Dukakis led George H. W. Bush handily in polls well into the summer, but Bush’s focus on crime, and Republicans’ emphasis on one of the inmates who had been furloughed, Willie Horton, helped turn his campaign around. (Some political scientists have argued persuasively that the original Horton ad was less significant than remembered, and that an expanding economy in 1988 was more of a factor in the Dukakis rout than Bush’s successful exploitation of racialized fears around crime.)

Lee Atwater, Bush’s campaign manager, was delighted by the Willie Horton line of attack. He crowed that he had recently seen Jackson in Dukakis’s driveway, and that if Dukakis was contemplating Jackson as a running mate, then he might “put this Willie Horton on the ticket after all is said and done.” (The source of the intended humor in Atwater’s joke was that Horton and Jackson are both black.)

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The Horton ad, produced by a PAC, stated that “Dukakis not only opposes the death penalty, he allowed first-degree murderers to have weekend passes from prison,” and ended with the tagline, “Weekend prison passes, Dukakis on crime.” During a presidential debate, the CNN moderator Bernard Shaw asked Dukakis, “Governor, if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered, would you favor an irrevocable death penalty for the killer?” Atwater himself might as well have been moderating.

As it happens, not many people appear to have seen the original Horton ad. Rather, most Americans who became aware of it in 1988 probably saw references to it in media coverage, which amplified its message far beyond the original ad purchase. The current occupant of the White House is tremendously good at getting the press to amplify racist messaging, even if they are attempting to condemn or debunk it.

Nevertheless, the lesson the Democratic Party took from Dukakis’s loss to Bush was that it could not afford to be “soft on crime.” The next Democratic nominee, Bill Clinton, presided over the execution of a mentally disabled black man, Ricky Ray Rector, in the middle of the primary, as if to show that unlike Dukakis, he would not shy away from extreme measures in the name of public safety. Rector had killed a police officer, Bob Martin, and then turned his weapon on himself, removing a large chunk of his own brain—his attorneys described him as functionally a “zombie,” and not mentally competent to understand what he was being punished for. Nevertheless, Clinton would be as tough on crime as he needed to be to assuage the fears of white voters, no matter the cost—he would not make the same mistake as the previous Democratic nominee.

Republicans loved crushing Dukakis in the 1988 election, but many were less than pleased that Willie Horton became a shorthand for racist campaigning. In the years since, they have attempted to saddle Gore with the responsibility for the Horton attack, even though Gore did not mention Horton by name in the debate, and did not run a national campaign centered on Horton. The contradictory premises of the Republican counterargument, that the Horton ad was not racist but that Gore was responsible for the racist Horton ad, should be familiar to anyone living through the Trump era. The Bush campaign, the Republican Party, and their enablers in the conservative media bear the full responsibility for one of the most racist campaign ads of the latter half of the 20th century, just as Democrats bear full responsibility for responding by attempting to out-tough the GOP on crime.