The Perot movement and the “unanticipated” Republican revolution

• Main Author: Yowell, Robert Orlando
• Format: Dissertation
• Language: English
• Published: ProQuest Dissertations & Theses 01-01-2002
• Subjects: American history; Political science
• ISBN: 9780493685700; 0493685707

It is often the unintended consequences of group mobilization that have the most significant effect on the composition of government and the formulation of policy. This is the case with the Perot presidential campaigns: the Perot mobilization, although primarily an attempt to capture the White House, had the effect of changing the makeup of Congress. Using Gary King's ecological inference model, the research here examines with a significant degree of confidence which candidates for House elections Perot voters supported in 1992 and 1996 and Perot voters' effects on the subsequent midterm elections of 1994 and 1998. Such results indicate in which districts those who voted for Perot were influential in the success of certain candidates and the propensity of these voters to side with either major party. Knowing for which party the Perot voter is more likely to vote in a House race provides insight on how they will likely vote in the subsequent off-year elections and helps explain the electoral changes brought in 1994. Using regression models, the data reveal that the proportion of Perot voters supporting Republicans in 1992 is a significant predictor of the voter percentage won by the Republican House candidate in 1994 even when including the lagged variable of Democratic success in 1992. Likewise, logit models indicate that district-level Perot support of the Republican House candidate in 1992 is a significant predictor that a House district will turn from Democrat to Republican. These results suggest that Perot supporters were quite influential in the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 as the inference model suggests they overwhelmingly supported Republican House candidates in 1992 and were likely to do so again in 1994. What follows is a discussion the subsequent erosion of the Republican majority in Congress that was in part a function of the concomitant decline in the popularity of Ross Perot and the decreasing level of mobilization of his supporters.