It's tricky to pinpoint Perot's effect on the 1992 outcome. Disgruntled Republicans like to claim Perot "cost" Bush re-election, which, as Sabin notes (and pundits have explained for decades), is belied by all the polling that showed Perot voters would either not have voted, or split exactly evenly between Clinton and Bush. Give Clinton's solid 5-point margin, he'd still have won easily, though Perot probably did hand him a few electoral votes (like Montana and Georgia) that would have narrowed the EC outcome.Sabin wrote:I'm going off of the Allan Lichtman 13 Keys to the White House model which shows six keys turned against Bush Sr. in 1992, including the Third Party key. Lichtman's model would suggest that Bush Sr. would've kept the White House if Perot didn't run. I understand what exit polling data suggests about Perot taking from both equally. That said, Ross Perot's run creating a unique three-candidate election that might have favored a candidate like Bill Clinton. When electability is a candidate's major concern (as Bill Clinton's scandal-plagued run would suggest), a kooky third partier like Perot only serves to make him look more electable by contrast. I also just don't think George H.W. Bush was a talented enough politician to stave off two major challengers. One perhaps.Greg wrote
2: Bush Sr. lost because he was an incumbent President running for reelection in a bad economy.
On the other hand, Lichtman is correct that the existence of a third-party candidate that strong was important in Bush's defeat, but I look at it from the opposite direction of the Bush partisans: the fact that so many people wanted to vote against Bush even while not being willing to vote Democrat indicated just how deep a failure his presidency was viewed. It was not unlike 1968, when the long-running Democratic coalition had cracked, but voters unwilling to switch all the way to Republican chose Wallace as a halfway house. The Nixon/Reagan coalition was coming apart by 1992, but voters who'd spent a quarter-century hating Dems weren't ready to swing all the way over, and Perot offered a comfortable nesting place. Most of those voters were aware they were probably electing Clinton, and were OK with that result as long as it idn't have their fingerprints on it.