Talk:United States presidential election, 1996

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

 This article is within the scope of the United States presidential elections WikiProject. This project provides a central approach to United States presidential elections-related subjects on Wikipedia. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards.
??? This article has not yet received a rating on the Project's quality scale. Please rate the article and then leave a short summary here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Please see Wikipedia:Style for U.S. presidential election, yyyy for standards for all "U.S. presidential election, yyyy" pages.

Contents

[edit] Red/Blue map

Should the map showing which states went to who be changed to the current red=Republican blue=Democratic color scheme?

Yes, because that's the common color scheme in US.--198 23:27, 1 Nov 2004 (UTC)

It was not necessarily the color scheme in 96. All elections up through 96 use red for the Dems and blue for the GOP. john k 01:22, 2 Nov 2004 (UTC)

Really that's odd, why did they change the sceme?--198 03:03, 5 Nov 2004 (UTC)'

Just something the media cooked up, nothing significant about it. You're welcome for the answer 3 years later.

[edit] Kemp

Should be noted that while Kemp was originally from New York, he was living in Maryland in 1996, and ran from Maryland. That is, the ballots said "Jack Kemp of Maryland" not "Jack Kemp of New York." john k 16:32, 10 Nov 2004 (UTC)

[edit] Southern States and "close states"

Apparently one of the authors decided that Florida wasn't a southern state...

There has indeed been a lot of imigration there from other states and countries in recent decades, but it's still considered to be very much a southern state.

At any rate, Clinton won the same number of southern states in 96 as he did in 92. All that changed there was that he won Georgia the first time and Florida the second time.

I also noticed that the colors for the "close states" are opposite those on the map, which could be confusing....

Blackcats 06:07, 30 July 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Don't include NY State Nomminations

Someone should remove "Liberal" and "Conservative" because both of them were, for the most part moderates. NY State party nominations aren't mentioned unless I didn't spot it

The labels "Liberal" and "Conservative" are listed in the column "Parties" and are wikilinks to the Liberal and Conservative Parties of New York. I don't see the confusion.
— DLJessup (talk) 03:52, 24 August 2005 (UTC)
Comment. This raises the issue of whether to include DFL, the official name of the Democratic Party in Minnesota. Also the official name of the Republican Party in Minnesota was the "Independent Republican Party" from 1974 until 1994. These state parties received a lot more votes than the Conservative, Liberal, or Right to Life parties in New York State. Chronicler3 20:05, 17 February 2006 (UTC)
I am disinclined to add the DFL on the basis that, unlike the Liberal or Conservative Parties of New York, it is actually affiliated with one of the national parties (in this case, the Democratic Party). As you can see, however, I have moved the Liberal and Conservative mentions to footnotes: I had found that Dole was also the Freedom candidate in New York, and I didn't want to overload the Party column. I also added Perot's SC vote, which was split between the Reform and Patriot tickets.
— DLJessup (talk) 01:18, 18 February 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Color

Can anyone explain to me why the colors changed between 1996 and 2000? On this map, the democratic voting states are represented as being red, with republican voting states in blue. However, for maps after 1996, the colors are reversed, with red for republicand and blue for democrat? Why the switch and how did it happen? 134.250.72.141

All of the election maps for 1789–1996 were pulled from the National Atlas of the United States, which is in the public domain as a government publication. That source used blue for Republican and red for Democrat. The map for 2000 also used to be pulled from the same site; however, because the terms "red state" and "blue state" were coined as labels for the Republican- and Democratic-leaning areas of the country in that election, the talk page was periodically pelted with complaints about the color scheme on the map until finally an editor came along and replaced it.
— DLJessup (talk) 06:22, 10 November 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Close states numbering

I just corrected the figures in the 'Close states' section of the 1992 election article, and ended up with over 30 "close" states. I chose to restrict the definition of "close" to a 5% span, rather than have over half the states be considered close. This article has nearly half of the states in the 'Close states' column. I personally think that it should be changed from a 10% to a 5% span, as anything over 5% isn't particularly close in American politics. Thoughts? -Subsurd 00:57, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

Sounds good to me.
— DLJessup (talk) 04:55, 18 March 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Nader's running mates

"As for his 'five or six' vice presidents, further research has turned up no fewer than eight! By Election Day these had been reduced not to two, but four (Annie Goeke, Muriel Tillinghast, Winona LaDuke, Madelyn Hoffman)."[1] Others mentioned are Deborah Howes, Bill Boteler and Richard Walton[2] Which ones actually appeared on the ballot and in which states, and were they the only Nader ticket on the ballot in those states or were there multiple Nader lines (there were two different ones in NY in 2004). I think: Anne Goeke in Iowa[3] (PDF) and Pennsylvania; Madelyn Hoffman in New Jersey;[4] Krista Paradise in Colorado; Muriel Tillinghast in New York.[5] Esquizombi 04:29, 30 March 2006 (UTC)

I've incorporated the above post into the article. Esquizombi, could you please check it and make sure that I'm not missing anything?
— DLJessup (talk) 16:36, 1 April 2006 (UTC)

[edit] LaRouche Delegates

Does someone have a source for the LaRouche delegate story? I recall that he did win a few delegates because he passed the minimum threshhold in places. However, the entire Arkansas delegation would have been about 35 - and LaRouche only received 6.8% of the vote in the primary there (http://www.ourcampaigns.com/RaceDetail.html?RaceID=36287). I find it statistically unlikely that LaRouche would have won more than 2-5 delegates in Arkansas. Chronicler3 22:31, 18 September 2006 (UTC)


[edit] Winner/Runner-Up

I have to voice my concern that this format is hurting the article. I will post this on a few notable election pages and hope that it's noticed. I have to admire the determination of whoever came up with this idea (it's apparently on every page) but ultimately, I think it should go. I think that having "winner/runner-up" displayed so prominently in the infobox overshadows the importance of the election. Some of these elections were not mere contests, but were epic events in American history where a variety of important viewpoints were symbolically represented and voted upon. Just in the last 50 years, the notable political climates of 1968 and 2004 came to a boiling point around election time. We should not be placing so much emphasis on the "winner" and the "runner-up" -- this is not a spelling bee. If we condense this into who "won" we are doing a disservice to the issues that drove these elections. SpiderMMB 23:16, 5 October 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Misrepresentation of Perot's impact on the vote

I want to dispell the myth of Perot, and this page has got to stop perpetuating the myth. The fact is Clinton was over 50 percent for almost the entire election http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/polls/cnn.usa.gallup/tracking/ and even tho Clinton got under 50 percent in the end, the exit polls showed that without Perot, Clinton wins by a similar margin. http://www.cnn.com/ALLPOLITICS/1996/elections/natl.exit.poll/index1.html If you look at the vertical columns, 30 percent of Perot's vote came from Clinton, 30 percent for Perot, and 38 would not have voted. Common sense shows that Bob Dole would never have won even without Bill Clinton. Saying that Perot was a spoiler is merely sour grapes for Republicans that Bill Clinton beat them, and is an outright lie. It is revisionism. Perot was not some hard righter who took votes only from Perot. He was pro-choice, against the gay ban in the military, against NAFTA, for which most Republicans are completely for and why Clinton is a moderate. Not to mention, Clinton had 49.3 percent, Dole would have needed every single Perot vote, plus a few to catch Clinton in the popular vote. And third party candidates never take just from one. They can take more from one than another, like Nader, who took 36 percent from Gore, 29 from Bush, and the rest woudln't have voted. It is simply a fantasy of revisionism that Perot spoiled this election, or even 1992. So stop with the sour grapes of Clinton winning the election. I think whoever can add the 'vote without perot' column should be added to the exit poll results on the page. I also think that in the results part, its got to stop saying Perot "was labeled by some" which makes it sound universal. Only conservatives initially said this. It is factually incorrect to not list exit polls as the ones who said the vote was split equally.