  Several cosmic ray experiments have measured excesses in electrons and
positrons, relative to standard backgrounds, for energies from ~ 10 GeV - 1
TeV. These excesses could be due to new astrophysical sources, but an
explanation in which the electrons and positrons are dark matter annihilation
or decay products is also consistent. Fortunately, the Fermi-LAT diffuse gamma
ray measurements can further test these models, since the electrons and
positrons produce gamma rays in their interactions in the interstellar medium.
Although the dark matter gamma ray signal consistent with the local electron
and positron measurements should be quite large, as we review, there are
substantial uncertainties in the modeling of diffuse backgrounds and,
additionally, experimental uncertainties that make it difficult to claim a dark
matter discovery. In this paper, we introduce an alternative method for
understanding the diffuse gamma ray spectrum in which we take the intensity
ratio in each energy bin of two different regions of the sky, thereby canceling
common systematic uncertainties. For many spectra, this ratio fits well to a
power law with a single break in energy. The two measured exponent indices are
a robust discriminant between candidate models, and we demonstrate that dark
matter annihilation scenarios can predict index values that require "extreme"
parameters for background-only explanations.
