1992 United States presidential election
Bill Clinton wins the 1992 U.S. presidential election
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Original prompt & settings (JSON) ↗Ross Perot collected nearly 19.75 million votes and not a single electoral vote. Bill Clinton collected 370 electors on about 43% of the popular count.
370 electors on a plurality
American voters chose presidential electors on 3 November 1992. The resulting Electoral College allocation gave Democratic Arkansas governor Bill Clinton 370 electoral votes and incumbent Republican president George H. W. Bush 168, against the 270 needed to win.
Clinton's national popular-vote plurality was 44,909,889 — about 43.01% — ahead of Bush's 39,104,545 and independent Ross Perot's 19,742,267. Total presidential votes recorded came to 104,426,659.
Perot carried no state and received no electoral votes.
Concession in Houston, acceptance in Little Rock
That night Bush telephoned Clinton to congratulate him, conceded publicly in Houston, and promised that his administration would cooperate in a smooth transition.
Clinton delivered his victory address in Little Rock, accepting election as the incoming 42nd president; Senator Al Gore of Tennessee became vice-president-elect.
Arkansas and the District of Columbia were the only contests in which any candidate took an outright popular-vote majority.
Two familiar claims that do not hold
Perot's presence cannot simply be assumed to have cost Bush the election. Scholarly analyses dispute the spoiler claim and find that Perot drew from varied constituencies.
Nor was Gore chosen to balance the ticket. Contemporary reporting describes the pick as a deliberate rejection of traditional geographic, ideological and generational balance — another young, moderate Southerner who reinforced Clinton's own profile.
Clinton was president-elect in the conventional political sense from election night; the electors' later meetings and Congress's count supplied the formal constitutional election.
Sources
Researched 24 Aug 2026 5 sources not yet audited
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What the sources leave uncertain
- Different historical compilations sometimes publish slightly different popular-vote totals because of later state updates and treatment of write-ins. This sheet uses the FEC’s June 1993 publication, compiled from official state figures and updates through 24 June 1993.