SubscribeBecause the popular vote has a great deal to do with the legitimacy of an incoming president. Clinton was perceived as an extremely weak president because he only received 42 percent of the popular vote in 1992. Look at what Republicans like a Newsday editorialist were saying about him after he won:
... Clinton won his electoral victory against an unpopular Republican president, fatally wounded by a weak economy, by only a minority of the votes cast. About 57 percent of the voters did not want him as president, but voted for Bush, Ross Perot or some other candidate.
And Clinton won a majority of the vote in only one state, his home base of Arkansas (remember Michael Dukakis?). In 47 states, the majority of voters preferred somebody else. (Clinton got about half the vote in two states.)
This kind of criticism was made about Clinton for four years, and now it appears we'll have a president whose showing in the 1992 vote makes Clinton look like a landslide winner. You can say what you want about the Electoral College, but it doesn't deny the fact that under a one-person, one-vote count George W. Bush was America's second choice. That's a huge albatross.
(Newsday source: Phineas R. Fiske, Nov. 11, 1992)
posted by rcade at 8:05 PM on November 27, 2000
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posted by m.polo at 2:09 PM on November 27, 2000