The idea that Bill Clinton didn’t really win the presidency in 1992, or would not have won if third party candidate Ross Perot wasn’t in the race, is a long-standing right-wing talking point. Incredibly, I have recently seen liberals making the same argument, apparently so full of anti-Hillary Clinton zeal that they are ready to denigrate any success in any way attributable to either of the Clintons. In any case, it’s an idea badly in need of refuting.
A total of 103,758,177 votes were cast in 1992 for Clinton, incumbent president George H. W. Bush, or Perot. For Bush to have won a bare majority of the popular vote, he would have needed half of those votes, or 51,879,089 of them. For that, he would have had to have won almost two-thirds of the Perot vote, or 12,774,539 extra votes. This, quite frankly, would have been a tall order. First of all, one must consider Bush’s low popularity ratings during that recession-plagued year (not surprisingly, incumbent presidents rarely get a popular vote percentage that is much higher than their approval rating around the time of the election).
Second, many of the counties and states which Clinton won and in which Perot won a high percentage of the vote, such as Bucks and Chester County, Pennsylvania, Hood River County, Oregon, Itasca County, Minnesota, and the state of New Hampshire, have trended Democratic since 1992. In fact, Clinton won many of those same states and counties four years later (when Perot was not nearly as much of a factor), and Gore and Kerry carried most of them as well. This leads me to doubt that Bush would necessarily have won most or all of them, if Perot had not been in the race.
Finally, while Clinton did win some states because of a high Perot vote (like New Hampshire and Montana), there were other states (Kentucky, Louisiana, and New Mexico notably) where the Perot vote was relatively low, but Clinton still carried the state. He also carried those same states again in 1996.
Some liberals even allege that Clinton’s strategy was to win a narrow victory by targeting only a few competitive states, a plan that is (of course) a poor alternative to the fight-Republicans-everywhere strategy, which is the brainchild of Howard Dean and Howard Dean only. There’s no nice way to say this; this idea is wrong on many levels. It’s nonsensical (how many people really want to win narrowly, instead of winning big?) and it requires major ignorance of history, since a major Clinton selling point was that as a moderate Democrat, he could win parts of the country that the Democrats had lost in recent presidential elections. Comparing 1992 returns with earlier ones shows that, love him or hate him, Clinton had a huge success doing exactly this. In addition to winning every state that Michael Dukakis won in 1988, Clinton won two states that his party hadn’t won since 1980 (Georgia and Maryland), six states they hadn’t won since 1976 (Delaware, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Ohio, and Pennsylvania), three states they hadn’t won since 1968 (Connecticut, Michigan and Maine), and eight states they hadn’t won since 1964 (California, Colorado, Illinois, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, and New Jersey). This list does not even count Arkansas and Tennessee, which were the home states of Clinton and his running mate, Al Gore. Howard Dean’s fans are going to have to accept that he was not the very first Democrat in the entire history of the party to think outside the box (or, more accurately, to think outside the blue states) when it comes to winning elections.
All these arguments, however, are moot when one considers the sheer and simple offensiveness of the whole idea that Clinton did not really win. It doesn’t matter if Clinton wouldn’t have won if Perot wasn’t in the race, or if Bush hadn’t been president during a recession. The bottom line is that Perot was in the race, and Bush was president during a recession (and did little about it, something which not surprisingly cost him a lot of support), and in the end, Clinton got more votes than anybody else running, and he therefore won the presidency fair and square. Moreover, he got more votes by a fairly wide five-percent margin. This was higher than George W. Bush’s much-talked-about 2004 margin over Kerry. It’s also higher than other election results that some bloggers cite as proof of the political acumen of those that they back, such as Jim Webb’s margin over George Allen in 2006, or John Tester’s margin over Conrad Burns the same year. Clinton won more votes than any other person running fair and square and did it twice, something Bush did not achieve in 2000 (and some would argue that he did not actually do it in 2004), and the right-wing talking point that says he didn’t really win is completely and totally wrong. The last thing in the world any liberal or any Democrat should do, no matter what he or she thinks about the Clintons, is recycle this pompous, ludicrous, arrogant and undemocratic piece of right-wing noise.
(Note that all election statistics are from Uselectionatlas.org.)