Perot's popularity, and which voters he "took" from the major candidates, is something that still gets some debate today. It's safe to say that initial thoughts were that he stole primarily from the Bush campaign's voters, but that this has been challenged in political science and history over the years. There are convincing factors suggesting that Perot's candidacy increased turnout and actually grabbed more Clinton voters than Bush ones. Perot appears to have attracted the pro-choice Republican voting group away from Bush.

Perot's popularity derived from an "outsider" label, from his business success, from his targeting of the national debt as an issue during a time of economic anxiety and rising deficits (remember Clinton's "It's the economy, stupid"?), and from his ability to be charismatic without going too deeply into policy. His campaign was quite media-savvy, and able to benefit from the weakness of the incumbent (Bush's popularity was below 50% going into 1992 already) and from the perceived weakness of Clinton, who was dogged by reports of an affair with Gennifer Flowers, and was weakened by a relatively tough primary and other scandals that arose (like conflict of interest accusations related to Hillary Clinton). His popularity for a simple, straightforward message, as well as his ability to plow money into his own campaign, gave him another advantage: he was able to reach the presidential debate stage.

Perot's biggest bloc of voters by ideology was moderate independents, followed up by moderate Democrats and Republicans. He did better with married couples than unmarried, and far better with whites than their share of the electorate (83% of voters were white, but 90%+ of his voters were white). More than half of his voters were under 44 years old, which meant he skewed young a bit more than Clinton and Bush. His voters skewed towards being more educated than Clinton's, though less than Bush's (though Clinton won handily in the post-graduate level), and he carried more suburban neighborhoods. This fits nicely with the theory of economic anxiety, of course.