Replies

Yes, Bush and Gore were split at 48% apiece. What that has to do with a McCain third-party challenge in 2004, I'm not sure. You can't draw any conclusions of how a race between the three would turn out other than use logic and do polling. Logic says that any race with an incumbent has two pools of voters: pro-incumbent and anti-incumbent. The incumbent will get all the pro-incumbent voters and the other candidates split up the anti-incumbent voters. McCain and Gore/Edwards/Kerry, etc. would split up the anti-incumbent voters. Polling has also shown that McCain would split up the vote the way I said, about 40-35-25.

Clintoon won in 1992 not because the conservative vote was split (unless you mean that Buchanan lead a revolt against Bush). Clintoon would have won without Perot in the race.

First, he would have won the electoral vote-- only about 30 EVs could have switched in 1992 (not enough for Bush to win). Perot may have cost Bush Montana, North Carolina, Colorado and Georgia, but it's also likely that Perot cost Clintoon Florida and Arizona. That's a net 5 EVs.

The only state in 1996 that Perot could have cost Dole was Nevada-- which was insignificant in Clintoon's EV landslide.

All exit polling showed that Perot voters in 1992 split about equally between Bush and Clintoon-- but Clintoon's lead over Bush was very high and so releasing these voters to vote for either Bush or Clintoon wouldn't have changed the outcome. In fact, Clintoon failed to win a majority of the popular vote in 1996 because of Perot-- and probably in 1992, too. Clintoon wasn't vulnerable in 1996 to losing the presidency. A different candidate may have been able to make the race closer, but he'd have still won.

The Bush voters from 1988 that abandoned Bush in 1992 (blue-collar Reagan Democrats) had abandoned him, period. It didn't matter whether Perot ran or not. They would have either voted for Clintoon or stayed home. They wouldn't have suddenly joined the pro-incumbent voter pool.

The big key to remember here is the electoral college. Clintoon was twice-elected and would have been twice-elected under different candidate circumstances because of the electoral college. He won most all the big states in both 1992 and 1996, making it easy to pick up a few more states to have a narrow victory. Of course, his EV victory was much bigger, but all he needed was a bare majority victory and he would have easily gotten that.