Even with Dukakis' gaffes, Quayle just isn't a good candidate.
I'd be more interested to see what the result would have been if it had been Bentsen vs. Quayle. I imagine Bentsen would have won all of the states Dukakis does here, in addition to Texas, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, Louisiana, Delaware, and possibly also New Jersey and North Carolina.
Bentsen could have potentially won even bigger than that against Quayle. He was the only candidate on either ticket who people had a positive opinion of at the end of the campaign. He would have likely had strong appeal to the South, and thanks to the farm crisis, the plains states were more in play for Dems than usual that year. All the same would have been true for an earlier running Bill Clinton by the way, but add 100 times more charisma on top of it, plus staffers like Carville who could go toe to toe with Atwater, and there is genuine potential for a 49 or 50 state landslide. (Utah may have been out of reach but that's about it.)
