Polls (Some History)

[selmaborntidefan]

THE SUMMER OF DEMOCRATIC RENAISSANCE
July 9 - August 15, 1992

Bill Clinton arrived at the Convention in full ardor, running mate in tow, and ready to give the speech of his life. Posing as an outsider - a laughable notion given Clinton was the ultimate politician - but one who wasn't paranoid about, well, everything, Clinton stepped up in New York City and took the nomination over four days in July of 1992. Running as a responsible centrist - tax cuts for the middle class financed by the wealthy, deficit reduction, pro-choice but hardly a militant about abortion, not exactly opposed to gun owner rights, but seemingly contrarian with his advocacy of open gays in a military whose service he once eschewed and "loathed" - Clinton benefited from the pragmatism of a party desperate to regain the White House. Unlike the nomination processes that had marked the party as the rule since 1972, Clinton did things (and took positions) that never would have been allowed by the conventions that nominated George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis. He was on the record as favoring the death penalty, he talked about how "welfare recipients" must "show responsibility" (a comment that would still be held up today as racist if Clinton was a Republican), and his record on the environment in Arkansas was mediocre at best. But good fortune plays as much a role in a Presidential election as anything, and Clinton benefited from the fact the first-ever African-American party leader, Ron Brown, gave Clinton cover every time the Hard Left reared its head.

And speaking of luck, Clinton was born under a four-leaf clover given what occurred on the memorable afternoon of July 16, 1992, when the biggest bombshell in the race went off: Ross Perot, who had been in a dead heat with the incumbent President and the beleaguered centrist challenger, committed political seppuku and withdrew from a race he had technically never even entered in the first place. He went through the process of firing both of his campaign managers, blamed them by saying "there had never been a bad story about me until you guys came aboard," and inserted himself into the Democratic National Convention mere hours before Clinton was to give his acceptance speech, an act that necessitated Clinton rewriting sections of the monologue. Perot declared that since the Democratic Party has "revitalized itself" he had "concluded we cannot win in November" because "the election would be cast into the House of Representatives." Donning a cloak of virtue, Perot said that that delay would impinge the incoming administration and narrow the transition window, so he was withdrawing.

His claim was so laughably absurd on its face that nobody took it seriously. Newsweek ran a headline calling Perot "Quitter", and Ed Rollins, Perot's just fired Republican manager, said that Perot was withdrawing because he didn't want to listen to the advice of professional consultants (like Rollins) and do things like polling, holding a convention, or run targeted TV ads.

His excuse was not only pathetic, it would take less than two weeks for Perot to come out and say he withdrew because the Bush campaign was going to sabotage his daughter's wedding. Forgotten was any of his nobility about the country.

The news hit the country like a nuclear bomb. And it is also one of the reasons that Republicans insist to this day that Perot cost Bush the election. Did he? Most probably not, but I will cover that in the epilogue. What is indisputable, however, is that liberal columnist Mary McGrory AT THE TIME wrote:

In the lobby of Clinton's headquarters hotel, the Inter-Continental, Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg was unleashed to explain the aftershock. The South, which supposedly had been sewed up by the southern-fried Clinton-Gore ticket, will now be contested. Had Perot stayed in, he would have robbed Bush of the usual GOP majorities.

In short, Perot's participation was at least going to distract Bush from being able to take the South for granted. And there was another - for the time - short-term benefit: Perot's withdrawal was a booster rocket attached to the Clinton campaign, showing the Arkansas Governor with a 42-30 lead over Bush (it was tied at 30 for all three entering July). And then came the long-term benefit: a bus trip through the Rust Belt designed to ride the momentum to election. It succeeded far beyond the Clinton campaign's wildest dreams, even praised by Republican consultant Charlie Black as a "master stroke." By the time it was over, Bill Clinton was an incredible 24 points ahead of Bush, the largest lead of any Democratic candidate in a Presidential elections since Carter's 33-point lead over President Ford in 1976.

With Perot gone and Clinton roaring into the lead, the scrutiny now focused on President Bush and one particular question: should he dump Dan Quayle as his running mate for the fall election?

 

[selmaborntidefan]

THE REPUBLICAN PHANTOM NOMINATION - AND PRE-CAMPAIGN

The Republican campaign was over the moment Pat Buchanan lost to George Bush in New Hampshire.
This should have been a blessing for the campaign and time to prepare for the fall campaign, particularly since Bill Clinton was the obvious nominee at the end of Super Tuesday. But Bush was about to learn how a President largely on the sidelines away from the race and with the other party in control of both Houses couldn't really do very much. And he was also learning how brutal outside events could impose themselves on a President and cripple his ability to function.

For three solid years, Bush had been incredibly lucky as to outside events. Forgotten today is how much change really occurred in the larger world between 1989 and 1991, with the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia going out of existence, several Eastern European countries having internal revolutions and throwing off decades of Communism, Germany reuniting, a war that put Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in his place, a coup in the Soviet Union that was beaten down in a few days, a massacre in Tianneman Square, and rapidly moving towards approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that was hoped would help North America counter the rapid development of a united Europe. Every time something had gone wrong, Bush had come out smelling like a rose; every time it went right, he got credit merely by being. Bush even got two nominees to the Supreme Court approved by a Democratic majority. But all of the good luck turned to bad when the calendar turned to 1992.

Buchanan savaged Bush as "not a real conservative." The biggest issue was his broken promise on taxes, an act that cost him his political base and reputation (high as far as politicians go) for integrity. But Bush would have gotten away with this had the economy not cratered in the worst recession since the Great Depression. No, it wasn't Bush's fault, but he was the one entering the 12th year of Republicans being in charge.

It got worse.

Perot entered the race and clearly had a personal disdain for Bush, whom he had invited to go to work for him after Bush left the CIA. The suspicions as to why Perot loathed Bush turned on two issues, his feeling that Bush (unlike Perot) had never made "real money" but more so that Bush, in 1986, had stopped Perot's attempts to locate POWs and MIAs in Vietnam all on his own. And it got worse.

When a Simi Valley jury acquitted four LAPD officers of all but one charge in the beating of motorist Rodney King, the city of Los Angeles went up in flames. Making it worse, Clinton made it to LA before Bush did and won the publicity race, too. And it continued to get worse. His Vice-President, Dan Quayle, went out and got on a roll firing up the conservative base, and Quayle was popular among that base as a "real conservative." But then Quayle flubbed it twice, getting into a fluff with popular TV actress Candace Bergen over and episode of her show, "Murphy Brown," and then relaying a word that was misspelled on the back of a card during a spelling bee ("potato" spelled "potatoe") to the ridicule of the public as a whole, who didn't know the details. With those two gaffes, Quayle reinforced that he was an out of touch rich white guy with a trust fund who wasn't exactly Einstein in the brains department. And after Clinton roared out of New York to a huge campaign lead, the question was put to Bush: "Should we throw the excess baggage (Quayle) overboard and start afresh?" Names like Colin Powell and Dick Cheney were brought forth, ties to Bush's successful sojourn into war.

But it was one consultant who went nose-to-nose with Bush and told him the facts of life: nobody votes for VP anyway, if Quayle is wrong now, he was wrong in 1988, and do you really want to tell the entire country "I had no idea what I was doing"? That didn't stop both Bush and Quayle from committing further blunders and getting drawn into conversations about what they'd do if their own daughters had abortions. The issue had renewed salience when the High Court stopped just short of overturning Roe v Wade at the end of June. And as if all this wasn't bad enough, Bush's convention didn't help.

Held in Houston, Texas, the Convention was by no means as bad as the coverage was, but it still gave the nation a picture of a party of nearly all-white and well-off speakers consumed with social issues like gay marriage and abortion - and a President whose numbers had tanked in one calendar year due to his perceived inattention to the economy. The media spin on the Convention was that it was a terrible ode to bigotry - but the fact is that for a "bad" Convention, the Bush campaign cut the Clinton lead from 24 points to a more manageable 8 within a week. So for all of the bad coverage and memories of the 1992 GOP Convention as a religious revival, the reality is that by the measurements of "bounce," it was successful, too.

Beneath the numbers, however, was a serious problem for the GOP: at the end of July, STATE polls showed an incredible reality, with Clinton holding either a lead or a narrow deficit in every single state except Utah. It was similar to the 1968 election when Nixon held leads in 46 states at the Convention and wound up winning at the very end by the narrowest of margins. Had Nixon lost California (he won their 40 electoral votes by less than 3 points), he would never have been President. So although Clinton had nothing but good news at this point, the fall campaign was about to begin with memories of Bush rallying the forces just four years earlier to wipe the floor with Michael Dukakis.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

TWO FLAWED CANDIDATES AWAITING A THIRD
September 1992

All year long, the assumption was that this race was George Bush's race to lose. Clinton was a second-tier candidate who only entered the race because the big names in his party - Cuomo, Bradley, Nunn, Bentsen, Gore, Rockefeller - had all sat on the sidelines dazzled at Bush's 91% approval rating in April of 1991. Clinton was also the master of the dangling participle or incomplete statement that sounded like it had been vetted through lawyers as the small print in a legal contract that he planned to pull as a technicality to defend himself from any charge he was actually "lying." In the back of the Democratic minds was a Democratic myth from 1988 that would not die, one that was never true in the first place, and even if it was, it had no relevance this time anyway. It was the idea that Bush was the master of coming back from deep poll deficits to win elections, and he would use any means fair or foul to win. The most constant appeal was for Clinton's side to reference "Willie Horton," the convicted murderer and rapist on furlough that Democrats imagined was the reason they lost the 1988 election. And Bush had made a stellar effort when up against it in New Hampshire in 1988 and the fall election of 1988. He reached into his bag of tricks and dusted off the same playbook used in 1988: Clinton was "the governor of a small, failed state" was the charge. It had worked in 1988 and the assumption across the spectrum was that it would work again in 1992. It was the fear of the Democrats and hope of the Republicans, particularly since the economy may have been growing but didn't feel like it to enough people to save Bush.

But there was one key difference in the race this time: Bush was no longer the Vice-President of the United States with a mostly clean slate who could take a carefully crafted position that was a break with his boss. Bush in 1992 was a President of three years in the White House who now had a public record hung around his neck as an albatross. If Bush's argument was that Clinton was the failed governor of a small state, Clinton's counterpunch was far more brutal: "Bush is the failed President of a great nation." And almost every time Bush talked about honesty and brought up Clinton's dissembling on issues, all Clinton had to do to take the edge off the attack was a variation of, "I'm not the one who said read my lips and then raised everyone's taxes." And unlike the last four Democratic losing candidates, Clinton was willing to lie to the public and dangle a middle-class tax cut that the rich were going to pay for in order to entice the broadest span of the electorate.

To put it another way, Clinton was running a smart centrist campaign.

THE CLINTON STRATEGY

Paul Tully, who died at age 48 in September 1992, formulated the election strategy, an obvious strategy that the Democrats had failed to use previously. Take the Dukakis states for granted (start with 112 EVs), work most heavily in the battleground states Dukakis lost by less than 5 points (PA by 2, CA by 4, IL by 2, MO by 4, MD by 3, for a total of 97 EVs, bringing Clinton to 209), do some campaigning in the South to show you were not a Northeast liberal (add in AR and TN for 17 more, bringing Clinton to 226), and hammer home the economic message in the Rust Belt states of Ohio, Michigan, and New Jersey (54 more EVs, or 10 more than necessary to win). Plus, if Clinton could just pick up a stray Southern state like Georgia or Kentucky - conservative states still inclined to vote Democratic - he had an insurance policy. Unlike every election since 1972, the Democrats were taking the field with the wind at their backs, a country reeling from recession, and one with a strong appetite for change. For the first time since that election, the Democrats were not in the position of having to "fill the inside straight" (e.g. win every close state to win the whole thing).

And a review of the state polls from September proves that Clinton was playing with house money regardless of whether the RNC was good or bad for the GOP.






September was dominated by three stories:

1) Clinton has a lead, but he doesn't have the election nailed down just yet. A look at the above map shows the problems Bush had: look at how many Southern states as part of his base were "lean" and not nailed down? Bush was in trouble. South Dakota.......SOUTH DAKOTA.......was a toss-up.

2) Bush is not only floundering, he's refusing to debate Clinton - and every day that goes by, he's throwing away his chances to turn the race around.

3) Why is Ross Perot, who isn't even running, spending money and filing with the FEC?


This last began as a trickle and then - when Perot dropped his own third big bombshell of the year on the country by re-entering the race on October 1 - it wasn't even a surprise by that point.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

1992 - THE REALIGNMENT ELECTION

Over the course of six Presidential elections, the Republican Party held what felt like the equivalent of an electoral college lock, winning five of the six elections (and coming within less than 10,000 votes of winning the other via the Electoral College in 1976), four of those in blistering landslides, two of them by counts of 49-1. Keep in mind this was a political party that had been nuked out of existence in 1964 when Lyndon Johnson routed Barry Goldwater, and the GOP began a conspicuous rightward turn within their nominating wing. And also keep in mind the Democratic Party had won seven of the nine elections prior to this Republican period of dominance at the Presidential level and the two they lost - Eisenhower's wins in 1952 and 1956 - weren't even that big of a thing because Eisenhower wasn't regarded on the whole as a partisan Republican so much as he was a beloved general. Indeed, President Truman tried to get Eisenhower to run in 1952 as a Democrat, and he felt Ike was holding back his party affiliation in hopes both parties nominated him and there wouldn't be an election. But starting in 1968, the Republican Party first escaped with a narrow win in 1968 and then repeatedly beat Democrats like a drum as the nomination process changed along with the country.

Democrats, of course, needed an excuse as to why they began losing elections and they found an easy culprit: the Republican Party is appealing to racist voters with dog whistles known as the Southern strategy. This strategy (in the tale) led to white voters in the South leaving the Democratic Party en masse and giving the Republicans the White House for 20 of the next 24 years. While of questionable accuracy as an excuse, there's a larger problem for the Democratic Party that consultants (as opposed to propagandists) had to accept: Richard Nixon would have won the White House anyway in 1968 regardless of any alleged Southern strategy simply by carrying states he had carried previously in the South as either Ike's running mate or in his own losing campaign in 1960 (to say nothing of the fact he finished THIRD in the "most racist" states in the south, too). And here's the rub: the same is true for every single Republican win from 1968 through 1988. The Southern states outside of Tennessee, Kentucky, and Virginia - states that were already voting for Nixon - did not have anything at all to do with Republicans winning elections at the Presidential level. But that's getting ahead of the discussion of 1968, except to make this point: the Republican Party wasn't so much winning elections because of the South - although, YES, that made their jobs easier - they were winning because they were capturing the Rust Belt states between New Jersey and Wisconsin while also winning the big electoral prizes of California and New York. In essence, the areas that had previously provided the Democrats with their winning margins at the Presidential level now had enough swing voters pulling the lever for a Republican. When Texas made their own flip, the Democrats had a serious problem on their hands at winning nationally. And the key to any Democratic comeback was going to have to be to win the big states with the big prizes - starting with California, and it is here that a more sober analysis prevails. The South DID begin to fracture as the Democratic Solid South beginning with Strom Thurmond's third-party run in 1948, but the reality is that the South wasn't the only geographic area to "switch sides" over the next 40 years, either. (32 states of the 50 voted for the opposite party in 2024 that they did in 1976).

When the GOP won five of six elections in 1968-88, the biggest reason was that Democrats could not seriously contest California. In four of those elections, a former California Senator (Nixon) or Governor (Reagan) headed the GOP ticket, and the GOP went 4-0. In the last GOP win in 1988, a relatively unpopular in California George Bush prevailed by 3.5 points thanks largely to Reagan campaigning on his behalf. And in four of those elections, the GOP also won New York, a huge electoral prize. With their Western base (almost every state west of the Mississippi River except - would you believe it - Texas), the GOP was the team playing with house money. It was so one-sided that in the late spring of 1984, Lee Atwater sat down with the party elders and a map and spelled out that Reagan had already locked down 266 electoral votes by virtue of the nomination of Walter Mondale. All they had to do now was not screw up, and they were going to win anyway. (Nixon would later advise the GOP to treat Ohio as a governor's race and bombard the state with appearances and ads to lock the race down, a strategy followed to the letter.

But in 1992, the GOP ran straight into a buzzsaw of a changing electorate, an economy that felt worse than the numbers, and a communication challenged Yankee who couldn't communicate his vision to the country. They also ran into a Democratic Party that - finally - after 20 years of infighting had decided it was better to win the White House FIRST and then start tearing one another apart. They also ran into a Democrat actually willing to lie about his intention on raising taxes, one willing to say that he'd LOWER them on the middle class and make the rich pay for it. McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis were never so brazen, but they were also never so charismatic, either.

The shifting of California from a GOP stronghold to one of the most liberal states in America where a Democrat nowadays doesn't even have to campaign occurred across the period of around 1986 to 1992. The GOP has not even come close to winning the state again and will not for the foreseeable future. This changing electorate was first noted around Labor Day by liberal commentator David Broder.

 

[selmaborntidefan]

THE DEBATES AND THE RACE THAT WASN'T
October 1992

Ross Perot joining the race on October 1 grabbed attention, the only asset he had apparently brought to the race in the first place. Over the final two weeks of September, he had been backdoor negotiating with both parties and making his list of demands for his endorsement. In fact at one point, Perot was seen by one of the powers that be in one of the parties walking out of a room with them - and right into another room with the opposing side after pretending he was all on board with the first group.

And now the question came: which candidate is hurt more by Perot entering the race? And the answer, viewed in terms of both the polls at the time and common sense, is Perot's entry into the race hurt
Bill Clinton more than it did President Bush. (I'll have more commentary on that subject two posts down). The short version, though, is that Perot unnecessarily divided the coalition of voters AGAINST the incumbent. The 1992 election - as all elections featuring an incumbent - was a referendum on the incumbent, in this case Bush. With polls showing the "wrong track" number nearing 70% (just as in 2024), the entire election came down to the pro-Bush voters vs the anti-Bush voters. And the anti-Bush voters were now split between two flawed candidates who were hardly equally flawed.

This and despite the nonsense you hear every election, 90% of the electorate has made their minds up before Labor Day.

These facts meant that Perot's entry into the race by definition hurt Clinton more than they hurt Bush. Whether his entry "really" hurt anyone, of course, is conjecture up to a point because how many of those folks who voted for Perot would have otherwise either stayed at home or voted for a lesser candidate down the ballot? It's difficult to tell since the USA does not use ranked choice voting. But before we can commentate on that subject, there's another reality: the debates, postponed because Bush refused to take on the Rhodes scholar earlier, now had no choice but to include Perot, whose support was above the 15% threshold necessary for an invite. Between October 11 and 19 - NINE DAYS - three Presidential and one Vice-Presidential - debate occurred, and the only thing they accomplished was interrupting the TV schedule and keeping the candidates off the stump for 10 or 11 days which could only benefit the candidate leading, in this case Clinton.

There was sharp disagreement over who won the debates, but the clear loser was President Bush. He had the misfortune to being the piece of meat two dogs took turns at taking a bite, and the most memorable moment came when Bush looked at his watch, looking for all the world like a man who wished he was somewhere else, anywhere else but on the debate stage. Perot's running mate, Navy Admiral James Stockdale, was shown to be out of his league in the VP debate, a fact that made Perot seem even more atrocious as a potential President.

Bush wasted most of the last month debating Clinton, Perot wasted most of the last month trying to capture just enough votes to throw the race into the House of Representatives, and Clinton spent the last month trying to not look overconfident.

The final pre-election national polls were as follows:

USA TODAY/CNN
Clinton 43
Bush 36
Perot 15

ABC NEWS
Clinton 42
Bush 37
Perot 17

LOU HARRIS
Clinton 42
Bush 38
Perot 16

WASHINGTON POST
Clinton 43
Bush 35
Perot 16


ACTUAL ELECTION DAY RESULTS
Clinton 43
Bush 37
Perot 19

 

[selmaborntidefan]

DID PEROT (HELP) COST BUSH THE 1992 ELECTION?

On November 3, 1992, Bill Clinton beat George H.W. Bush by an electoral vote count of 370-168, winning 32 states plus Washington DC. Bush, who had carried 40 states in 1988, lost 22 of those 40 states to carry 18 (mostly in the South and Western Plains, and suffered the biggest negative referendum on an incumbent since the Republican Party of 1912 split between President Taft and former President Teddy Roosevelt.
Even Herbert Hoover's loss in the wake of the Great Depression was not as much a reversal as Bush suffered in 1992, as his popular vote dropped from 53.37% to 37.45% (Hoover and Goldwater both carried a higher percentage than did Bush in 1992, even though both were blown out). Perot got nearly one out of every five votes nationally and actually finished ahead of the President in Maine, where Bush's family has held a summer home in Kennebunkport for years. The 22 states Clinton flipped are as follows: Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut (where Bush's father had been a Senator), Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Michigan, Missouri, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, and Vermont. And almost immediately, it became an article of faith among Republicans that Bush "only lost because Perot swung the election to Clinton." Some of their "evidence" at least sounded reasonable but much of it took the form of a conspiracy theory, unproveable at all stages.

There was one solid suggestion in favor of the hypothesis: the Democrats won an Electoral College landslide, but they didn't gain any seats in the Senate, and they actually had lost 9 House seats. But the Democrats had picked up one Senate seat each in 1990 and 1991, and they'd gained 8 House seats in 1990, so losing those meant next-to-nothing. Given the Democrats had 30 governors, one could hardly argue the GOP was popular around the USA.

The conspiracy theory version goes sort of like this:

Perot attacked Bush incessantly before "withdrawing" (true) on the day Clinton gave his acceptance speech (true) which pushed Clinton ahead by 24 points (true), which made it impossible for Bush to catch him. Then, just as Bush was catching him and had narrowed the gap (true - sort of), Perot re-entered the race (true). The basic premises of the pro-Bush side are all true, but they don't necessitate the conclusion that this means Perot cost Bush so much as a single vote much less the entire election.

The first problem is the most obvious: on what basis can anyone claim that if Perot was not in the race that 3/4 of his voters in the right states would have voted for Bush? Granted, Bush came closer than is often realized. In fact, if just a little over 300,00 voters spread out across ten states had voted for Bush rather than Clinton, Bush would have narrowly won the Electoral College despite 5 million fewer votes. But it is not enough to talk about Perot voters - you have to get them TO VOTE FOR BUSH, too.

I have looked at the state-by-state data. Consider the brutal reality: Clinton got more votes than Bush and Perot combined in New York state. Looking at the state by state data, I feel comfortable saying that Perot almost certainly cost Bush the state of Montana (he lost by 10K and Perot got 107K) and probably Ohio (Clinton won by 90K and Perot carried over a million votes). He might - and this is more debatable - have cost Bush the state of Georgia, where Perot got 309K and Bush lost by 12K votes. I'm less certain regarding Georgia simply because Clinton was a known Southern Governor when Georgia was more Democratic than today, and the state had two Democratic Senators then (Nunn and Fowler, although Fowler lost a runoff to Paul Coverdell in December 1992) and Zell Miller as governor. I'm willing to say that Perot cost Bush two states, maybe three, which would have simply reduced the margin of the defeat.

At the same time, however, Perot probably cost Clinton the state of Arizona (29K deficit, Perot got 353K votes).

But here's the other issue: how do you blame Perot for Bush losing when Bush was leading with Perot in the race earlier? And when Perot re-entered the race, it took more from Clinton than it did from Bush nationally, even though many conservatives don't want to admit it. It is indisputable that Perot seemed to have a special animus towards Bush. He would attack the President incessantly and would barely utter a word about Clinton unless pushed hard enough - at least until the final week when Perot suddenly turned his guns on Clinton, too. The assumption is "well, Perot ran as a conservative," but did he really? Yes, he ran as a deficit hawk who was going to raise taxes and cut spending, but he was a social liberal (for the most part), and he kept working everything back to the need to raise taxes on everyone. That might be 1950s conservatism but it wouldn't have gotten him halfway down the line to first base in the Reagan party.

I'm sure it makes conservatives "feel better" to say that "we only lost because of Perot," but the problem is that it's like any other religious belief. You have to ASSUME Perot's voters would have voted for Bush by a huge number in the right states. And while that's POSSIBLE, we don't base political conclusions on possibility.

Perot was not the failure of the Bush campaign. It was the Bush campaign's failure to cash in on the Perot vote early in the race when they were still there for the taking.

1992 is over.

And I'll close it out with polls from the bizarre and sad year of 1968.

Suffice it to say, almost everything you've heard about that election is wrong or at least a tad twisted.