David S. Bernstein is a contributing editor at Boston Magazine.

As the Clinton camp looks ahead to the November election, it’s not clear whether this is a time to celebrate or panic. Its leading opponent isn’t the kind of conventional Republican it has been gearing up to run against: He’s a total outsider with wildly devoted fans and an off-the-cuff — some say crazy — populist style that’s nearly impossible to predict.

The year? 1992.


When it comes to precedents for the wild and woolly 2016 campaign, H. Ross Perot’s 1992 independent run is largely forgotten, but it may be the most crucial one for Hillary to keep in mind. It’s easy to look at the 19 percent Perot drew in the popular vote and dismiss his importance: that’s actually an enormous showing without major-party backing, bested only twice in history—both times by ex-presidents. The true miracle was that Perot made any showing in November at all: At the very peak of his popularity, as the summer general election campaign got rolling, Perot dropped out. He didn’t return to the race until early October—claiming he’d been forced from the race by a blackmail plot involving his daughter, her impending marriage, and compromising photos—without enough time to run a full-scale national campaign.

For a crucial moment in the summer of ’92, Perot was the biggest story in American politics. For the better part of three months, he led all candidates—ahead of both Bill Clinton and incumbent President George H.W. Bush—and upended the conventional wisdom about the issues that American voters were concerned about.

The parallels between Donald Trump and Perot are imperfect, but striking. Both have been perceived as drawing support from angry white conservative men, but also have broader appeal across demographics and party lines. Both have taken advantage of historically negative attitudes toward Washington and career politicians. Both are billionaires who have successfully argued that they are the antidote to the vile, corrupting influence of money in politics. And, perhaps most important, both are expert salesmen of the populist notion that only a successful businessman—someone from outside the political system, but intimately familiar with its failings—could fix what was broken in America.

As the Republican Party slouches toward its July convention in Cleveland, the parallels between 2016 and 1992 may get even more profound. Here is Hillary Clinton, nomination nearly under wraps, prepping for a likely general-election campaign against yet another high-polling billionaire—and, with every passing day, the threat building of a third-party candidate, whether it’s Trump himself or a potential GOP conservative-in-exile. We’ve already seen Texas Governor Rick Perry, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, and 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney floated as possible candidates for that role, but would it be too much to ask for the perfect symmetry of George H.W. Bush’s son, Jeb, being pressed into service as the third wheel?

Whether or not a third candidate emerges, the 2016 election might hinge upon whether the Clinton camp has learned these three lessons from Bill’s run against Perot in ’92.

Lesson 1: Don’t underestimate the dramatic appeal of a nonpolitician

Perot climbed into solid front-runner status in 1992 just as Americans were declaring the lowest level of trust in government since Pew had begun surveying their attitudes back in 1958. As Bush sought reelection to the presidency, public trust in government was lower than during Watergate; lower than during Jimmy Carter’s crises over stagflation and the Iran hostages; lower than it would later be during the worst of the George W. Bush-era recession. A mere 22 percent of Americans said they trusted the government in Washington to do what’s right most of the time.

Today, that figure is even worse—19 percent, roughly where it has been since the economy collapsed in 2007. Last July, just after Trump entered the presidential race, it was even lower: an astonishing 14 percent. In this environment of incredible hostility toward Washington, the appeal of a successful nonpolitician should be obvious.

Perot shot to the lead in ’92 because, like Trump in ’16, he was already a well-known business superstar. In 1984, he’d sold a controlling interest in his company Electronic Data Systems to General Motors for $2.4 billion. He was even something of a proto-reality-television celebrity: in a wildly dramatized NBC miniseries about the 1979 rescue of two EDS employees from imprisonment in Iran, Perot had been portrayed by Richard Crenna, a veteran of the first three Rambo movies.

Perot appealed to voters precisely because his demeanor and blunt politically incorrect language were the opposite of what Americans had in mind when they thought of a politician. The near-total opposition of Perot by actual establishment politicians only strengthened the Texan’s appeal among voters who were fed up with Washington.

In 2016, people are still fed up, and that reality is underestimated in much of the coverage of Trump’s most detestable backers. Certainly there is a group of ardent Trump supporters who are driven by tribal resentments in a stubborn and racist reaction to eight years of an Obama presidency that brought greater attention to the lives and struggles of minorities. But there’s a danger in assuming that those outliers—the volunteers with white supremacist tattoos, and the N-word-shouting rally attendees—are representative of the primary appeal of Trump’s candidacy. Nearly 6 in 10 Americans surveyed believe that the government needs “very major reform,” according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center, which also found that the view of Washington elected officials as out of touch and self-interested is “widely held across the political spectrum.” More than half of the country says that ordinary Americans could do a better job solving the nation’s problems than elected officials.

That’s the engine of steaming discontent driving the Trump train. Beyond the most politically active Trumpites, most of his supporters are driven by a simple pervasive rationale: Washington is broken; politicians are the worst. The solution? Send a businessman to knock some heads together.

A Gallup poll taken in late February found Trump supporters were most likely to cite his outsider or nonpolitician status as the reason for their support—followed closely by his business success. One could argue that Gallup’s self-selecting respondents under-reported the degree to which they have been wooed by racial demagoguery and bombast. But that would miss the central insight of the Gallup poll, which concluded that rank-and-file Republicans are willing to look beyond Trump’s temperament and bombast in order to get the nonpolitician they want. “General-election swing voters could do the same,” Gallup concluded.

Lesson 2: Nobody cares about the details

Perot repeated this mantra throughout the 1992 campaign: Only the media was interested in policy specifics. Action trumps experience. Voters had heard far too much about detailed plans that never got implemented. What they wanted was someone who would actually get things done—not a lot of talk about how that would happen. In ’92, Clinton and Bush tried to paint Perot as inexperienced, but that attack backfired. “I’ve got a lot of experience in not taking 10 years to solve a 10-minute problem,” Perot shot back during one debate. “If it’s time for action, I think I have the experience that counts.”

That’s Trump’s message in a nutshell—and it’s effective. For voters who see Washington as a bastion of wasteful laggards who refuse to get anything done, the logical answer is hard-charging business leadership forged in the kill-or-be-killed world of the marketplace.

The Trump/Perot appeal works differently for different groups. Politically active ideologues on the left and right believe that the solutions to the country’s most pressing problems are obvious—all that’s required is common sense and a spine; getting things done has nothing to do, then, with complexity and nuance, but in overcoming the resistance of powerful, malevolent forces: George Soros scheming to turn Mexican scofflaws into Democratic voters, or the Koch brothers, stealing elections through voter ID laws. And for the casual, less partisan, voter? Policy details are just noise, Washington is pure gridlock, and what’s needed is someone who can run government like a business.

Viewed through this lens, Perot and Trump have been able to give it to Washington with both barrels. Their business successes resonate with voters looking for a take-charge cowboy, while their billion-dollar fortunes—which allow them to self-fund their campaigns—inoculate them from the influence of big donors, lobbyists and special interests. Even back in 1992, before Citizens United made things even worse, Perot was calling for curbs on PACs and a ban on soft money in campaigns. Today, Trump blasts the evils of super PACs. It’s an almost unassailable argument, since nearly everyone—career politicians included—admits our campaign finance system is busted. From the perspective of get-shit-done voters, who believe that moneyed interests are blocking common-sense solutions, only a financially independent candidate like Perot or Trump has the freedom to take the action that’s needed. “I was not put on the ballot by any PAC money, by any foreign lobbyist money, by any special interest money,” Perot said in an October 1992 presidential debate. “This is a movement that came from the people.”

Neither Trump nor Perot made even a half-serious effort to master the issues. Perot, his advisers later revealed, could barely be coaxed to read one-page summaries. Interviews on foreign policy and most domestic issues found him giving brief, often contradictory answers, some of which the campaign later tried to explain away as meaning something else. During the crucial period when Trump knocked out more than a dozen opponents in a broad Republican field, he’s been no different—although his scripted speech on Israel before the AIPAC convention last week was a sign that he’s beginning to pivot his approach, ever so slightly, for the general election. The reaction? A mixed bag: The audience in attendance laughed at Trump when he claimed he’d studied the Iran nuclear deal “in greater detail than almost anybody.” The next day, horrified by Trump’s attacks on the sitting president, AIPAC issued an unprecedented apology for Trump’s remarks.

Perot had a similar experience. In ’92, Perot’s campaign was focused so strongly on the need to balance the federal budget that his team put together a detailed plan to do so within five years. It was great policy: serious and reasonable, combining tax increases with tough programmatic cuts. But it was terrible politics: The details were so obviously toxic that the campaign never released it. When it leaked out, late in the campaign, it became a liability—as when Perot was forced to defend a 50-cent-per-gallon gas tax increase that would have socked middle class Americans hard.

There are lessons here for both Trump and his opponents. For Trump, the cynical takeaway is this: Don’t complicate the brand. In Perot’s case, it wasn’t merely that people didn’t want to pay higher taxes and lose services. It was that when Perot got into the details, he began to come across as the kind of business figure who sees numbers, not problems—and certainly not the real problems of people watching at home. Meanwhile, Bill Clinton was feeling people’s pain: He was a once-in-a-generation wonk who could listen to voters’ stories and connect them to his policies.

For Trump’s opponents, Perot’s case suggests an Achilles' heel. Trump has been able to bluster his way through substantive questions by selling voters on his deal-making abilities, a one-size-fits-all approach that he invariably punctuates by invoking his sure-fire riposte: “Believe me.” Perot’s candidacy suggests that even if Trump wants to become more substantive, voters may not approve. And it also suggests there are limits to his simplified appeal—his approach could grow old by autumn, especially if Hillary Clinton can, like her husband, turn the two-candidate race from a choice between action and policy into a choice between action and caring.

Lesson 3: Race can trump the economy, stupid

You couldn’t escape race in 1992: the Los Angeles riots took place that April.

Unlike Trump, Perot never overtly stoked the embers of racism. That isn’t to say he was faultless. He got in trouble when he addressed “you people” in a speech to the NAACP. He emphasized crime as one of the country’s top issues, and spoke of it almost exclusively as a drug-driven problem of the black inner city. He favored “three strikes” laws, suggested keeping criminals in prison until they were literate, and reportedly called for a virtual paramilitary operation to rid a black Dallas neighborhood of guns and drugs. But his racial attitudes, as Clarence Page observed at the time, were perceived as naïve more than provocative. His rhetoric didn’t push racial buttons as directly as Pat Buchanan’s had during his Republican primary challenge to George H.W. Bush. And he probably did less race-stoking than Bill Clinton, whose campaign was marked by the infamous “Sister Souljah” moment—when, during a speech to Rev. Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, he criticized the rapper/activist’s defense of rioters—followed by Clinton presiding over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a mentally incapacitated African-American man who had murdered a cop.

While Perot’s campaign was far more associated with his opposition to free trade than with his stance on racial issues, his campaign consistently pitted the old Nixon silent-majority types against an other. Most notably, Perot channeled economic resentment through opposition to free trade—particularly the North American Free Trade Agreement then being negotiated by the Bush administration. The most memorable phrase of Perot’s campaign was his prediction of a “giant sucking sound” of U.S. jobs going south to Mexico if NAFTA was enacted. Perot also predicted that NAFTA would lead to increased levels of illegal immigration from Mexico. He was selling a fear of Mexicans taking American jobs in their own country, and also crossing the border to take them here.

Like Trump, Perot preached a neo-isolationism premised on the United States ending gratuitous foreign aid designed to solve other countries’ problems. “It is very important for us to let them assume more and more of the burden, and for us to bring that money back here and rebuild our infrastructure,” Perot said in a 1992 debate. Trump says almost the exact same words today.

All this us-versus-them polarization draws loyal followers—but even in Perot’s milder form, it alienated Americans who feared they might be part of the “them.” And it showed at the ballot box: Perot voters were diverse across partisan, ideological, age, and income lines—far more so, according to exit polls, than tea party activists nearly a decade later—but when it came to race, 94 percent of Perot’s voters were white.

That should be bad news for Trump. We already know that Trump will need a historically high percentage of the white-male vote to win in 2016. His recent focus on trade and foreign policy may signal a general election strategy designed to improve his standing with minorities and women by toning down his violent and racial-tinged rhetoric in favor of a more Perot-like approach. But Perot’s example is a warning that even a message of economic fairness can be a double-edged sword—attracting disenfranchised whites, but alienating the voters with whom Trump needs the most help.

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The 1992 Bill Clinton campaign got lucky: Perot imploded. The 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign will have to absorb these three lessons better, because Trump probably won’t go away on his own. Already, Team Hillary has been so eager to face Trump in the general that it has mostly refrained from attacking him during the primary. That’s not unlike how Bill Clinton and other Democrats withheld fire on Perot for too long—only to realize late in the year that Perot was pulling as many votes from their side as from the GOP.

Right now, Hillary needs to work on persuading the persuadable. Trump’s die-hard race resenters and dead-set Washington haters are never going to switch. But if she’s consistent and focused, Clinton can begin to meet some of Trump’s core disaffected voters—the ones who, not unreasonably, would like to see an independent, successful businessman in the Oval Office—on their own terms. She can begin to chip away at the patina of Trump’s business success, she can smoke out his lack of detail and contradictory ramblings on substantive issues. She can convince these voters that Trump is not the inevitably-winning decider he plays on reality TV—but is, instead, an overprivileged, out-of-touch, hopelessly fabricating dilettante who merely wants to play at being president. If they could do it to Mitt Romney, they can do it to The Donald.

And in the Perot candidacy there is, also, a glimmer of hope for anyone alarmed by Trump’s sudden rise from billionaire to demagogue: Eventually, the nonprofessional part of being a nonprofessional politician can turn out to be a liability, not just an asset. Like Trump, Perot was allergic to spending money: he believed that paid advertising was unnecessary as long as he could get on TV as often as he wished. For a time, it worked: He got away with many slip-ups, gaffes and misdeeds because they reinforced his outsider persona. Perot was adept at using the public’s disdain of the news media to deflect criticism. Repeatedly deemed a nut-bag by the press, Perot adopted an appropriate campaign song: the Patsy Cline tune, “Crazy.”

But Perot came to despise the scrutiny brought on by all the free media he sought, and he never truly embraced retail politics to the degree needed to win. Just as Trump has drawn criticism for phoning in his cable-news appearances from his bedroom, Perot preferred to campaign from his Dallas office rather than make personal appearances. And ultimately, his skin proved too thin for the race: When he withdrew in mid-July, he gave various official explanations for the decision. But the one his advisers gave to the New York Times was telling: “[C]ampaign insiders described Mr. Perot as a man obsessed with his image who began to lose interest in the contest when faced with a barrage of critical news reports.” Even when Perot dove back into the race in the fall, he was a busted candidate: in the final five weeks, he left Dallas only for debates and a handful of rallies. After his 1992 loss, Perot’s image never really recovered, and after one more flailing presidential run in 1996, he disappeared from the public eye almost entirely.

Trump might believe, at this stage of the race, that he can handle the media scrutiny and the damage to his public image. We’ll see. This is just the beginning. The Democrats are said to be sitting on a cache of opposition research they’ll use to pummel Trump in a general election—everything from his business career, to his failed Trump University, to his taxes, to his personal life. One big factor will be whether Trump is able, as he has been until now, to use strategic criticisms of his opponents to deflect attention from topics he finds sensitive. Hillary Clinton will be an easy target for his over-the-top attacks, but Trump has fared worst when he’s attacked women, including Megyn Kelly and Carly Fiorina. Clinton’s ability to keep him under the spotlight could determine how well he holds up through November.

That must have hurt for Perot—but not nearly as much as it would hurt Trump, whose worth and self-image is so wrapped up with his public branding. As impossible as it seems at this moment in time that Trump would abandon a race in which he’s the Republican front-runner, the lessons of Perot show how quickly things can change for a candidate so singularly focused on his own money, his own ego and his own image. And it leaves open an even more unthinkable possibility: That the only way to make Trump go away—not just from politics, but from American life—might be to defeat him in November.