you know this how? As rt pointed out, the poll numbers were beginning to turn against Clinton during the shutdown "crisis". Probably because many people were finally beginning to realize how unnecessary the federal government was in their lives.
_____Clinton was re-elected and remained popular even during Lewinsky...and Gore won the popular vote in 2000.
At number #71 you said this was because of conservatives voting for Perot. So which is it? Were the majority of voters in those two elections ideologically conservative or were they not?
and remained popular even during Lewinsky
A good part of the reason for his popularity had to do with the efforts of congressional Republicans. It was they who forced him to scale back welfare, and slow the growth of federal spending in general. He may have taken the credit for it, but the fact remains that he was taking the credit for limiting government, not expanding it. Remember when he said, "The era of big government is over"? It was a lie, of course, but what matters is that he knew that's what the public wanted to hear.
and Gore won the popular vote in 2000.
Bush wasn't exactly the most popular guy in 2000. He was widely regarded as an underachieving privileged son, and his public speaking (in particular his endless repeating of "fuzzy math" and "MediScare" during the debates) didn't do much to remedy that impression. It was only after 9/11 that his approval rating changed for the better. 2000 was definitely a textbook example of an election where people voted NOT for the candidate they liked more, but against the candidate they liked less. Gore was slightly less unpopular than Bush, that's all. Ideology had little to do with it.
If you want an example of an election that illustrates popular views, you need to look at the congressional election of 1994. Keep in mind that most of the time, the turnover rate in Congress is geologically slow. That's because people pretty much have only one issue when voting for Congressmen: how much dough he'll lavish on his district. Everything else is a very distant second. This gives a huge advantage to incumbents, because they're much more likely than some newbie to have the connections necessary to steer the pork in the direction that they want.
What this means is that the people of a district really have to have strong feeling about something if they replace their incumbent Congressman with a challenger. 1994, therefore, was a tremendous achievement for the Republicans. And they didn't do it by promising to be "bipartisan" and "mainstream" and set a "new tone" for "compassionate conservatism". Instead, they hammered hard for limited government.
The 1992 Republican National Convention set the stage for it. Speaker after speaker railed against the overspending and arrogant, power-hungry ways of the Democrats. That didn't enable the GOP to win the election in '92, because of popular discontent with Bush himself, but it clearly started the ball rolling for the Contract with America and the electoral victory two years later.