A national poll more than a year into the Clinton presidency shows that H. Ross Perot runs dead even with the president in a hypothetical head-to-head race. What is more, over forty-five percent of those polled said they would consider voting for Perot for president, an increase of fourteen percent since Clinton's inauguration. Finally, in a head-to-head race with Kansas Senator Bob Dole, Perot would defeat Dole by ten percentage points.
These results show that, despite questions about his performance in the 1992 election campaign (more than half of those polled responded that they saw Perot as "naive, scary, and a little too much of a dictator"), the Texas billionaire's political future remains bright. Sixty-seven percent of Americans have a favorable impression of him, nearly half have more confidence in him than in Clinton or Dole, and three-quarters believe he is sincerely trying to help the country.2
Perot's strength remains in his image as a problem-solver, especially on economic issues. The high degree of confidence shown in him by the voters in this regard must be the core of any future election bid. This was largely responsible for the 19.7 million votes (nearly 20 percent) that he received in 1992. Allied to this was a strong anti-Washington, anti-politician sentiment, which appeared so strongly in the 1994 mid-term elections, and might lay the groundwork for a viable third party in 1996. Perot, as an outsider, would be the natural beneficiary of this trend.
It has been remarked that Perot has no strategy for becoming president in 1996 "for the simple reason that he doesn't want to become president".3 This belies the careful organizing that he has been undertaking since the 1992 election. His organization, United We Stand America, has all the earmarks of a grass-roots political party, and may represent the rudiments of the third party that many Americans seem to favor. Perot has organized in all fifty stat...