The Myth of Bill Clinton’s Electoral Dominance

A lot of digital ink has been spilled, particularly here at new Splinter, explaining how the Democrats’ neoliberal shift under Bill Clinton at the turn of the century set the stage for them to lose to Donald Trump (really it began with Jimmy Carter, but that’s a blog for another day). At this point it is well-established that Bill Clinton governed to the right of the average Democratic voter in the 21st century, and his conservative legacy the elite in the party so desperately want to continue is at the heart of a lot of conflicts on the left these days.

However, not enough of a fuss has been made over what a huge electoral fraud he was, and how the myth of Bill Clinton’s supposed dominance over the electorate helped convince the elite in the party that their outdated policies are actually popular. Ever since his speech at this year’s Democratic National Convention, I have seen this machine manufacturing this lie spinning back up and it has Grinded my Gears to the point where I need to blog about it.

Bill Clinton’s election was culturally jarring, as he was the first president born after World War II. The 22-year difference between Clinton and George H. W. Bush is the second largest in U.S. history, falling short of the 27 years separating John F. Kennedy and Dwight D. Eisenhower. For contrast, Kamala Harris will be 60 years old on Election Day, which would leave her 21 years younger than Joe Biden, who was born nearly a year after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Clinton was a big deal in the sense that like JFK and Harris, he felt like a bridge to a new world, and after he got the greatest assist in modern electoral history, the Democratic mythmaking machine got to work. The notion that his “era of big government is over” policies are at the root of his victories has about as much evidence behind it as QAnon does.

Fun fact: Donald Trump received 46.1 percent and 46.8 percent of the popular vote in 2016 and 2020, which is over three percent more than Bill Clinton won in 1992. His dominant 1996 victory where he ran against a man all of America deemed too old to be president (at 73 years old, eight years younger than Joe Biden is now) only garnered Clinton 49.2 percent of the popular vote, one percent more than his wife’s world-historic failure of a campaign in 2016.

Fraud!

Bill Clinton ran under the friendliest set of circumstances for a Democrat since the parties flipped a century ago. Not only did he have a baked-in once-in-a-generation economic boom that a golden retriever could have successfully overseen making him look like a genius in 1996, but he had a ton of help from one of the most competitive third-party candidates in American history draining votes from the Republican Party. Any generic schmuck could have won those elections for the Democrats.

Ross Perot won a staggering 18.9 percent of the popular vote for the Reform Party in 1992, as George H.W. Bush lost 22 states he took in 1988: California, Nevada, Montana, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas, Louisiana, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Georgia, Pennsylvania, Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, Delaware, New Jersey and Maryland. If you’re looking for the root of America’s modern political realignment, this year is it. These are the tides of history shifting, and no one politician has any control over them.

In 1996, Perot was much less formidable, but he still received a healthy chunk of the popular vote—8.4 percent—enough where if you added it to Bob Dole’s total, he would fall 0.1 percent short of Clinton’s popular vote share. Bill Clinton’s two Republican opponents averaged thirty-nine percent of the popular vote, and you have to go back to the days of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s constitution-altering rule to find two elections in a row where one party performed that poorly. Even Ronald Reagan’s back-to-back blowouts over Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale by an electoral vote score of 1,014 to 62 saw the Democrats capture a larger proportion of the popular vote than the GOP did in the Clinton years.

Bill Clinton never surpassed fifty percent of the popular vote. Ross Perot did pull some voters from him and he likely would have eclipsed the halfway mark in 1996 if Perot had not run, but America’s favorite master of charts took a lot more votes from the GOP, so the point here stands. Clinton is often credited by partisans with “ending” twelve years of Reagan-Bush Republican dominance, even though going into the 1992 election, the Democrats held a 100-seat advantage in the House and a 14-seat lead in the Senate.

Fraud!

The story of Clinton is primarily the story of the GOP carving his path to the White House through its own civil war. Clinton would not have defeated even a marginally unified Republican Party in 1992, and had the GOP found a way to fully placate the Perot coalition, Bill Clinton’s name would be remembered alongside historically uncompetitive losers like Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

As a friend of mine pointed out, perhaps nothing better demonstrates what a nobody Clinton was in 1992 than this Saturday Night Live sketch from November 1991, titled “The race to avoid being the guy who loses to Bush.” This was at the dawn of the Democratic primary, and Bill Clinton isn’t even included in these five “chumps” running a futile challenge against a formidable incumbent!

Even Barack Obama’s meteoric rise in 2008 was fueled by his stunning speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention. Trump has run for president every year since the height of Clinton’s popularity, and Bernie Sanders had been in the House and Senate for decades building a socialist movement. There’s no real modern comparison for Clinton’s overnight success. He’s an anomaly, not a revelation.

Bill Clinton was the beneficiary of a fractured field in the Democratic primary too and is perhaps the prime example of New Hampshire’s undue influence in our presidential primary process. He parlayed a surprising second-place finish in the Granite State to his first primary victory in Georgia a few weeks later, and the calendar shifting south accelerated this momentum he created in one of America’s highest profile random number generators, and the rest is history.

So the next time you hear someone begin to wax poetic about the supposed genius of the Clinton years, don’t bore them with a lecture about neoliberal policies, just point out how they were ushered in with much less of the popular vote than Trump has won twice, and Bill’s high water mark is marginally better than Hillary’s disastrous campaign two decades later—all of which was primarily aided by a wildly successful kamikaze mission by Ross Perot and a 114 seat advantage in Congress. What a visionary!