Talk Elections

Who performed the worst of Ford, Bush 1992, Dole, McCain, and Romney?

Dole pretty clearly

In terms of Electoral Vote, Dole. The gop knew they would lose that year, and thus poured most of their money into keeping congress and the senate.

In popular vote too just not the electoral vote

Dole. While he did over perform somewhat on Election Day he still only received 159 electoral votes and got less than 41 percent of the popular vote. There was absolutely no doubt about the outcome that election.

Dole did worse electorally, but Bush's popular vote margin in 1992 was only 37% compared to Dole's 41%

In all fairness Bush only lost by six percent

Dole. He lost the popular vote by 8.5%, and won 159 electoral votes. Clinton was leading by 10-15 points a few weeks before the election and chose to campaign for Dem congressional candidates, resulting in him winning by a lower margin. Clinton could have won GA, CO, VA, MN, NC, IN, if he had campagined aggressively for himself in the closing 2 weeks.

I actually never knew Dole did better than people expected him to

Clinton did win MN.

They probably meant MT

Maybe people didn’t realize that a “red state”/“blue state” divide was forming?

Bush 1992. Dole overpreformed a bit if anything, and the GOP had little trouble holding most of it's 1994 coattails downballot.

Bush 92 got more EV than Dole , and lost by a smaller PV margin than Dole did. Heck I would say 92 was less of a defeat for HW than 08 was for McCain

Yup. I meant MT. Clinton won MT in 1992 due to Perot.

In 08, McCain faced structural disadvantages that no GOP candidate could have overcome. In 92, HW Bush's defeat had more to do with the incredible political strength of Clinton. Bush would have defeated a Brown or Tsongas. Even then, Bush closed the gap to 2-3 points in the week before the election. Then, the Caspar Weinberger indictment proved to be an October surprise, hurting Bush's momentum.

It is interesting how the October surprises tend to hurt Republicans.

1992: Weinberger indictment
2000: W Bush DUI in Maine
2012: Romeny's 47% video tape
2016: Access Hollywood

In 2004, Bin Laden put out a tape to get Bush re-selected.

Bush in '92. Simple EV math doesn't really matter (ignoring for a second that the '92 and '96 margins weren't very different from one another).

Bush was an incumbent who managed to barely get more than one-third of the vote against a n00b and a crackpot. Dole was running full-force into a rapidly-strengthening economy and a popular incumbent President.

Even though numerically Dole did worse, Bush 1992 has to be the worst performance (ala Hoover's reelection in 1932) in that the electoral realignment that exists today.   

Bush received 10 million votes less than 1988.  Furthermore, Clinton was able to align the coastal states with significant chunks of the South and Midwest--and this defined how the Democrats should run their election campaigns.   

The Romney 47% tape didn't come out in October, did it? I thought it came out earlier.

I stand corrected. The 47% tape was released by Mother Jones' David Corn in mid-September. For some reason I thought it was mid-October.

1980: Debate-ghazi 2.0
1988: Debate-ghazi
1996: China incident
2016: Comey Letter

None of those actually swung the election, the Comey letter did. Arguably the Bin Laden tape also swung the 2004 election to Bush, though this isn't as clear of a case.