It would've been great to follow politics on a site like Atlas from Jan-Jul 1992

[Mr. Morden]

I was actually following the 1992 presidential election campaign somewhat as a geeky kid, just by reading newspaper and magazine articles at the time.  Of course, nothing like the modern internet existed back then.  But can you imagine if it did?  There really wouldn't have been any better time in recent history to follow politics in the way that we do here.  The campaign was great....that is, it was great up until the DNC was held in July, Clinton surged into a huge lead, and Perot temporarily dropped out.  That's when it got very boring very fast.  But before that, the campaign was amazing.

First, the early primaries were so topsy turvy.  Four different winners in the first four contests, *none* of whom were the eventual nominee.  When are we ever going to see that again?  Then we have the first multi-state primary day with "Junior Tuesday".  Four different winners again, but this time, Clinton was one of them.  The primary race got boring once Super Tuesday came, and Clinton swept the South and built up a huge delegate lead.  But that's also when Perot started make more noise about running.

Perot surged into the national polling lead in May 1992, and as late as the eve of the DNC in early/mid-July, I believe it was a competitive 3 way race.  There was widespread talk of an election with no electoral college majority, and an upside down electoral map.  Perot, for example, led polls in both California and Texas.  Of course, there weren't as many state polls back then.  Can you imagine if we'd had robopolls like PPP, polling multiple states every week, throughout the spring and summer?

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

1948 would be great. Remember all the smug Republicans with egg on their face on November 7th? Take that multiplied by 1,000.

[Kaine for Senate '18]

1948 would be great. Remember all the smug Republicans with egg on their face on November 7th? Take that multiplied by 1,000.

Except that, unlike with 2012, in 1948 nobody really saw it coming.

[Snowstalker Mk. II]

1948 would be great. Remember all the smug Republicans with egg on their face on November 7th? Take that multiplied by 1,000.

Except that, unlike with 2012, in 1948 nobody really saw it coming.

Yeah, but there were indications by mid-late October that it would be a close race (polling started showing only a narrow Dewey lead) that went mostly ignored.

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

You probably could get a taste of that by looking through the Usenet archives of that period.  The groups talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.usa, us.politics, and alt.politics.perot probably are good places to start.

[Blackacre]

1948 would be great. Remember all the smug Republicans with egg on their face on November 7th? Take that multiplied by 1,000.

Except that, unlike with 2012, in 1948 nobody really saw it coming.

Just follow 2012 in The Bubble and you get the same effect

[Mr. Morden]

You probably could get a taste of that by looking through the Usenet archives of that period.  The groups talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.usa, us.politics, and alt.politics.perot probably are good places to start.

Yeah, not quite the same as following it in real time though.  I did just find this repost on Usenet of an electoral college analysis from June 1992, which claimed Clinton only leading outside the margin of error in only Arkansas and DC:

link

Amazing that Clinton led the polls nationally just one month later.  In any case, the electoral map as described there would have been pretty crazy, with Perot holding a plurality of electoral votes, and battling to reach 270.

[SPC]

You probably could get a taste of that by looking through the Usenet archives of that period.  The groups talk.politics.misc, alt.politics.usa, us.politics, and alt.politics.perot probably are good places to start.

Yeah, not quite the same as following it in real time though.  I did just find this repost on Usenet of an electoral college analysis from June 1992, which claimed Clinton only leading outside the margin of error in only Arkansas and DC:

link

Amazing that Clinton led the polls nationally just one month later.  In any case, the electoral map as described there would have been pretty crazy, with Perot holding a plurality of electoral votes, and battling to reach 270.

Interesting East-West phenomenon going on there.

Combining that source with the actual election results, I suspect the map could have ended up looking like this:

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Interesting that he was leading in California. 9 years later, his company wrote a how to on price-gouging California in energy prices. That giant sucking sound was California paying $9,999 a megawatt hour. Good thing they never realized that they could have set 5 digit prices.

The problem BTW was treating energy as something easily traded to buy and sell. The system didn't take into account transmission. Quite often there isn't an energy shortage, there's a transmission shortage.