# 1988 Presidential Election Vice President [[George H.W. Bush]] (Republican) defeated Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis (Democrat) 426 to 111 electoral votes, 53.4% to 45.6% in the popular vote. The election is principally remembered for the aggressive Republican campaign operations directed by [[Lee Atwater]] — the **[[Willie Horton]] ad** (which used the case of a Black convicted murderer who committed additional crimes while on a Massachusetts weekend furlough program to attack Dukakis's crime policy with explicitly racialized imagery), the **"card-carrying liberal" ACLU attacks**, the Dukakis-in-a-tank photo (Dukakis riding an M1 Abrams tank in a campaign photo-op that was widely mocked as making the candidate look ridiculous), and the Bush convention pledge "**Read my lips: no new taxes**" (which Bush violated in the 1990 budget deal, fueling the Buchanan and Perot 1992 insurgencies). Bush became the first sitting Vice President to be elected directly to the presidency since [[Martin Van Buren]] in 1836. ## Result - **[[George H.W. Bush]]** (Republican) — 426 electoral votes, 53.4% popular (48,886,597 votes) - **Michael Dukakis** (Democrat) — 111 electoral votes, 45.6% popular (41,809,476 votes) - One faithless elector (West Virginia) voted Lloyd Bentsen for President and Dukakis for VP - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 50.1% ## Right-wing relevance The 1988 election is one of the most thoroughly-documented case studies in the **operationalization of race-coded political advertising** in late-20th-century American politics. The Willie Horton ad — produced by an independent political-action committee but coordinated with the Bush campaign through Atwater — used the case of a Massachusetts furloughed convict (William Horton, whom Atwater renamed "Willie" for political effect) to attack Dukakis on crime in a way that aligned tightly with [[Southern Strategy]]-era racial-political coding. Atwater's 1991 deathbed apologies (he was dying of brain cancer at 40) for the Horton ad and for other Atwater operations are part of the historical record. The "**Read my lips, no new taxes**" pledge — broken in the 1990 budget deal as Bush 41 reached a deficit-reduction agreement with the Democratic Congress — is one of the canonical case studies in **campaign-promise / governance trade-offs**. The political cost was severe: the pledge violation fueled [[Patrick Buchanan]]'s 1992 primary insurgency, fueled [[Ross Perot]]'s 1992 third-party run, and is conventionally credited as a major factor in Bush's 1992 reelection loss to Clinton. Contemporary right-wing commentary on Republican-establishment-betrayal-of-base routinely invokes the 1990 broken pledge as the canonical historical example. ## Connections - [[George H.W. Bush]] — Winner; first sitting VP elected directly since 1836. - [[Lee Atwater]] — Campaign manager; the Willie Horton operation; died 1991. - [[Ronald Reagan]] — Outgoing president; political patron. ---