Mark Penn advised me that if I wanted to win a majority of the votes, I needed to fly into the large media markets in the big states and ask people to go to the polls. Otherwise, he said, with the outcome not in doubt, lower-income Democrats were far less likely than more affluent or ideologically driven Republicans to vote. I was already scheduled to be in Florida and New Jersey, and on Mark’s advice we added a stop in Cleveland. Beyond that, I scheduled appearances in the Senate race states: Louisiana, Massachusetts, Maine, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Iowa, and South Dakota. In the presidential race, only Kentucky was in doubt; I was well ahead in all the others except South Dakota, where I expected the Republicans to come home to Dole at the end. I decided to go to these states because I thought it was worth two or three points off my vote total to elect more Democrats to the Senate, and the candidates in six of the seven states had helped me in ’92 or in the Congress.
On Sunday, November 3, after attending services at St. Paul’s AME Church in Tampa, I flew to New Hampshire to support our Senate candidate, Dick Swett; to Cleveland, where Mayor Mike White and Senator John Glenn gave me a last-minute boost; and to Lexington, Kentucky, for a rally at the state university with Senator Wendell Ford, Governor Paul Patton, and our Senate candidate, Steve Beshear. I knew it was going to be tough to hold Kentucky because of the tobacco issue, and I was heartened by the presence on the stage of the University of Kentucky basketball coach, Rick Pitino. In a state where everyone loved the basketball team and nearly half of them disliked me, Pitino’s presence was helpful and a gutsy move on his part.
By the time I got to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, it was 8 p.m. I really wanted to be there for Tom Harkin, who was in a tight race for reelection. Tom had strongly supported me in the Senate, and after the ’92 primary he and his wife, Ruth, a lawyer who was serving with the administration, had become close friends of mine.
The last stop of the night was Sioux Falls, South Dakota, where Democratic congressman Tim Johnson had a real chance to unseat incumbent Republican Larry Pressler. Both Johnson and his chief supporter, Senator Tom Daschle, had been very good to me. As Senate minority leader, Daschle had been invaluable to the White House during the budget fights and the shutdown; when he asked me to come to South Dakota, I couldn’t say no.
It was nearly midnight when I got up in the Sioux Falls Arena and Convention Center to speak “at the last rally of the last campaign I will ever run.” Because it was my final speech, I gave them the whole load on the record, the budget fight, and what I wanted to do for the next four years. Since I was in a rural state like Arkansas, I told them a joke. I said the Republicans’ budget reminded me of the story of a politician who wanted to ask a farmer to vote for him but was reluctant to come into his yard because a barking dog was there. The politician asked the farmer, “Does your dog bite?” “No,” the farmer replied. When the politician walked through the yard toward the farmer, the dog bit him. “I thought you said your dog didn’t bite!” he shouted. The farmer replied, “Son, that ain’t my dog.” The budget was their dog.
The election went as Mark Penn predicted: there was a record low turnout, and I won 49 to 41 percent. The electoral vote was 379 to 159, as I lost three states I had carried in 1992, Montana, Colorado, and Georgia, and won two new ones, Arizona and Florida, for a net gain of nine electoral votes. Underneath the aggregate numbers, subtle differences in the state totals between 1992 and 1996 revealed the extent to which cultural factors influenced the election in some states, while more traditional economic and social matters dominated in others. All competitive elections are determined by such shifts, and in 1996 they told me a lot about what mattered to different groups of Americans. For example, in Pennsylvania, a state with many NRA members and pro-life voters, my winning percentage was the same as it had been in 1992, thanks to a bigger margin in Philadelphia and a strong vote in Pittsburgh, while my vote went down in the rest of the state because of guns and my veto of the partialbirth abortion bill. In Missouri, the same factors cut my victory margin almost in half, from 10 to 6 percent. I still got a majority in Arkansas, but my victory margin was slightly smaller than in 1992; in Tennessee, the margin was cut from 4.5 to 2.5 percent.
In Kentucky, tobacco and guns cut our margin from 3 to 1 percent. For the same reasons, though I was ahead in North Carolina all the way to the end, I lost by 3 percent. In Colorado, I went from a 4 percent victory in 1992 to a 1.5 percent loss because the ’92 Perot voters in the West were more likely to vote Republican in ’96 and because the Republicans had gained 100,000 registered voters on the Democrats since 1992, partly as a result of the large number of Christian Right organizations that had located their headquarters in the state. In Montana, I lost this time around largely because, as in Colorado, the lower vote for Perot meant more votes for Senator Dole than for me.
In Georgia, the last poll had me ahead by 4 percent; I lost by 1 percent. The Christian Coalition deserved a lot of credit for that; in 1992, they had cut my margin from 6 percent to under 1 percent with heavy distribution of their “voting guides” in conservative churches the Sunday before the election. Democrats had worked black churches like that for years, but the Christian Coalition, at least in Georgia, was particularly effective at it, changing the outcome by 5 percent in both 1992 and 1996. I was disappointed to lose Georgia, but glad that Max Cleland survived by getting a few more white votes than I did. The South was tough because of the cultural issues; the only southern state to give me a substantially larger victory margin in 1996 was Louisiana, which went from 4.5 to 12 percent. By contrast, my winning percentage increased a good deal in less culturally conservative or more economically sensitive states. My margin over the Republicans was up 10 percent or more in 1996 over 1992 in Connecticut, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, and Rhode Island. We held on to our big ’92 margins in Illinois, Minnesota, Maryland, and California, and substantially increased the edge in Michigan and Ohio. Despite the gun issue, I also gained 10 percent over my ’92 margin in New Hampshire. And I held on for a 1 percent victory in Nevada, largely because of my opposition to dumping America’s nuclear waste there without scientific evidence that it was safe to do so, and the constant publicity my position received thanks to my friend and Georgetown classmate Brian Greenspun, the president and editor of the Las Vegas Sun, who felt passionately about the issue. On balance, I was happy with the results. I had won more electoral votes than in 1992, and four of the seven Senate candidates I had campaigned for won: Tom Harkin, Tim Johnson, John Kerry, and, in Louisiana, Mary Landrieu. But the fact that my share of the vote was considerably lower than my job rating, my personal approval rating, the percentage of people who said they felt comfortable with my presidency, was a sober reminder of the power of cultural issues like guns, gays, and abortion, especially among white married couples in the South, the intermountain West, and the rural Midwest, and among white men all across the country. All I could do was to keep searching for common ground, keep trying to temper the bitter partisanship in Washington, and keep doing my best as President. The atmosphere at the victory rally at the Old State House in Little Rock was quite different this time around. The crowd was still large, but the celebration was marked not so much by shouting exuberance as by a genuine happiness that our nation was in better shape and that the American people had approved of the job I was doing.