Posted on 07/09/2019 11:05:52 PM PDT by knighthawk
Ross Perot was leading both Bush and Clinton in the summer of 1992. An astonishing achievement for an Independent who just months earlier entered the race and had to scramble to get his name on general election ballots in all 50 states. The establishment was in a real panic.
Something happened to make Perot drop out of the race and it wasn’t about not wanting to disrupt his daughters wedding. We may never know the full story.
The establishment were scared of Perot but not so much with Trump. They never thought Trump would win.
RIP ROSS.
It gets quite tiresome to have Perot blamed for George HW Bush's loss in 1992. First, as a moderate on social issues, Perot attracted nearly as many former Democrats as he did Republicans.
Second and more importantly, those former Republicans who voted for Perot wouldn't have done so if Bush were a halfway decent President. If you really want to blame someone for getting Clinton elected, blame the so-called Republican President who increased immigration quotas, increased taxes, denounced the NRA, and pushed "free trade" with China. The very same agenda as Clinton, in other words.
He crushed it with non political Independents, basically launching the fraudulent Independence party. He also attracted many moderate Republicans and Democrats who wee more like populists.
Here's my thoughts on 1992:
If Perot had run as a democrat he would have beaten Clinton in the primary and been elected president.
If Perot had run as a republican he would have lost to Bush in the primary and Bush would have been elected president.
Since Perot ran as a third party and came in third if there had been a runoff between Clinton and Bush then Bush would have been elected president.
But instead we got Clinton on 43% of the vote.
Exactly right - but the GOP establishment won't allow facts like this to get in the way of their narrative of scapegoating Perot, because the alternative would mean admitting to the fact that Bush was a sub-par President who betrayed the people who got him elected. They expected Reagan III and got a Nelson Rockefeller reboot instead.
Yep, he f^cked us big time for decades to come. Just for a few minutes of fame.
Exactly.
Perot brought millions of non-political non-voters into the voting booth. Those were people who wouldn't have voted at all if Perot wasn't in the race. The popular vote increased by 12 million in 1992 vs. 1988, and dropped by 8 million in 1996.
Lousy GOPe "it's my turn" candidates are the real problem. They gave us Clinton and Obama, and almost gave us Kerry or Gore. And if Trump wasn't in the race in 2016, Hillary would be president today.
My father,back in the 60s when there were conservative Democrats and liberal republicans often said we should just have a Conservative party and liberal party.
Bill Clinton won because of the electoral college.
He lost the popular vote.
They are the problem because the party itself is a failure. For too long the party failed to cleanse itself of RINO's and embrace true conservative candidates and party members/committeemen.
That’s not true. Clinton had more votes than Bush.
Aha! So Ross Perot was the bag man for the Russians! (mouth froth, rant and rave, fight straightjacket).
The problem is self-created by election success.
Once a candidate has been in office roughly 10 years (e.g., 2 terms - 12 years in the Senate, 5 terms - 10 years in the House) their constituency becomes the Beltway & the “lobbying crowd” not their home state or congressional district. Conservative GOP’ers morph into RINOs and continue to move in that direction until they are indistinguishable from Rats. (Rats are already there by definition!) A professional GOP politician meaning one who has done nothing but politics as a career is either already a RINOs or on the fast track to becoming one. None of this is going to change until we have term limits in the House & Senate.
Even then vigilance is necessary!
If suddenly you have an election where a third party candidate is getting 10-20% of the vote, that tells you more about the quality of candidates in both major parties and about voter dissatisfaction with the political status quo than it does about the third party candidate. Neither Perot nor any third party candidate could be "stealing" any votes that "belonged" to Bush if Bush gave voters enough reasons to support him.
Funny how Jeb! was just like dad.
I think many forget the political environment of 1992 and 1996. Those were really the last elections where, as Americans, we had true hope for grassroots change on the conservative side. That is until the tea party. That was co-opted pretty quickly though. If you recall, in the 1990s, we had The militia, outspoken and eloquent conservative speakers, and a common enemy in Bill Clinton. Interesting times, but I don’t think I our current political situation can be hung on Ross Perot at all. It should be hung on a conservative leadership that was extremely ineffective over the last couple of decades.
Seems to me that change pretty much sucks.
Big Media is too busy to do anything but propagandize Perot’s death against Trump.
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