[EM] Strategy in the 1992 POTUS election (Clinton/Bush/Perot)

[Rob Lanphier]

Hi Robert,

Always fun chatting with you.  More inline:

On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 5:24 PM robert bristow-johnson
<rbj at audioimagination.com> wrote:
> i'd like to hear [your Ross Perot impersonation]!

I'll have to practice it a little bit so that I can pull it off
(again).  My Richard Nixon isn't as rusty, but I haven't seriously
performed my Ross Perot nor my Ronald Reagan in quite some time.

Now to the heart of the conversation, regarding whether Ross Perot was
subject to the "center squeeze" effect:

> No, the Center Squeeze does not squeeze out a candidate that was not really a viable winner.

The optics behind the Perot campaign looked pretty good before he dropped out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections#1992_United_States_presidential_election

Gallup put him in the lead in their weekly polls in the month of May
and most of June.  The campaign got much more difficult in July with
all of the free television coverage that the Democratic National
Convention received in New York City that year (and with Clinton
choosing fellow southerner and conservative Democrat Al Gore).
Moreover, he was receiving more scrutiny for what he said than he had
ever received before.

Was he viable?  There are a lot of people that have explored the
scenario on the /r/ImaginaryElections subreddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginaryelections/search?q=perot&restrict_sr=on

Many are just goofing around, but the analysis is interesting.  For example:
https://armariuminterreta.com/2020/12/12/perot-win-1992/

It would be interesting to put these scenarios through more scrutiny.

I'll confess that I voted for Perot in 1992.  He seemed vaguely like a
technologist.  He funded NeXT. and as a young, broke college student,
I would go to magazine stands and drool over pictures of NeXT
computers (my apologies to the people that purchased those magazines).
In fairness to Perot as a technologist, his company (Perot Systems)
sold for $3.9 billion in 2009 to Dell Computer, which is not nothing
for Dell to pay:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perot_Systems

In hindsight, I can see that a lot of his biggest strength was "gish
galloping"[1] the other people in discussions/interviews/debates,
which was quite the superpower in early 1990s media campaigns.  He
probably had lots of practice gish galloping the technologists that
worked for him at Perot Systems whenever they would ask him for money,
and if they could survive his gish galloping in the boardroom without
losing their cool, they got the money.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop

That's probably why Steve Jobs was able to get all of that money from
Ross Perot.  My understanding (from people I know who have met Steve
Jobs) is that Jobs does indeed have a reality distortion field.  Perot
was probably no match for hungry, mid-1980s Steve Jobs.  Perot was
reported to have said "I never should have given those kids all that
money"

The Internet wasn't a mainstream thing yet (and Wikipedia was years
away from creation), so fact-checking was much harder then than it is
today.

> Perot has the role of spoiler (if we knew for sure that the Perot voters
> in the critical states preferred H.W. over Clinton, this is why we need
> ranked ballots) and if Perot were farther right than H.W. you could argue
> that it was center squeeze.  But since the election was not Hare RCV,
> I am not sure how center squeeze gets factored in here.

I'm still admittedly thinking anecdotally from my own experience.
Back in college, when I was surrounded by Democrats who thought I was
a weird Republican nerd (which...admittedly... I was), I thought of
Perot as a centrist.  A Democratic-party-loyalist friend of mine had
me convinced that Jerry Brown wouldn't be so bad if he had been
nominated, but alas, Bill Clinton had been nominated. Still, I was
very anti-establishment by that point, and Bush 41 pissed me off.  Not
for the same reasons that he pissed off Rush Limbaugh (who I thought
was a kook, but ended up listening to on my car's AM-only radio
because there was frequently nothing else to listen to), but for other
reasons.  Both Bush and Clinton seemed like untrustworthy politicians,
so Perot won my support.

> It could be simply the classic spoiled election that this Perot candidate
> took a lot more votes away from the election loser (H.W.) than who became
> the winner and possibly changed who the winner is.

I think that's what happened.  Perot arguably siphoned off
"anti-establishment" votes from both sides, but it's hard to be more
"establishment" than Bush 41 was by 1992.  It's hard to be more
"establishment" than the incumbent President of the United States.

> H.W. and Clinton did not spoil the election for Perot, it was Perot who spoiled it for H.W.

Depends on who you were rootin' for.  :-)  I'll concede that it's more
likely that Perot who spoiled it for HW, but apparently, there were
pundits back in 1992 (like E.J. Dionne, writing for the Washington
Post) that disagreed with you:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/08/perot-seen-not-affecting-vote-outcome/27500538-cee8-4f4f-8e7f-f3ee9f2325d1/

Moreover, Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight fame) also disagrees:
https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/the-ross-perot-myth/

I openly disagreed with both of those guys back in 2018:
https://medium.com/@robla/fivethirtyeight-botches-the-clinton-election-4c25d71272e1

...and I stand that opinion, so I implicitly agree with you, Robert.
I'll leave it at that for now.

Why don't all y'all here on the election-methods mailing list join me
tomorrow for a video call?
https://whereby.com/robla

I'll be there tomorrow (Tuesday) from 2pm to 4pm Pacific Time, which
you can convert to your own timezone here:
https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5391959,5128581,2950159,2063523&h=5391959&date=2022-1-11&sln=14-16&hf=1

Rob