The United States presidential election of 1992 was the 52nd quadrennial presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 3, 1992. There were three major candidates: Incumbent Republican President George H. W. Bush; Democratic Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, and independent Texas businessman Ross Perot.
Bush had alienated much of his conservative base by breaking his 1988 campaign pledge against raising taxes, the economy was in a recession, and Bush's perceived greatest strength, foreign policy, was regarded as much less important following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the relatively peaceful climate in the Middle East after the defeat of Iraq in the Gulf War.
Clinton won a plurality in the popular vote, and a wide Electoral College margin. The election was a significant realigning election after three consecutive Republican landslides. The Democratic Party picked up and maintained strong support in the Northeast, the Great Lakes region, and the West Coast. Also, Clinton won only four states of the former Confederacy, the fewest for a victorious Democrat up to that point, reaffirming that those states and the broader region had changed from being solidly Democratic to strongly supporting the Republican party. This is the most recent election in which a sitting president lost reelection.
Famous quotes containing the words list of, list, swing and/or states:
“Shea—they call him Scholar Jack—
Went down the list of the dead.
Officers, seamen, gunners, marines,
The crews of the gig and yawl,
The bearded man and the lad in his teens,
Carpenters, coal-passers—all.”
—Joseph I. C. Clarke (1846–1925)
“Weigh what loss your honor may sustain
If with too credent ear you list his songs,
Or lose your heart, or your chaste treasure open
To his unmastered importunity.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“On 16 September 1985, when the Commerce Department announced that the United States had become a debtor nation, the American Empire died.”
—Gore Vidal (b. 1925)