Victory and Defeat - When it's in Your Hands... and Mark Kirk's

Illinois Review ^ | August 5, 2015 A.D. | John F. Di Leo

[AuH2ORepublican]

My statistical analysis of the 1992 and 1996 elections are that, had Perot not appeared on the ballot (i.e., he ran the same campaign that he did but dropped out near the end):

(i) in 1992 Bush would have carried the states that he did win plus at least GA, MT, NV, CO, WI, OH, NH, NJ and KY, for a total of 255 electoral votes, with IA, CT and ME being very close and the first two states deciding the election (the likeliest result being a narrow win for Clinton); and

(ii) in 1996, Dole would have carried the states that he did win plus NV, AZ, FL, OH, MO, KY and TN, with PA being a narrow win for Clinton and barely allow him to be reelected (but if Dole managed to carry PA—which would imply having netted over 96% of the Perot vote—he would have gotten exactly 270 electoral votes and the presidency.

For 1992, I’m assuming that around 60% of Perot voters would have preferred Bush over Clinton, and that a very high percentage would have voted, while around 40% of Perot voters preferred Clinton over Bush but less than half of them would have turned out to vote without Perot on the ballot. I’m basing that, in part, on what we saw from Perot voters in 1994, although obviously conservative Perot voters wouldn’t vote so strongly Republican, and liberal Perot voters wouldn’t have stayed as home in as large numbers, in 1992 as they did in 1994. My turnout assumptions for a Perot-less election would yield a turnout only slighly higher than for the 1984 and 1988 elections.

For 1996, I’m assuming that at least 95% of Perot voters would have preferred Dole over Clinton and that turnout among Perot would have been almost universal even had he not been on the ballot. Liberal Perot voters from 1992 either voted for Clinton or stayed home in 1996, and the Perot vote in 1996 was almost exclusively right of center (and generally quite conserbative). I base my assumptions as to turnout from how Perot voters acted in 1994, 1998 and 2000.

So Ross Perot turned two winnable races into Clinton landslides.