# 1996 Presidential Election [[Bill Clinton]]'s reelection over Republican Senator [[Bob Dole]] (Kansas), the long-serving Senate Majority Leader who had resigned his Senate seat in June 1996 to focus on the campaign. Clinton won 379 to 159 electoral votes, 49.2% to 40.7% in the popular vote. [[Ross Perot]] ran again as the candidate of his newly-formed **Reform Party**, finishing with 8.4% of the popular vote — a substantial drop from his 1992 19% but still significant. Clinton became the first Democrat to win re-election to a second term since FDR in 1944. The election was conducted in the aftermath of the **[[Gingrich Revolution]]** — the 1994 midterms that gave Republicans control of the House of Representatives for the first time in 40 years — and the **1995-1996 government shutdowns** that had damaged Newt Gingrich's House Republican coalition and rehabilitated Clinton's political standing. Clinton's 1996 messaging was "**a bridge to the 21st century**"; Dole's was substantively a generational-change-from-the-other-direction (Dole was 73, a WWII veteran). ## Result - **[[Bill Clinton]]** (Democrat) — 379 electoral votes, 49.2% popular (47,401,185 votes) - **Bob Dole** (Republican) — 159 electoral votes, 40.7% popular - **Ross Perot** (Reform) — 0 electoral votes, 8.4% popular - Total: 538 electoral votes - Turnout: 49.0% — lowest since 1948 ## Right-wing relevance The 1996 election is principally significant to right-wing analysis as the *failure* of an old-Republican-establishment candidate (Dole) against an incumbent Democrat operating in good economic conditions. Dole's defeat is part of the long arc of the Republican Party's reorganization away from World-War-II-generation moderate Republicans (Dole, Bush 41, the Rockefeller wing) toward the post-Reagan movement-conservative formation that would consolidate under Bush 43 and then transform again under Trump. The 1996 Perot Reform Party run — though significantly diminished from 1992 — also kept the third-party populist-right constituency operationally available for later capture by the Buchanan 2000 Reform Party challenge and eventually by Trump's 2016 Republican-internal takeover. ## Connections - [[Bill Clinton]] — Reelected. - [[Bob Dole]] — Republican nominee; long-serving senator. - [[Newt Gingrich]] — Speaker of the House 1995-1999; the post-1994 Republican congressional resurgence had been Clinton's principal political problem entering 1996. ---