Many of the Perot voters were new to politics and many were’t regular voters before he came on the scene and wouldn’t have voted at all if he hadn’t. They mostly stayed active and helped the 1994 landslide happen when it became clear that Clinton was pushing leftist policies. It’s one of the reasons that Clinton reversed course in 1995 and usually avoided iedological conflict during the rest of his Presidency.
DJ, with all due respect, your hypothetical, Perotless 1992 presidential election map is not based on reality. Exit polls showed that Perot voters preferred Bush over Clinton by about 55%-40%. And many of the Perot voters who preferred Clinton over Bush were kids who probably would have stayed home had Perot not been on the ballot. Had Perot not been on the ballot (e.g., had he not returned after dropping out due to supposed “Republican dirty tricks”), Bush would have seen a net gain versus Clinton in every state. A simplistic way to predict how each state would have voted in a Perotless 1992 election would be to have Bush net 25% of the Perot vote. However, one would expect Bush to net a higher percentage in conservative states and a lower percentage in liberal states, so the analysis needs to be more nuanced than that.
My analysis of the electoral results from 1992 leads me to conclude that, in a race without Perot, turnout (as a percentage of the 18+ population) would have been around the same as in 1988, Clinton would have won the national popular vote by not more than 1%, and that Clinton would have won at least 264 electoral votes, Bush at least 255 (the 18 states Bush won in the three-man race, plus GA, MT, CO, NV, OH, WI, NH, NJ and KY), 19 EVs (CT, ME and IA) would be toss-ups leaning towards Clinton. Thus, Clinton would most likely win by 283-255 in the Electoral College, but had Bush been able to win CT and IA he would have eked out a victory.
BTW, the analysis for 1996 would be far different, with Perot voters being far likelier to vote for Dole than for Clinton (if you didn’t vote for Clinton in 1996, you were unlikely to do so just because Perot wasn’t ilon the ballot). I think that in a Perotless 1996 race Dole would have lost both nationally and in PA by about 1%, but had Dole carried PA he would have gotten exactly 270 EVs.