re: Why did Louisiana, South, middle America vote Democrat in '92 and '96?

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Women ADORED Clinton and It was sickening

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Not only that, Hollywood and the entertainment industry adored him and put him front and center for a lot of free advertising.

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The Dems weren't so completely batshit insane as they are now and it wasn't entirely laughable for a Dem to run as a centrist.

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Right.

Dems built this flimsy house of cards on identity politics, Clinton understood it was all about the economy.

My econ professor was a big Bill Clinton fan due to his knowledge of economics.

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I look at maps of Electoral Vote results, and beginning 2000

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The whole country voted red for RR but the south wasnt really solid red until W and beyond.


It goes against the democrat narrative of some party flip.

Clinton caused a lot of Blue Dogs to get beat or switch. Richard Shelby was a Democrat, for example.

For the first two years, Hillary ran everything. The Clintons, and yes, it is plural, governed borderline progressive/liberal. Assault weapons ban was passed by them. Hillarycare was further to the left than Obamacare. They wanted to institute, get this, a BTU tax. An economy killer. They raised taxes.

Led to the 1994 elections. Clinton was smart enough to read the room and adapt accordingly. Obama never did.

And unlike Obama, Clinton didn't go taunting Trump at a dinner before a room full of people.

There were still a lot of Dixiecrats back in the early 90s. That affected things as well.

For example:

In the words of my former MIL, who was an idiot….But Bill Clinton is just so good looking.

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92 Ross Perot

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I've often wondered how different things would have gone had he been elected.

Clinton

I was led to believe Clinton was conservative. I lived in Ms. I voted for the Arkansas guy in 92. Never forget my wife saying you’ll be sorry, you voted for Hillary too

The South was still largely Democrat back then. I know it's hard to comprehend now, but if you go back and look at Louisiana legislature control by party, the Dems had control of the state house and senate chambers for well over a century (from 1876 - 2011). The time length for Democrats holding the Governor's office and all Congressional seats is only slightly less. LINK That was the standard, it was generational and it was pretty much completely opposite of what we have today.

Dave Treen was the first to put a crack in the dam. Buddy Roemer and Fox McKeithen switching to GOP while in office and our House representation starting to move to the GOP was a precursor to what was eventually going to happen in the state.

Clinton's win came about when that transition was still far too young to do anything but give him the state in both of his runs.

Along with that, one of Bush I's biggest platforms ini the 1988 campaign was "Read my lips: no new taxes!" He, of course, signed the 1990 Omnibus and it raised various taxes. Even while Bush was making this claim, the talking heads (which were relegated pretty much just to Sunday mornings back then) were saying there was no way taxes couldn't be raised (because of the ongoing deficit spending at the time). Voters didn't forget this (and Pat Buchanan made sure they didn't) for the 92 election.

Another issue was the presence of Ross Perot. Perot had the strongest showing thus far of any 3rd party candidate, even to the point of earning him a spot on the debate stage. While Perot didn't win a single EC delegate, he did pull in almost 19% of the popular vote (Clinton and Bush split the rest, 43-37.4% respectively) and there has always been speculation those would have been Bush votes had Perot not been in the picture.

As if that wasn't enough, the media loved Bill Clinton. He was a charming philanderer (Gennifer Flowers, anyone? Anyone?) who won the media spotlight, at least in part, by being "The Comeback Kid" by his campaign coming out of nowhere in the 92 primaries to come in 2nd in New Hampshire (fun fact: he dubbed himself with the nickname and the media ran with it). The media loves a good Cinderella story so it became part of his campaign's charm when the media reported on it.

A bit of a sub-section of that was the invention of Rock The Vote. Some Clinton supporters in the music industry created this movement, which was heavily pushed on MTV (which, at the time, still had a strong following among young adults) with the on-the-ground actions of not just getting young adults registered to vote but to register them as Democrats and push Clinton as the candidate they should vote for. This was so successful that it created an entire industry of "voter registration organizations" which have been traditionally Democrat operations regardless of their claims of non-partisanship.

Clinton was a brilliant reader of political tea leaves and Hillary was a taskmaster behind the scenes (and the media loved her, despite things like the Bimbo Eruption Squad, Travelgate, Whitewater, etc). Clinton's ability to know when to bend became important when the GOP won the House in the mid-terms. Leading up to the 96 election the GOP House had made much-needed welfare reform a hot issue while Clinton had stated publicly on multiple occasions that he would not sign any form of welfare reform. He ended up signing the PRWORA in August 1996.

In 1996 the GOP put up the sacrificial lamb of Bob Dole. Dole was old and campaigned with little personality while Clinton was still young (for a President), charismatic, energetic and "willing to work across the aisle" (finger-quotes because he signed welfare reform only because he knew it was a popular issue that could put his re-election too close to being in jeopardy). Clinton would then go on to steamroll Dole by winning 379 EC votes.

92 was the recession and Clinton was from Arkansas. And the marxist media finally had a viable messiah, after trying desperately to push Carter, Mondale, and Dukakis.