H. Ross Perot did not win the 1992 presidential election. He did not even capture a single Electoral College vote.
Nonetheless, the Texan billionaire’s foreign candidacy for the US presidency has transformed the political and electoral landscape, both short and long term. Collecting 19% of all votes cast in November – the highest percentage for a third-party or independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt campaigned for a third term in the White House in 1912 – Perot issued a wake-up call to politicians on both sides of the wing.
Perot followed the populist pattern established by William Jennings Bryan in his (unsuccessful) campaigns for the presidency in 1896, 1900, and 1908. Like Bryan, Perot contacted working-class and middle-class Americans who felt ignored by the political institutions within both parties. Bryan argued for what he felt was in the best interests of “the common man,” advocating the creation of a silver standard and vilifying monopolies and the excessiveness of US imperialism.
Almost a century later, Perot changed the dynamics of the race by focusing on equally populist issues that voters felt had been overlooked or dismissed by both incumbent President George HW Bush and the Democratic Party candidate. , Arkansas Governor William J. Clinton. “All he wanted was change,” argued Jim Squires, his former campaign spokesperson, in a 2007 analysis.
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Perot delivered his message to the masses, using the media
Billionaire Texas businessman Ross Perot shows off a graphic during a self-funded TV commercial / program promoting his run for president as a third-party candidate.
Ted Thai / LIFE Images Collection / Getty Images
The first sign that Perot’s campaign would diverge from any other American had encountered: He announced his candidacy not at a press conference or political rally, but rather on a televised political talk show, ” Larry King Live “. Long before candidates like Barack Obama, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders turned to the internet to transform their campaigns, Perot recognized that mass media – in the form of cable TV and infomercials – had the potential to turn the world upside down. how candidates and voters connect. “If I want 100,000 more volunteers, all I have to do is get on a national show,” Perot said of his campaign. Millions of people have watched his infomercials.
Perot didn’t just change the way candidates reached voters. It also transformed both the style and the substance of the political campaign. Discontent with “politics as usual” and “the establishment” have long been key elements of challengers’ political rhetoric, but Perot’s insistence on “taking back the country” and the voters behaving like “the owners of this country” brought a new sense of empowerment to Americans who felt ignored by the big parties. In the midst of the campaign, political scientist and columnist Charles Krauthammer argued that Perot was the first to find a way around “the big institutions – the political parties, the establishment media, Congress – that traditionally stood by between the governors and the ruled. “He avoided large public gatherings and emphasized direct voter education. It was, Krauthammer said,” a geological shift in American politics. “
One element of this change: a focus on the grassroots activist campaign. When Perot announced his candidacy on “Larry King Live,” he said he would run if, and only if, volunteers from all 50 states campaigned and got enough signatures to put him on the ballot. By completely bypassing the conventional nomination process, he called on individual voters to stand up and be counted. It was this voter engagement, rather than his heavy spending later in the campaign, that fueled his success – something the candidates then ignored at their peril, claim Ronald B. Rapoport and Walter J. Stone, professors of political science and co-authors of Three is a crowd, a book on the impact of the Perot campaign.
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WATCH: The rise of populism
Perot campaign puts deficit first
Perot also transformed the way in which outside presidential campaigns – whether run as an independent or third-party candidate or within both established parties – have influenced the issues. “Neither party could afford to offend” Perot’s constituency, whether in 1992 or beyond, Rapoport and Stone concluded, based on a comprehensive analysis of electoral trends.
In 1992, for example, the two traditional candidates focused on economic issues in light of high unemployment and a sluggish economy. But it was Perot who focused his firepower on the ever-growing budget deficit, dubbing him the “crazy old aunt in the attic” that no one wanted to discuss publicly. By making the national debt a cornerstone of its policy and by garnering such massive popular support at the polls, “Perot stuck a balanced federal budget in Washington’s throat,” Squires said.
Other themes Perot raised during his campaign have survived his two candidacies (he returned to vie for the presidency in a less successful bid in 1996) – and Perot himself. Opposing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), he insisted that the outcome of the trade pact would be “a giant sucking noise from jobs being taken from this country.” Opponents of free trade on both sides have since invoked the phrase countless times, and subsequent administrations and candidates have continued to voice its concerns in trade policy proposals.
Perhaps one of Perot’s most enduring legacies is the resurgence of the Republican Party that began in 1994. Their “contract with America” endorsed by almost all but a handful of Republican candidates , in the midterm elections of 1994, and by the Tea Party movement, born in 2008, both reflect Perot’s strategy in both style and substance. Not only did they emphasize connecting with the grassroots and combating the sense of deprivation of the right to vote of working-class and middle-class groups of voters, but they prioritized some of the his ideas, such as fiscal discipline. “Perot’s vote was responsible for producing historic Republican victories in the 1994 House elections and the 2000 presidential election,” Rapoport and Stone concluded.
This resurgence of the GOP, and the polarization that follows, remains one of the most ironic results of Perot’s insurgency campaign. It produced, Jim Squires noted, “some of the most resentful supporters in history and the very block that Perot had campaigned against.”
READ MORE: How the 1994 ‘Contract with America’ Led to a Republican Revolution
