If Bush didn’t betray the base, there would have been no Perot.
It’s all Bush’s fault.
Wrong.
Clinton 43% (All Democrat)
Bush 37% (All Republican)
Perot 19% (All Republican)
Perot ran on an extreme pro-Wall Street platform and thus peeled off over a third of the Republican votes from Bush. If Perot had not been in the race, Clinton’s paltry 43% plurality would have left him a bigger loser even than Carter, Mondale, or Dukakis.
Bush would have won in an epic 56/43 landslide.
Bush was not perfect, but there is no doubt that twenty million Republicans voting for Ross Perot was the SOLE reason that Bush did not win re-election by a landslide.