Winning South and Midwest electoral college votes allowed Bush to win
But the number of votes that Bush receive from these electoral college is sigificantly low compared to what Ronald Reagan got during his presidency, which indicates that George Bush is pretty much disliked by the Republican voters compared to Al Gore. There are two theories about the 1988 presidential election. One is that the Democrats can't lose unless they do everything wrong. The other is that they can't win even if they do everything right.
According to the first theory, the Democrats hold all the trump cards--the Iran-contra scandal, the stock-market crash, public disenchantment with Ronald Reagan, and George Bush's high negatives in the polls. All they have to do is play their cards right. The other theory says that the Democratic Party is in such a parlous condition that none of these advantages really matters. "The unpleasant truth is this," the political consultant Patrick H. Caddell wrote in a memorandum to major party contributors last year. "The party has never been weaker in our lifetime and the array of obstacles and trends never more alarming." Horace W. Busby, formerly a confidant of Lyndon B. Johnson's and now a Washington consultant, offered this prophecy one month before the 1980 election: "The hard-to-accept truth is that Democratic candidacies for the White House may no longer be viable. The Republican lock is about to close; it will be hard for anyone to open over the four elections between now and the year 2000." I interviewed Busby late last year and asked him if he saw any prospect that the Democrats could break the Republican lock in 1988. "No, I don't," he replied. Who did he think would be the strongest Democratic standard bearer in 1988? "Michael Dukakis," he said. "Why Dukakis?" I asked. "Because," Busby replied, "he is the Democrat most likely to carry his own state."
It's fairly easy to find evidence for the theory that the Democrats are headed for a victory. Just look at the polls--and not only the "horserace" polls, showing Dukakis with a healthy lead over Bush. Gallup polls taken earlier this year showed the Democrats regaining a lead, of 42 to 29 percent, over the Republicans in party affiliation. In 1985, shortly after President Reagan's re-election victory, the parties were nearly equal in strength. In October of 1987 a Time magazine poll asked people which party would handle various issues better. The Democrats were rated five points ahead on "keeping the country out of war." Two years earlier the Republicans had been five points ahead. On "keeping inflation under control" the Republican advantage had shrunk from 10 points in 1985 to an insignificant one point by 1987. The Republicans were still ahead on "keeping the country strong and prosperous," but the margin was six points in 1987, down from 18 points in 1985. And this was before the stock market crash.
The revolt against government is over. According to a CBS-New York Times poll taken in May, the American public is now evenly divided when asked whether it prefers a "bigger government providing more services" or a "smaller government providing fewer services." The Times reported, "Bigger government has not been this popular since November 1976, which is also the last time the Democrats won a presidential election." Moreover, tax resentment, a key source of public support for the Reagan revolution, has clearly diminished. From 1978 to 1986, according to polls taken by the Roper Organization, the percentage of Americans who felt that their federal income taxes were "excessively high" dropped from 41 to 26 percent.
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