victory which, although less convincing than Reagan's two landslides, nevertheless seemed
impressive. A closer examination of the actual vote totals reveals a much different lesson: even incompetition with the bumbling and craven Dukakis campaign, Bush remained a pitifully weak
candidate who, despite overwhelming advantages of incumbency, money, organization, years of
enemies' list operations, a free ride from the controlled media, and a pathetic opponent, just
managed to eke out a hairsbreadth margin.
Bush had won 53% of the popular vote, but if just 535,000 voters in eleven states (or 600,000 voters
in 9 states) had switched to Dukakis, the latter would have been the winner. The GOP had ruled the
terrain west of the Mississippi for many moons, but Bush had managed to lose three Pacific states,
Oregon, Washington, and Hawaii. Bush won megastates like Illinois and Pennsylvania by paper-
thin margins of 51%, abeen too close for George's comfort. Missouri had also been a 52% close call for George. In thend the all-important California vote, which went to Bush by just 52%, had
farm states, the devastation of GOP free enteprise caused both Iowa and Wisconsin to join
Minnesota in the Democratic column. Chronically depressed West Virginia was having none of
George. In the oil patch, the Democrats posted percentage gains even though Bush carried these
states: in Texas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana the Democratic presidential vote was up between 7 and11 percent compared to the Mondale disaster of 1984. In the Midwest, Dukakis managed to carry
four dozen counties that had not gone for a Democratic presidential contender since 1964. All in all
half of Bush's electoral votes came from states in which he got less than 55.5% of the two-party
vote, showing that there was no runaway Bush landslide.
Exit polls showed that less than half of Bush's voters were strongly committed to him, underlining
the fact that Bush has never succeeded in winning the loyalty of any identifiable groups in the
population, except the spooks and the bluebloods. At the time 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%. Eeconomic depression worsens into 1992, axit polls that 53% of all voters through tll of those figures will belong to the good olhat the economy was getting better. As thed 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 tmargins of about 20%, buthe eligible voters in his pocket. Bush had won a number of southern states by lop-sided 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 1986. 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 wdepend on keeping the black turnout low, and this is part of the rationale behind his "wedge issue"ill (^)
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 voterturnout 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