Why do we put so much faith in Bill Clinton when he won his first election mainly due to the vote splitting of Ross Perot (19% of the vote!). Without a right-wing third party candidate most people think George H.W. Bush would've had a second term.
In general, I kind of wonder why the Ross Perot effect is less talked about than the Nader effect. Nader took a tiny percentage of votes compared to Perot, and still gets blamed year after year for Al Gore's defeat to G.W. Bush.
In 2016, too, though kind of in a Nader order of magnitude rather than a Perot one, Gary Johnson added momentum to Hillary Clinton's campaign by giving conservatives who hated Trump an option, and she still lost.
Might it be that if the brilliant plan your party has devised to win elections is this fragile that maybe it's not such a brilliant plan? Mind you, clearly it's a plan I just don't ideologically like. But I'm trying to make the case in terms of numbers, not ideas.
This is taking things in a real cynical direction, but arguably Bill Clinton won in 1996 because American voters are sexist garbage and wanted to stick it to Monica Lewinsky. And because Bob Dole is a zombie. Oh! & because Clinton engineered debates to be during the World Series.
Wait? Am I getting the timeline right there? I was in middle school when this went down, so now I'm trying to remember if people knew about Lewinsky before the election, or if that was only after the election?
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