Perot was harbinger of Trump in state
The death Tuesday of Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot has recast attention on his legacy as a political harbinger of Donald Trump.
Like Trump, Perot was a rich political outsider who railed against U.S. trade deals, ran for president on themes of American nationalism and restoration and leveraged TV, celebrity and his own unconventional personality to connect with voters deeply frustrated with politics.
Like Trump, Perot’s brand of populism struck a chord with many older blue-collar whites living outside of big cities and prosperous suburbs.
As Bill Clinton’s former strategist James Carville once said in a comment that was widely quoted this week, “If Donald Trump is the kind of Jesus of the disenchanted, displaced noncollege white voter, then Perot was the John the Baptist of that sort of movement.”
The Perot-Trump parallels are far from perfect. But one place where they’re unmistakable is the Wisconsin political map.
In this battleground state at the epicenter of the next presidential election, it’s striking how closely Trump’s victory in 2016 followed the geographic contours of Perot’s defeat in 1992.
There was a vast difference in their overall performance. Running as a Republican, Trump won Wisconsin with 47% of the vote. Running as an independent, Perot finished third in Wisconsin with 22% of the vote, behind Democrat Bill Clinton and Republican George H.W. Bush.
Yet Trump’s regional strengths and weaknesses bear an uncanny resemblance to Perot’s regional strengths and weaknesses 24 years earlier.
Perot’s strongest areas (where he earned between 27% and 30% of the vote) were almost all small counties in central or northern Wisconsin. So were Trump’s. Perot’s top 10 counties include four of Trump’s top five (Florence, Taylor, Oconto and Green Lake) and two more of Trump’s top 11 (Clark and Waushara). They also include three counties that voted for Democrat Barack Obama in 2012 but swung massively to Trump in 2016 (Grant, Buffalo and Lincoln).
Perot’s weakest counties (where he earned between 15% and 21% of the vote) also parallel Trump’s. Perot’s 10 worst counties include seven of Trump’s bottom 10: Menominee, Milwaukee, Dane, Ashland, Eau Claire, La Crosse and Douglas. These counties represent different sizes, demographics and regions of Wisconsin, but they are all Democratic strongholds where Perot had little appeal as a conservative independent and Trump had little appeal as a hot-button Republican.
Perot’s bottom 10 counties also include two higherincome, higher-education Republican strongholds in metro Milwaukee (Ozaukee and Waukesha) that Trump carried in 2016. But the stories of these two counties in this past election were actually one of weakness for Trump: these are the only two GOP counties in Wisconsin where Trump did significantly worse than his party’s previous nominee, Mitt Romney.
In short, Perot did worst in the most historically partisan parts of Wisconsin (either deep blue or bright red) and places with high population density and education levels. Trump showed weakness in the same areas.
“Is Perot the precursor (to Trump)? Well, here in Wisconsin, there is pretty good evidence he was,” said Charles Franklin, the political scientist who conducts the Marquette University Law School Poll.
When you quantify the relationship between Perot’s performance across Wisconsin’s 72 counties in 1992 and Trump’s in 2016, you find a statistical correlation of .73, with 1.00 being a perfect correlation. It doesn’t mean that the two men got similar shares of the vote. After all, Trump narrowly won what was effectively a two-way contest, while Perot finished third in what was effectively a three-way race.
Instead, what this powerful correlation means is that the county-by-county voting patterns for Perot (where Perot did better and worse in relation to his own statewide performance) look a lot like the county-by-county voting patterns for Trump.
In fact, the 1992 Perot vote in Wisconsin (again, we’re talking about the county voting patterns) is much more closely correlated with the 2016 Trump vote than it is with that of any other GOP nominee going back to at least 1980 — a list that includes Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, the two Bushes, John McCain and Romney.
Even more telling, the Trump voting pattern in Wisconsin in 2016 is much more strongly correlated with the Perot vote in 1992 than it is with George H.W. Bush’s vote in 1992. And Bush was the actual Republican nominee that year. Perot was a third-party candidate.
“Whatever drove people to welcome Perot here (in ’92) was related to them embracing Trump” 24 years later, said Franklin.
When you broaden the focus to the political map nationwide, the Perot-Trump vote parallels get a whole lot murkier.
Franklin ran the same statistical tests for county voting patterns in all 50 states and results are all over the board. In some states, the correlation between the Perot and Trump voting patterns is very high. That includes virtually all the northeastern states and several Deep South states.
In some states, the correlation is significant, but not as strong as it is in Wisconsin. That includes Michigan and Pennsylvania — the other two “Blue Wall” states that swung the 2016 election by shifting to the GOP after years of voting Democratic.
And in many other states, the relationship is much weaker.
On first glance, it’s not exactly clear what explains these state-by-state variations.
But it is clear that in the pivotal states of Pennsylvania, Michigan and especially Wisconsin , there are strong parallels between where Perot did well and where Trump did well.
In that sense, in states that mattered hugely in the last election and will matter hugely in the next one, Perot was an important portent of what has come to pass.