Taking on the Zombie Perot-Myth/Smear (With Maddow video)

[ericson00]

14. you can't win 'em all. And Gore was a media unsavvy gaffe machine.

Gore shoulda known that the internet comment would be wildly taken out of context, or the "love story" thing. Also, did he really expect to win Florida given the kind of machinery that ran that place in 2000 (his opponent's brother as gov and his campaign manager as SoS aka vote counter)? Gore just wasn't media savvy: people found a WASPY rich kid pretending to be a cowboy hick more trustworthy than him (see the exit polls from 2000: https://web.archive.org/web/20001214221524/http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2000/epolls/US/P000.html). He won 267 electoral votes before the faithless elector; had he just spend just a little bit more money and time in another state, like New Hampshire, or his home state than he did an likely-to-be-rigged state like FL, he'd have been President. Also, he coulda used Clinton in some states and not in others instead of blanketly hiding him: he had stratospheric approvals at the time, varying state to state. He was gonna get linked by Bush anyway. Or how about the sighing at the debates? I respect Al Gore and all he's done (and the ticket he was on, the Clinton-Gore ticket) his activism against global warming, but not his election 2000 act. (1988 tho was much worse for Gore's presidential ambitions if you know how he came behind Dukakis and Jesse Jackson (!) in that primary)

Monica didn't help as well, but that was the obvious goal of the GOP pulling Monica, or they'd have gotten cleaned out badly in 2000, dededee.

2008 was no realigning election. Clinton won and kept in the D column a lot more formerly GOP states than Obama in 2008, no disrespect to him. The states I mentioned in the OP, had they gone to McCain, Obama woulda lost, even if he kept FL and OH. A better name for the "blue wall" is the President William Jefferson Clinton Electoral College Wall.

Let's rephrase your question: If the Clintons didn't change the electoral calculus radically, why has the GOP only won the most votes (by a tiny margin) one time in the last quarter century? That was the spot we were in the aftermath 1988 when the Dem party was starting to look like its days were over at the national level. Why did the GOP go from >400 EVs on average to barely 200?