of the election, the official statistics of the Reagan regime were alleging a yearly
consumer inflation rate of 5.2% and an unemployment figure of 4.1%. Exit polls that
53% of all voters through that the economy was getting better. As the economic
depression worsens into 1992, all of those figures will belong to the good old days. A
comparison of Bush's victory in the Iowa caucuses of 1980 with his wretched third-place
finish there in 1988 is a good indicator of how utterly support for Bush can collapse as a
result of a dramatic deterioration in economic conditions, given once again that Bush has
no loyal base of political support.
The voter turnout hit a new postwar low, with just 49.1% of eligible voters showing up at
the polls, significantly worse than the Truman-Dewey matchup of 1948, when just 51%
had deemed it worthwile to vote. This means that Bush expected to govern the country
with the votes of just 26.8% of the eligible voters in his pocket. Bush had won a number
of southern states by lop-sided margins of about 20%, but this was correlated in many
cases with very low overall voter turnout, which dipped below 40% in Georgia and South
Carolina. A big plus factor for George was the very low black voter turnout in the south,
where a significant black vote had helped the Democrats retake control of the Senate in
- With Dukakis capturing 90% of the black vote, a bigger black turnout would have
created some serious problems for George. Bush knows that victory in 1992 will depend
on keeping the black turnout low, and this is part of the rationale behind his "wedge
issue" nomination of the black rightist Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court, which
successfully split national black organizations in such a way that Bush hopes he will be
able to ignore them in 1992.
More generally, it would appear that Bush would be very happy to keep across the board
voter turnout at such depressed levels, since a larger vote could only threaten his results.
Dukakis was able to attract only about half of the Reagan Democrats back to their
traditional party, despite the preppy-blueblood aura of the Bush campaign, which these
voters would normally have found highly offensive. The Bush cause is therefore well
served by public scandals and media campaigns that tend to elicit widespread disgust
with politics and government, since these increase the probability that citizens will stay
home on election day, leaving George to dominate the field. It is no surprise that
precisely such scandals, from Congressional pay raises and the Keating five to the
Thomas nomination hearings have proliferated during the years of the Bush regime.
Among those Republicans who had succeeded in winning the White House in two-way
races (excluding years like 1948 or 1968, when the totals were impacted by Henry
Wallace and Strom Thurmond's Dixiecrats, or by George Wallace), Bush's result was the
weakest since fellow Skull and Bones alumnus William Howard Taft in 1908. [fn 51]
These patterns might also indicate that the dominant role of the electoral votes of the
former Confederate States of America within the Electoral College under the post-1968
Southern Strategy of the national Republican Party may be subjected to erosion in 1992,
especially under the impact of the Bush economic depression.
It is also to be hoped that 1988 will prove in retrospect to have represented the high-water
mark of hired gun media and campaign consultants in presidential elections. Atwater at