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:
“Every morning I woke in dread, waiting for the day nurse to go on her rounds and announce from the list of names in her hand whether or not I was for shock treatment, the new and fashionable means of quieting people and of making them realize that orders are to be obeyed and floors are to be polished without anyone protesting and faces are to be made to be fixed into smiles and weeping is a crime.”
—Janet Frame (b. 1924)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“Every profound new movement makes a great swing also backwards to some older, half-forgotten way of consciousness.”
—D.H. (David Herbert)
“It is impossible for a stranger traveling through the United States to tell from the appearance of the people or the country whether he is in Toledo, Ohio, or Portland, Oregon. Ninety million Americans cut their hair in the same way, eat each morning exactly the same breakfast, tie up the small girls’ curls with precisely the same kind of ribbon fashioned into bows exactly alike; and in every way all try to look and act as much like all the others as they can.”
—Alfred Harmsworth, Lord Northcliffe (1865–1922)