In 1992, President George Bush’s bid for a second term did not go well. Despite taking 79% of the electoral vote in 1988, holding office during the collapse of communism in Europe, and serving as commander-in-chief during the US victory in the first Iraq War, Bush found himself flanked by a smooth talking former Arkansas governor and a Texas businessman armed with a personal fortune and a lot of charts. When it was all over, Bush had garnered about ten million fewer votes than he had four years earlier and a 12-year run of Republican Presidents was over.

How did Bill Clinton manage to beat an incumbent President by so much? Was third-party contender Ross Perot responsible for Bush’s catastrophic loss in 1992, or was it really, as Clinton’s people claimed, “the economy, stupid?” And why did Perot, who at one point looked to be a viable contender, decide to drop out of the race, only to rejoin a few weeks before the election? Let’s find out.

Welcome to the Road to Now’s Third Party Election Series. Today: The election of 1992 with Julian Zelizer.

Julian Zelizer is Malcolm Stevenson Forbes, Class of 1941 Professor of History and Public Affairs, Princeton School of Public & International Affairs at Princeton University. He is the award-winning author and editor of 25 books including The Fierce Urgency of Now: Lyndon Johnson, Congress, and the Battle for the Great Society, the winner of the D.B. Hardeman Prize for the Best Book on Congress and Fault Lines: A History of the United States Since 1974, co-authored and Burning Down the House: Newt Gingrich, The Fall of a Speaker, and the Rise of the New Republican Party.

This episode was edited by Gary Fletcher.

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