” At this writing, Calderon leads by 243,000 votes, about 0.5 percent in an electorate of 40 million.
John F. Kennedy defeated Richard Nixon in 1960 by about 118,000 votes out of 69 million cast, or 0.15 percent. (And that’s if you give Kennedy about 320,000 Democratic votes in Alabama, even though only five of Alabama’s 11 Democratic electors intended to vote for Kennedy. If you don’t credit the Alabama votes to Kennedy, then he would win the electoral college vote while losing the popular vote.) Nixon got his revenge eight years later, defeating Hubert Humphrey by about 500,000 votes, or 0.70 percent in an electorate of 73 million. And then of course there was George W. Bush, whose popular vote margin was about minus 500,000 in 2000.
Calderon’s margin is thin, but it is “the thinnest” only by Mexican standards, not when compared to U.S. presidential elections. |
