What Democrats can actually learn from the 1992 election
Bill Clinton's victory is supposed to prove that Democrats win by moving to the center. The data disagrees
After every Democratic loss, the same argument returns: the party needs to move to the center, or it will die. The post-2024 version has been especially loud, with elites in politics and the press uncritically adopting the theory that Democrats lost the last election because of progressive policy positions.
One notable 2025 report by centrist super PAC Welcome invokes Elaine Kamarck and Bill Galston’s 1989 paper “The Politics of Evasion” — a document that one could consider the intellectual foundation of Bill Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. And in many Democrats’ eyes, Clinton is the model Democrats should follow today. By publicly rebuking the left (Clinton’s “Sister Souljah Moment”), moving to the right entitlements, and holding the line with southern whites, the usual explanation goes, Clinton broke 12 years of national Republican rule ushered in a new era for the New Democrats.
But as I argued recently in the Boston Review, this entire debate — between moderates and progressives, “popularists” and populists, whatever you want to call it — rests on the faulty premise that voters are thinking about politics and policies the way elites in Washington, DC are. Funnily enough, the 1992 case makes the shortcomings with this view especially clear: According to the American National Election Studies (a quadrennial academic survey of the American public) voters perceived Bill Clinton as more liberal than Michael Dukakis, and also rated Clinton as less favorable.
This entire framework for thinking about voter decision-making is flawed, and thus offers extremely limited utility. The Sister Souljah narrative assumes voters rewarded Clinton for tacking right — but political scientists have found voters didn’t even perceive Clinton as particularly moderate. Scholarship has also found that in 1992, the centrist third-party candidate, Ross Perot, pulled votes away from Clinton, not Bush.
Instead of poring over troves of polling data and statements of issue positions, voters mostly react to national conditions and (only the most significant) moments in campaigns. The data does not support the case that Clinton won in 1992 because he ran to the center. But it does show a huge increase in the percentage of Americans who lost faith in the Republican Party to handle the economy.
From my point of view as a pollster and empirical journalist, I see Democrats endlessly relitigating an ideological debate that the electorate isn’t having. The debate isn’t really helping anybody. So I want to offer Democrats an escape hatch: nuance. Starting with the foundational myth of the power of centrism.
An alternative theory of the 1992 election is that Bill Clinton won because the economy was terrible and voters blamed the incumbent, not because he moved to the right on crime, welfare, and race. If that’s true, then almost any Democrat could have won in 1992. Perhaps the Democrats could do more for their constituents if they stop looking in the rear mirror.
