I recently learned that Michael Dukakis was poling higher in June of 1988 than Joe Biden is now, and yet he lost badly to George H.W. Bush. How do we account for such an apparently huge swing in public opinion in just five months?
It's largely considered to be due to the "Willy Horton Ad" run by the Bush campaign, and likely ginned up by the campaign manager, Lee Atwater. The charge was as follows:
On June 6, 1986, he was released as part of a weekend furlough program but did not return. On April 3, 1987, in Oxon Hill, Maryland, Horton twice raped a woman after pistol-whipping, knifing, binding, and gagging her fiancé. He then stole the car belonging to the man he had assaulted.
This is from the Wikipedia, but is cited from Reader's Digest and I'm using it here because it covers the issue concisely. In a Washington Post ad, It’s time to stop the endless hype of the ‘Willie Horton’ ad, they sum up how the ad worked as such:
When then-Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis became the Democratic presidential nominee in 1988, Horton was the centerpiece of attacks on Dukakis’s record on crime. Called “Willie” by the campaign of Republican candidate George H.W. Bush, Horton was most famously depicted in an ad called “Weekend Passes,” produced by an independent group supporting Bush.
The impact of the Willie Horton ad has been described as “devastating to Dukakis.” In a profile of Larry McCarthy, the ad’s creator, the New Yorker’s Jane Mayer described the ad as “the political equivalent of an improvised explosive device, demolishing the electoral hopes of Dukakis.” Dukakis himself now thinks that he was “getting killed.”
But the Washington Post article claims this is more legend that fact. In case it's paywalled, here's election polling from June to November from the article: https://imgur.com/mrd7qpA. It's important to see that this isn't a cliff. The ad released on Sept. 7th which according to the graph was already seeing Bush as being favored to win.
The WaPo article makes the assertion that it was Jessie Jackson "making it a racial question" but that doesn't quite seem to add up either. Again, Bush had been taking over in the polls by the time the add dropped, and there was little waning in those numbers. There were two other major elements for the campaign that was handled poorly:
You can find an ad through that link to the Bush campaign tank-ad. It's not great, and there's an exhaustive coverage of all things Dukakis-Tank in Politico that has extensive coverage, but here's the important part:
On Monday, Sept. 19, Rowland Evans and Robert Novak offered perhaps the most devastating press account yet in their syndicated column. “Howls of laughter echoed through Bush headquarters in Washington,” they wrote, “where ridicule was prepared for the candidate’s speech Friday. Democratic insiders could only shake their heads in dismay.”
By Tuesday, one poll found that Dukakis had lost significant ground, with 25 percent saying they were less likely to vote for him because of the tank ride.
Election Day was seven weeks away.
As for the Kitty Dukakis rape question, it's about the Death Penalty. This was a major angle Bush wanted to play up, and many suspect that this was a question Lee Atwater had lobbied behind the scenes to have asked ( According to Boogie Man: The Lee Atwater Story). Given that it tied in directly with the ad campaign with Willie Horton, it doesn't seem completely unfounded. And while you can search your own morals for the validity of the question, what made matters worse (allegedly) was the response Dukakis gave: (from Time Magazine)
A longtime opponent of the death penalty, Dukakis responded to the startling question from CNN's Bernard Shaw, "No, I don't, Bernard, and I think you know that I've opposed the death penalty during all of my life. I don't see any evidence that it's a deterrent and I think there are better and more effective ways to deal with violent crime." While some criticized the fairness of the question, to viewers the answer seemed both dispassionate and dismissive. Years later, Dukakis would recall his response, saying, "I have to tell you, and maybe I'm just still missing it ... I didn't think it was that bad."
Those three items combined, not to mention Reagan's popularity at the time - it's referred to as the Reagan era - and Bush being his Vice President lead to an uphill battle. But one thing that I believe contributed to his loss, and it's exactly measurable beyond what I've posted here, was what Lee Atwater called the "naked cruelty" of the 1988 campaign. I've put some highlighted clips from the article in the New York Times below:
In a detailed and candid article about his career and his fight against an inoperable brain tumor, Lee Atwater has apologized to Michael S. Dukakis for the "naked cruelty" of a remark he made about the Democratic Presidential nominee in the 1988 campaign.
As manager of Mr. Bush's campaign, Mr. Atwater succeeded in making the case of Willie Horton, a convicted murderer, an issue against Mr. Dukakis.
Mr. Horton, who is black, raped a white woman and stabbed her husband while on a weekend furlough from a Massachusetts prison. The Bush campaign used the case to portray Mr. Dukakis, then Governor of Massachusetts, as a liberal who was soft on crime.
"In 1988," Mr. Atwater said, "fighting Dukakis, I said that I 'would strip the bark off the little bastard' and 'make Willie Horton his running mate.' I am sorry for both statements: the first for its naked cruelty, the second because it makes me sound racist, which I am not." Reputation as 'Ugly Campaigner'