The Ross Perot Spoiler Myth

Politics & Elections
1

You know, every so often, particularly during election cycles, the talk about third party candidates come out. Donald Trump is the most recent example. Some people out there have posited that Ross Perot, in 1992, affected the outcome of the 1992 election. The WSJ and today the NYT parroted it like its absolute truth. This seems to fly in the face of commonly available data and it amazes me how that happens, such willful ignorance or mendacity. The data against the idea that Perot “elected” Clinton is enumerated here.

  1. The fundamentals of the election were not very good for Bush. George H.W. Bush’s approval ratings in 1992 rivaled Jimmy Carter’s in 1980. Both in their election years were not only much lower than Reagan in 1984 and Clinton in 1996, but lower than Bush 2004 and Obama 2012, both of those being tossup. I crunched the numbers in excel using the approval numbers from UCSB. I took the average 6-month pre-election day approvals of the election year for Ford thru Obama to see its effect on incumbent party retaining the White House.

Close incumbent elections with margins of victory closer than 4 points (often MoE in national polls)
i. 1976: Gerald Ford’s 6-month pre-election approval was 46%
ii. 2004: George W. Bush’s 6-month pre-election approval was 48.75%
iii. 2012: Barack Obama’s 6-month pre-election approval was 47.23%

Decisive incumbent Party Re-elections (re-elections with margin of victory 4 points or more
i. 1984: Ronald Reagan’s 6 month pre-election approval was 53.35%
ii. 1996: Bill Clinton’s 6 month pre-election approval was 55.08%

Incumbent President defeats
i. 1980: Jimmy Carter’s 6 month pre-election approval: 34.14%
ii. 1992: George H.W. Bush’s 6 month pre-election approval: 35.68%

Incumbent party w/o incumbent on ballot
i. 1988: Reagan’s is 51%, party retains White House
ii. 2000: Clinton’s is 58.42%, Gore wins popular vote, loses election (1 in 13 historical chance)
iii. 2008: Bush II’s is 28.92%, party loses White House

You might point out that popular votes don’t directly decide the election, but there is a very VERY strong correlation between popular vote winners and electoral vote winners. Over 93% of the time, the popular vote winner (plurality or majority) wins the election. George W. Bush is the only one in anyone here’s lifetime to do the opposite, and will likely continue to be. But I will mention the electoral college calculus.

  1. On the electoral college map, Bush Sr. would have needed to win nearly every state he lost by less than 5% to win 270 (in which case the map looks like this. Bush Sr’s election year approvals did not lend themselves to that. Change WI (a Dukakis '88 state) on that map, or NJ (Dem since '92), Clinton STILL wins. Also, 1992 was clearly the start of a 2 decade trend in which NJ, CT, ME, NH, MI, CA, DE, MD, VT, PA, and IL vote exclusively Dem (except NH '00), even tho before Clinton, they were very Republican on the national level from 1968 to 1988. Most of them went 6 for 6 GOP in that period.

  2. The actual question was asked to voters about their vote sans Perot. The exit polls from election night 1992, a lot more empirical than some pundit, show that Clinton would have won an absolute majority of the vote absent Perot, and thus in more than 12 in 13 trials, the election.

  3. Ross Perot was left-of-center, not at all like Nader was a liberal or Trump is running as a conservative. Perot was pro-choice, pro-gay rights. He was also against “trickle-down economics.”

  4. The Republicans and the far-left also leave out that when Perot was not in the race, which was from July to the start of October 1992, Bush still polled near the 37% that approved of his performance and that he won in the end. Nate Silver, a data and stats expert, also disagrees with the idea that Perot cost Bush tho he does believe Perot hurt Clinton.

Whatever political party you are part of or ideological stripe you believe in, data ought to mean more than what fits a narrative. This myth has gone on for too long. The extremists of both parties do have use for it. The GOP likes to use it to save face for permanently losing what amounts to 156 EVs today (NJ, PA, VT, NH, ME, CA, IL, MI, DE, MD, CT), EVs that would put Romney in the White House. Losing in general is not something they handle well. Liberals also use the myth to try to nominate and push far-left ideas. I think facts and figures beat out agendas any day.

2

Duplicate thread reported.

3

I wanted to delete it on the “great debates” but it won’t let me. Its more approriate to be here.

4

It should be remembered that 1992 had the highest voter turn-out in many an election cycle.

It can be argued that Perot didn’t take votes from anybody. He brought his own.

5

In theory you have a point. But this ridiculous 2 party thing dominates both the media and thus the way politicians are expected to govern. For practical purposes tho, he was clearly at least a wash, and at most a convenient way for the GOP to save face.

6

If the main point is that, due to the weak economy, George H.W. Bush was in trouble, and would have had a hard time getting re-elected in 1992 even without Ross Perot, I fully agree.

I don’t agree that Perot made NO difference. I think a two-man race between Bush and Clinton would have been very close, though I think Clinton would have eked out a narrow victory in the Electoral College. Perot enabled Clinton to win comfortably, instead of in a squeaker.

7

Why do you think it would have been close? What about the deficit Bush Sr.'s approvals had compared to the actual close re-election tossup campaigns, like 1976, 2004 and 2012? Ford, Bush II, and Obama had the toss-up range approvals in the near term before the election as I’ve posted. Bush Sr. didn’t. Bush Sr. also had Iran-Contra, which is convenient to forget so its not like he was “scandal-free” as people try to claim. Also, what states do you really think Perot made the difference in, and when you post it, you should first go find the margin and results, and electoral votes of that state, and why. Also, how do you account for the fact Bush Sr. was losing during the Perot-less part of the race so badly?

8

In the future, if you have this problem again, please contact a mod and we can move the thread for you.

9

I don’t normally watch MSNBC but this is the first time I’ve seen MSM take on this lie.

10

The data you posted is pretty much what I remember. The idea since 1992 that Perot hurt Bush more than Clinton was not common at the time and I don’t really understand where it came from. I always thought if he hadn’t been in the race the outcome wouldn’t have been different other than the fact Clinton would have gotten a clear majority of the popular vote.

11

I think clearly the Clintons pissed off everyone: the media, the GOP simply for being there, but enough of the liberal side of them Dems, which is why the media was able to peddle this lie for 23 years. Ever notice how even the liberal blogs often peddle this myth? But the truth needs to be out

12

A current 538 article touches on this.

Here’s the relevant bit:


CANDIDATE	ELECTION	RESULT	WITHOUT 3RD PARTY	DIFFERENCE
Ross Perot	1992		D+6	D+6			–
Ross Perot	1996		D+9	D+8			R+1
13

I love data. It doesn’t listen to political agenda and rivalries. Of course the media hates the Clintons, if you think about it. Many of them were Carter vets and didn’t like that Bill Clinton had to shove that maloser (malaise+loser) in the closet, or many of the media members wanted jobs in a Democratic WH but didn’t get them (Chris Matthews is an example). But that’s no excuse to try to polute the history books with lies.

14

It comes from lazy thinking from people who either weren’t around in 1992, or don’t remember it very well. Ross Perot was a rich businessman, so he must have drawn votes from Republicans, right? Isn’t politics that simple? No it isn’t, and wasn’t.

15

Even a lotta the clowns who were around in 1992, like some of the recent articles published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, CNN and countless others. Even if the authors may not have been with their papers in 1992, the data is still up there. These clowns need to be called out.

16

Whatever might have been the case with Perot, if Donald Trump makes a third-party run, he will be a spoiler on the Republican nominee.

17

For Trump, it does appear to be that now, but that’s probably because currently his only issue is immigration, and on the far-far right. Therefore, Trump is more like Nader, who took more from Gore than Bush, not Perot. The media needs to get it right.

18

I remember 1992 quite well, thankyewverymuch, and what I witnessed was a dynamic sequence of events that would have to be captured by polling over the duration of 1992, rather than by any election-day “who’d you have voted for instead of Perot” question. And I’ve never seen any use of polling to confirm or deny what I saw.

What I saw was that, early in the year, there were a lot of normally Republican voters who weren’t very happy about Bush the Elder, but would likely have voted for him in the end.

The ones I knew were fiscally conservative (from back in the day when that meant balanced budgets, rather than tax cuts uber alles), and socially moderate. There were still a fair number of Republicans like that in 1992, even though some of us that fit that description had already left the party with Anderson in 1980.

But Perot gave them an ‘out’ that didn’t involve voting for a Democrat, that gave them a way to admit to themselves that they’d had it with Bush and, quite possibly, the Republican Party as it was becoming. By the time he dropped out (remember that?) right before the Dem convention, they’d already put some emotional separation between themselves and where they’d been, and the conventions (a very positive convention for Clinton and Gore, and a GOP hatefest) solidified this. Clinton’s lead in the polls before Perot re-entered the race was something like 20%. And while Perot’s re-entry closed most of that gap, Clinton probably remained the second choice for a bunch of those formerly Republican voters.

So the question isn’t “who would Perot voters have voted for on Election Day 1992 if Perot hadn’t jumped back in?” but “who would they have voted for if Perot had stayed out of politics entirely in 1992?”

I’ve never seen any sort of analysis of that. I’m sure someone’s done some work on that, because a lot of political scientists are really smart people. But that doesn’t mean any of that work has informed the wider public discussion on Perot’s effect on the 1992 race.

19

Perot was a centrist, plus a lot of the vote isn’t necessarily ideological, but instead is just a negative reaction to the incumbent party. Clinton and Perot had the same basic message: change.

Trump, on the other hand has been primarily wooing the far right, so yeah, he’s going to take away mainly from the Republican candidate if he runs as an independent.

20

Even without Perot, the fundamentals of the race are important. If you look at a comparison of Bush I and Carter (both incumbents lost) to Bush II and Obama (two close races which actually saw incumbents re-elected) you’ll notice how both Bush I and Carter never got back above that red 45% approval line I put on there (you can go to Gallup’s presidential approval center to verify that 45%). Obama and Bush II kept themselves above it, but not as much as LBJ, Reagan, and Clinton did. 45-50 is tossup (like Obama, Bush and Ford-barely lost), above 50 is a win, and below 45 is a loss. You can confirm that by looking at the other presidents. You can go to UCSB to get a list of approval ratings, download them, take the standard deviations in Excel, and see that Carter and Bush I had much higher standard deviations of approvals than Ford, Reagan, Clinton, Bush II, and Obama.

Also, look how fast and consistently down Bush I’s approval went down from the peak, which demonstrates that he could not stem the tide of waning popularity. Perot entered in late March and early April 1992, and that trend began long before that. Hell, Bush I was as 45% and below before that. Clearly, Bush Sr. was a very weak incumbent either way. Some did try to peddle the idea of Anderson as a spoiler (Perot-myth peddlers essentially copied that but carried it decades farther) but no one seriously buys it. That fundamental aspect of the re-election cycle sunk both of them.

With regard to what you “remember,” memories can be distorted. Data and numbers cannot be. Also, Perot’s effect was very different in different states.