Hi folks, A couple of folks I know are planning to do some serious analysis of the 1992 POTUS election: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_United_States_presidential_election They seem startlingly uninterested in hearing my Ross Perot impersonation, but I guess to each their own. :-) Here on the EM-list, we've been trotting out the Clinton/Bush/Perot example for a LONG time on this mailing list. It's arguably a case of "center squeeze", if one considers Perot to be in the "center" of the 1992 election. I've personally thought a lot about that election, because it happened during my slow transition from "loyal Republican" to "loyal Democrat". These days I'm arguably a stereotypical west-coast liberal, but I know how to pass for a Texan if I wanted to. (For the record: I don't want to; though trotting out a Texan accent comes in handy for my Ross Perot impersonation). I have lots of subjective opinions about the 1992 election, but I think it's worth remembering the timeline. IIRC, Perot was polling above 20% before he dropped out in the early summer (June? July? I can't remember....). Then he RE-ENTERED the race just before the three debates that happened that fall. The debate commission had to keep changing the rules to get Bush and Clinton to agree to participate, because each style seemed to favor a different candidate. Both Bush and Clinton acquiesced to letting Perot on the stage, because neither wanted to appear to be afraid of Perot. As I recall, during the third debate, (see <https://youtu.be/cm-UAfEdWg4>), each candidate was allowed to have something like one page of notes placed on their podium prior to the debate, and they were required to stand behind their respective podiums. I believe that was because Clinton gained an advantage after the second debate by getting up out of his chair and walking around. Clinton's strong polling just before the third debate suggests that: <https://youtu.be/fqFy2vzwSVs> Just before that third debate, Clinton's percentage of the polling vote (49%) was much more than Bush's (31%) and Perot's (12%) combined. It's worth keeping in mind that ABC News was polling based on choose-one voting, because most people didn't think of polling for approval rating (and I'm guessing that Steven Brams was throwing things at his television set if he was watching that newscast). How big of a role did the three debates play? I'm not sure, but the general consensus that I recall from the time is that they played an enormous influence. Like Ross Perot says, I'm the crazy aunt in the basement who wants to talk about numbers: <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s6UYwEUVGkE>. Seriously, though: does anyone know the best place to find the approval ratings for all of the candidates during the campaign? If not approval ratings, then at least the best choose-one polling numbers? It would help the folks doing analysis on the 1992 election, and I'd find the numbers interesting too (like the crazy uncle in the basement). Rob p.s. I may post some links here: (<https://electowiki.org/wiki/User:RobLa/POTUS1992>) and turn this into a proper electowiki article.

> On 01/09/2022 7:05 PM Rob Lanphier <roblan@gmail.com> wrote: > > > They seem startlingly uninterested in hearing my Ross Perot > impersonation, but I guess to each their own. :-) > i'd like to hear it! > Here on the EM-list, we've been trotting out the Clinton/Bush/Perot > example for a LONG time on this mailing list. It's arguably a case of > "center squeeze", if one considers Perot to be in the "center" of the > 1992 election. No, the Center Squeeze does not squeeze out a candidate that was not really a viable winner. Perot has the role of spoiler (if we knew for sure that the Perot voters in the critical states preferred H.W. over Clinton, this is why we need ranked ballots) and if Perot were farther right than H.W. you could argue that it was center squeeze. But since the election was not Hare RCV, I am not sure how center squeeze gets factored in here. It could be simply the classic spoiled election that this Perot candidate took a lot more votes away from the election loser (H.W.) than who became the winner and possibly changed who the winner is. H.W. and Clinton did not spoil the election for Perot, it was Perot who spoiled it for H.W. > I've personally thought a lot about that election, About all the debate stuff, I dunno. I do remember that Perot was oft credited for getting Clinton elected (and, after 12 years of GOP rule, I was grateful). But the Center Squeeze effect is something that I attach only to Hare RCV and since all of the RCV elections other than Burlington 2009 had elected the Condorcet Winner, I dunno that the Center Squeeze had manifested itself at any other election than the Burlington 2009 IRV election. -- r b-j . _ . _ . _ . _ rbj@audioimagination.com "Imagination is more important than knowledge." . . .

Hi Robert, Always fun chatting with you. More inline: On Sun, Jan 9, 2022 at 5:24 PM robert bristow-johnson <rbj@audioimagination.com> wrote: > i'd like to hear [your Ross Perot impersonation]! I'll have to practice it a little bit so that I can pull it off (again). My Richard Nixon isn't as rusty, but I haven't seriously performed my Ross Perot nor my Ronald Reagan in quite some time. Now to the heart of the conversation, regarding whether Ross Perot was subject to the "center squeeze" effect: > No, the Center Squeeze does not squeeze out a candidate that was not really a viable winner. The optics behind the Perot campaign looked pretty good before he dropped out: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_polling_for_United_States_presidential_elections#1992_United_States_presidential_election Gallup put him in the lead in their weekly polls in the month of May and most of June. The campaign got much more difficult in July with all of the free television coverage that the Democratic National Convention received in New York City that year (and with Clinton choosing fellow southerner and conservative Democrat Al Gore). Moreover, he was receiving more scrutiny for what he said than he had ever received before. Was he viable? There are a lot of people that have explored the scenario on the /r/ImaginaryElections subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/imaginaryelections/search?q=perot&restrict_sr=on Many are just goofing around, but the analysis is interesting. For example: https://armariuminterreta.com/2020/12/12/perot-win-1992/ It would be interesting to put these scenarios through more scrutiny. I'll confess that I voted for Perot in 1992. He seemed vaguely like a technologist. He funded NeXT. and as a young, broke college student, I would go to magazine stands and drool over pictures of NeXT computers (my apologies to the people that purchased those magazines). In fairness to Perot as a technologist, his company (Perot Systems) sold for $3.9 billion in 2009 to Dell Computer, which is not nothing for Dell to pay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perot_Systems In hindsight, I can see that a lot of his biggest strength was "gish galloping"[1] the other people in discussions/interviews/debates, which was quite the superpower in early 1990s media campaigns. He probably had lots of practice gish galloping the technologists that worked for him at Perot Systems whenever they would ask him for money, and if they could survive his gish galloping in the boardroom without losing their cool, they got the money. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gish_gallop That's probably why Steve Jobs was able to get all of that money from Ross Perot. My understanding (from people I know who have met Steve Jobs) is that Jobs does indeed have a reality distortion field. Perot was probably no match for hungry, mid-1980s Steve Jobs. Perot was reported to have said "I never should have given those kids all that money" The Internet wasn't a mainstream thing yet (and Wikipedia was years away from creation), so fact-checking was much harder then than it is today. > Perot has the role of spoiler (if we knew for sure that the Perot voters > in the critical states preferred H.W. over Clinton, this is why we need > ranked ballots) and if Perot were farther right than H.W. you could argue > that it was center squeeze. But since the election was not Hare RCV, > I am not sure how center squeeze gets factored in here. I'm still admittedly thinking anecdotally from my own experience. Back in college, when I was surrounded by Democrats who thought I was a weird Republican nerd (which...admittedly... I was), I thought of Perot as a centrist. A Democratic-party-loyalist friend of mine had me convinced that Jerry Brown wouldn't be so bad if he had been nominated, but alas, Bill Clinton had been nominated. Still, I was very anti-establishment by that point, and Bush 41 pissed me off. Not for the same reasons that he pissed off Rush Limbaugh (who I thought was a kook, but ended up listening to on my car's AM-only radio because there was frequently nothing else to listen to), but for other reasons. Both Bush and Clinton seemed like untrustworthy politicians, so Perot won my support. > It could be simply the classic spoiled election that this Perot candidate > took a lot more votes away from the election loser (H.W.) than who became > the winner and possibly changed who the winner is. I think that's what happened. Perot arguably siphoned off "anti-establishment" votes from both sides, but it's hard to be more "establishment" than Bush 41 was by 1992. It's hard to be more "establishment" than the incumbent President of the United States. > H.W. and Clinton did not spoil the election for Perot, it was Perot who spoiled it for H.W. Depends on who you were rootin' for. :-) I'll concede that it's more likely that Perot who spoiled it for HW, but apparently, there were pundits back in 1992 (like E.J. Dionne, writing for the Washington Post) that disagreed with you: https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1992/11/08/perot-seen-not-affecting-vote-outcome/27500538-cee8-4f4f-8e7f-f3ee9f2325d1/ Moreover, Nate Silver (of FiveThirtyEight fame) also disagrees: https://fivethirtyeight.com/videos/the-ross-perot-myth/ I openly disagreed with both of those guys back in 2018: https://medium.com/@robla/fivethirtyeight-botches-the-clinton-election-4c25d71272e1 ...and I stand that opinion, so I implicitly agree with you, Robert. I'll leave it at that for now. Why don't all y'all here on the election-methods mailing list join me tomorrow for a video call? https://whereby.com/robla I'll be there tomorrow (Tuesday) from 2pm to 4pm Pacific Time, which you can convert to your own timezone here: https://www.worldtimebuddy.com/?qm=1&lid=5391959,5128581,2950159,2063523&h=5391959&date=2022-1-11&sln=14-16&hf=1 Rob