Michael Dukakis 1988 presidential campaign

The 1988 presidential campaign of Michael Dukakis began when he announced his candidacy for the Democratic Party's nomination for President of the United States on March 16, 1987, in a speech in Boston.^[6] After winning the nomination, he was formally selected as the Democratic Party's nominee at the party's convention in Atlanta on July 21, 1988.^[7][8] He lost the 1988 election to his Republican opponent George H. W. Bush, who was the sitting Vice President at the time. Dukakis won 10 states and the District of Columbia, receiving a total of 111 electoral votes compared to Bush's 426 (Dukakis would have received 112, but one faithless elector who was pledged to him voted for Lloyd Bentsen for president and Dukakis for vice president instead out of protest). Dukakis received 45% of the popular vote to Bush's 53%.^[9][10][11] Many commentators blamed Dukakis' loss on the embarrassing photograph of him in a tank taken on September 13, 1988, which subsequently formed the basis of a successful Republican attack ad.^[12][13] Much of the blame was also laid on Dukakis' campaign, which was criticized for being poorly managed despite being well funded.^[14][15] Had Dukakis been elected, he would have been the first Greek American president, the first Eastern Orthodox president, the first Eastern European American president, and the second governor of Massachusetts to accomplish this feat (after Calvin Coolidge) and the first incumbent state governor to do so since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1932, this feat would be accomplished four years later to Bill Clinton, as well as the fifth president from Massachusetts. Bentsen would have been the second senator from Texas to be elected vice president, after Lyndon B. Johnson.^{[16][17][18][19]}

Dukakis's March 16, 1987, "Marathon Speech" was followed by a formal campaign launch on April 29, 1987, in New Hampshire and on Boston Common.^[20][21] The campaign was built around Dukakis's reputation for managerial competence and around his record in Massachusetts during the so-called "Massachusetts Miracle." In the Democratic primaries he emerged as the front-runner through steady fundraising, organizational discipline, and victories in major contests such as New Hampshire, Wisconsin, New York, and Pennsylvania.^{[22][23][24][25][26]} In the general election, however, Bush and his advisers succeeded in making the race less about economic competence and more about crime, national defense, cultural symbolism, and ideology. Retrospectives and campaign archives have frequently described the 1988 contest as one of the harshest and most negative presidential races of its era.^[27][28][29]

Michael Dukakis was the 65th and 67th governor of Massachusetts, from 1975 to 1979 and 1983 to 1991.^[30] His running mate, Lloyd Bentsen, was a U.S. senator from Texas, and a member of the United States Senate Committee on Finance who had previously run for the Democratic nomination in 1976.^[31][32]

Dukakis entered the 1988 race as a nationally known Democratic governor who had chaired the Democratic Governors Association and who had been voted the nation's most effective governor by his peers in 1986.^[6] His candidacy was rooted in the argument that a governor with an administrative record was better suited to the presidency than senators who mainly offered rhetoric or ideology. In contemporaneous accounts, the campaign emphasized not merely liberal policy positions, but a particular image of Dukakis as a disciplined, data-minded, unflamboyant executive who had already "made new ideas work" in Massachusetts.^[22]

On March 16, 1987, Dukakis, then the Governor of Massachusetts, gave what has become known as the "Marathon Speech" in Boston in which he hinted that he was running for president in next year's election. He formally announced that he would run in a speech given the following month.^[7] Previously, he had been urged to consider running for president by Mario Cuomo, who had dropped out the previous month.^[33][34] This made him the third declared Democratic candidate for the 1988 election, after Richard A. Gephardt and Bruce Babbitt. Dukakis soon received an outpouring of support from voters throughout the country, which reportedly resulted in him receiving more attention than even he had expected.^[35]

The formal announcement on April 29, 1987, underscored the theme that would define much of the campaign: voters, Dukakis argued, should judge the contenders not simply by what they promised to do but by what they had already done in public office.^[1][20][22] The "marathon" metaphor also became one of the campaign's signature images; Dukakis repeated it at the Democratic National Convention when he said that he had described the race as a marathon "sixteen months ago" and that the sprint to the finish line was now beginning.^[36]

Dukakis' early organization was shaped chiefly by campaign manager John Sasso and campaign chairman Paul Brountas, both longtime political allies. According to The Washington Post, Dukakis deliberately delayed any real presidential move until after securing re-election as governor in 1986, then began an exploratory phase in early 1987 that included meetings with former candidates and consultants, as well as trips to Iowa, New Hampshire, North Carolina, and Louisiana.^[22] The same account described the campaign's early internal theory as a bet on steadiness and discipline in a large, volatile Democratic field: in a race where other candidates rose and fell, Dukakis was expected to move "in steady if unspectacular fashion".^[22]

Fundraising proved critical to making that strategy plausible. Robert Farmer, the campaign's chief fundraiser, initially estimated that Dukakis might raise $6.5 million before the Iowa caucuses; the campaign eventually far surpassed that figure.^[22] Greek-American donors and volunteers were especially important in building the campaign's national network. Contemporary reporting in the Los Angeles Times described Greek-Americans as a major organizing and financial base for Dukakis and reported that roughly one-fifth of his campaign war chest had come from Greek-American sources.^[37]

Dukakis's ethnic and religious background became both an asset and an occasional target. His campaign often incorporated the story of his immigrant parents into its public image, while opponents on the far right intermittently circulated attacks on his religion and his marriage to Kitty Dukakis, who is Jewish.^[17][38] Those attacks were publicly rejected by Archbishop Iakovos, who described Dukakis as "a steadfast son of the church".^[39]

The first major internal crisis of the campaign came in late September 1987, when Sasso and political director Paul Tully resigned after the disclosure that the Dukakis camp had been the source of an "attack video" related to Joe Biden's plagiarism controversy.^[3][40] Dukakis replaced Sasso with Susan Estrich, a Harvard Law School professor who became, according to the Los Angeles Times, the first woman to hold such a senior campaign-management role in presidential politics.^[41][42] Later campaign retrospectives credited Estrich's managerial style with helping stabilize the operation after the Sasso affair, though Brountas said the scandal had cost the campaign "two months of momentum".^[22]

By May 1988, Dukakis had become the Democratic Party's front-runner for their nomination in that year's election, thanks to his victories in the New York and Pennsylvania primaries.^[43] On June 7, 1988, Dukakis clinched the Democratic Party's nomination by winning all four of the party's last primaries against Jesse Jackson, the only other remaining Democratic candidate at the time. These victories gave Dukakis significantly more delegates than the 2,081 required to win the nomination.^[44]

Dukakis's path to the nomination was not based on an overwhelming early breakthrough but on cumulative victories and organizational endurance in a fragmented field that also included Jesse Jackson, Al Gore, Dick Gephardt, Paul Simon, Joe Biden, Gary Hart, and others. He won the New Hampshire primary on February 16 by a 16-point margin over Gephardt, a victory that contemporary observers regarded as a major boost to his claim of electability and managerial seriousness.^[23] After Jackson upset him in Michigan, Dukakis rebounded strongly in Wisconsin, where he defeated Jackson by 19 percentage points and reasserted himself as the favorite for the nomination.^[24]

His victories in New York and Pennsylvania proved particularly important because they demonstrated that he could win large industrial states central to the Democratic electoral coalition.^[25][26] On June 7, 1988, after decisive wins in California and New Jersey, an Associated Press delegate tally placed Dukakis at 2,119 delegates, above the number needed to secure the nomination.^[45] The victory ended one of the most crowded Democratic nomination fights of the post-1968 era and made Dukakis the party's standard-bearer heading into the 1988 Democratic National Convention.^[6]

Dukakis' campaign was focused on his experience as Governor of Massachusetts, during which time Massachusetts had emerged from an economic depression and had become a "bastion of prosperity and full employment".^[48] Commentators had described this as the "Massachusetts Miracle", a term Bush dismissed as the "Massachusetts mirage".^[49]

The "Massachusetts Miracle" was more than a talking point; it was the core rationale of Dukakis's candidacy. In campaign speeches and advertisements, Dukakis repeatedly argued that Massachusetts under his administration had balanced budgets, reduced unemployment, and created hundreds of thousands of jobs.^[36][50] Bush and his allies, by contrast, sought to puncture the phrase by highlighting state fiscal strains, environmental problems such as pollution in Boston Harbor, and the prison furlough controversy.^[27][28] The clash over whether Massachusetts represented a model of technocratic competence or a misleading "mirage" became one of the principal interpretive battles of the fall campaign.^[51]

On July 12, 1988, Dukakis announced he had chosen Texas senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate, in the hopes of garnering more support in the South.^[52] Dukakis compared his pick to John F. Kennedy's pick of Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate in the 1960 election.^[53] As a result, his ticket became known as the "Boston-Austin axis", as Bentsen himself described it.^[54][55] Shortly after Dukakis made the pick, a Time cover story dubbed Dukakis and Bentsen "the odd couple", and Richard Stengel noted in 1988 that Bentsen was "...more Bush's twin than Dukakis'".^[56] James J. Kilpatrick called the pair "The Sominex Twins".^[57]

The choice was generally understood as an effort to add regional balance, reassure moderate and business-oriented Democrats, and make the ticket more competitive in the South and Southwest.^[58] The Los Angeles Times reported that Dukakis announced the selection while "seeking to bolster support in the South" and that he explicitly called it his "first presidential act".^[58] The pick also reflected a classic form of ticket-balancing: Dukakis, a technocratic Northeastern governor, was paired with an older Texas senator known for his ties to business, his conservative tone on some issues, and his institutional gravitas in the Senate.^[31][58]

After winning the primaries in 30 states against Jesse Jackson and Al Gore, Dukakis accepted the Democratic Party's nomination at the 1988 Democratic National Convention on July 21, 1988, where governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton formally nominated Dukakis.^[14]

In his acceptance speech, Dukakis framed the general election as a choice about "competence" rather than ideology and placed heavy emphasis on his biography as the son of immigrants. He told delegates that the campaign had been a marathon, spoke of "good jobs at good wages", invoked "old-fashioned values" such as accountability and respect for the truth, and argued that the country needed a new era after the Reagan years.^[36] The speech also showed how the campaign hoped to fuse technocratic competence with a more emotional story about national possibility and immigrant aspiration.^[36]

Campaign rallies during and after the convention reinforced that theme. The ticket frequently appeared to Neil Diamond's "America", which contemporary reporting described as the song becoming Dukakis's theme and as a tribute to immigrants.^[59]

The immediate aftermath of the convention appeared to favor Dukakis. A New York Times/CBS News poll taken on July 21 and 22 found him ahead of Bush by 17 points, while an NBC/The Wall Street Journal poll taken just after the convention also showed a 17-point advantage.^[60][61] Dukakis and Bentsen tried to capitalize on the bounce by arguing that the election should be about the economy, ethics in government, and middle-class opportunity rather than about ideological labeling.^[36]

The campaign's principal public slogans reflected that attempt. "Good jobs at good wages" came directly from Dukakis's convention address; "We're on your side" and "The Best America Is Yet to Come" appeared in the campaign's late advertising and rally rhetoric.^[36][62] By the end of the campaign, Los Angeles Times reporting described "We're on your side" as the campaign's central late slogan as Dukakis tried to sharpen a populist contrast with Bush.^[63]

Yet the campaign never fully resolved the tension between Dukakis's technocratic style and the emotional, symbolic politics of a general election. Post-election analysis in the Los Angeles Times concluded that Bush had successfully defined Dukakis as ideologically out of the mainstream and had even seized Dukakis's chosen issue of "competence".^[29] That judgment became one of the enduring retrospective summaries of the race.^[6]

During the campaign, Dukakis was the target of several now-infamous attack ads by individuals supporting the Bush campaign, most infamously the "Willie Horton" ad produced by the pro-Bush National Security Political Action Committee. Although the Bush campaign disavowed the ad,^[64] it still played a major role in Dukakis' defeat.^[65] The Dukakis campaign was mired in confusion during the general election, as exemplified by "the Handlers", a series of unintentionally confusing commercials that the campaign produced and aired at a cost of $3 million. Dukakis also erred in not responding to the Horton attack until late in the campaign.^[66]

Media historians and retrospective accounts have frequently treated the 1988 advertising war as a defining example of modern negative campaigning. The Bush side attacked Dukakis on prison furloughs, defense, and pollution in Boston Harbor through a coordinated stream of ads and staged media events, including "Harbor", "Revolving Door", and "Tank Ride", while the independent Willie Horton commercial gained immense amplification through television news coverage.^{[27][28][67][68][69]}

The Dukakis campaign's own advertising operation became a symbol of internal disorder. The Living Room Candidate notes that the campaign's "Handlers" spots, especially "Crazy", were meant to parody Bush's image management but confused viewers and seemed pro-Bush at first glance; they were pulled only after about $3 million had already been spent. The same source reports that the campaign considered more than 1,000 ad scripts in a three-month period, cycled through consultants from several agencies, and produced an inconsistent body of ads that was mostly defensive in tone.^[27] Late in the race, however, the campaign did produce more pointed commercials, including "On Your Side" and "Counterpunch", the latter a direct response to Bush's attacks on furloughs and defense.^[62][70]

The tank episode of September 13, 1988, was intended to rebut Republican efforts to portray Dukakis as weak on defense. Instead, the images of Dukakis in an oversized helmet riding in a tank quickly became one of the campaign's defining visual liabilities.^[12][71] The Living Room Candidate later described Bush's "Tank Ride" ad as "inaccurate yet devastating", arguing that it gave durable symbolic form to charges that Dukakis could not be trusted as commander in chief.^[68] The photo opportunity, which had been staged by the Dukakis campaign itself, rapidly overwhelmed its intended message and entered campaign folklore as a classic example of a backfired visual.^[68]

The 1988 campaign featured two presidential debates between Dukakis and Bush and one vice-presidential debate between Bentsen and Quayle. The vice-presidential encounter on October 5 produced one of the most famous lines of the year when Bentsen replied to Quayle's comparison of himself to John F. Kennedy by saying, "Senator, I served with Jack Kennedy, I knew Jack Kennedy, Jack Kennedy was a friend of mine. Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy."^[72] The exchange immediately became one of the enduring soundbites of the campaign and elevated Bentsen's personal standing, even though it did not reverse the overall trajectory of the race.^[72]

Eight days later, at the second presidential debate, moderator Bernard Shaw opened with the now-famous question asking Dukakis whether he would support the death penalty if Kitty Dukakis were raped and murdered.^[73] Dukakis responded by reiterating his long-standing opposition to capital punishment. Although some later commentators criticized the fairness of the question itself, many viewers and analysts judged his answer to be emotionally flat and politically damaging.^[73][74] The moment became, alongside the tank photograph and the Willie Horton issue, one of the most frequently cited symbols of Dukakis's perceived inability to answer emotionally charged attacks in a persuasive way.^[74]

On October 20, 1988, Donna Brazile resigned from her role as deputy field director for the Dukakis campaign after saying that Bush needed to "fess up" about a rumor that he had had an extramarital affair. Her comments were also disavowed by the campaign, and Dukakis personally apologized to Bush for them at the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation Dinner that year.^[75]

The resignation underscored how difficult the campaign found it, late in the race, to land effective counterattacks without creating fresh controversies of its own. By October, Bush's advertising and message discipline had given him a clear advantage in framing the contest, while Dukakis's attempts to escalate rhetorically often came under scrutiny as signs of desperation rather than initiative.^[27][29]

A poll conducted on July 21 and 22 of 1988 found that Dukakis had expanded the size of his lead over Bush to 17 points, with 55% of voters surveyed saying they would prefer Dukakis to win, compared to 38% for Bush.^[76] His lead soon began to shrink, however. For example, on July 30, Dukakis criticized the Reagan administration's handling of ethical issues,^[77] to which Ronald Reagan himself responded by describing Dukakis as an "invalid", after which his poll numbers dropped by 5 points overnight.^[12][78] By August 11, Dukakis' lead over Bush had shrunk to 7 points,^[79] and by August 24, Bush had gained a 4-point lead over Dukakis. Of the dramatic shift in Dukakis' poll numbers, Mervin Field said, "I have never seen anything like this, this kind of swing in favorability ratings, ever since I have seen polls, going back to 1936."^[80] Later that year, after the second Bush-Dukakis debate occurred on October 13, Dukakis' numbers dropped by 7 points that night, largely due to his response to a question about whether he would support the death penalty for someone if they raped and murdered his wife, Kitty Dukakis, being perceived as emotionless by voters (although others considered the question inherently unfair).^[81][82]

The collapse of Dukakis's post-convention lead became one of the most remarked-upon statistical stories of the 1988 race. A Washington Post report on the Gallup poll of August 5–7 found Dukakis ahead by only 49% to 42%, down sharply from the 17-point margins recorded by the CBS/New York Times and NBC/Wall Street Journal surveys immediately after the Democratic convention.^[61] Less than two weeks later, after the Republican convention, another Gallup survey put Bush ahead 48% to 44%, ending what the Los Angeles Times called Dukakis's "long domination of the presidential race".^[83]

After the election, a Los Angeles Times/CNN survey concluded that Bush had captured the political "mainstream" and had successfully taken away Dukakis's chosen issue of competence, while also defining him as too liberal ideologically.^[29] That interpretation became central to later assessments of why the campaign failed despite its strong finances and summer polling lead.^[6]

A presidential transition was contingently planned from Reagan to Dukakis.

Dukakis' transition planning efforts' activities were largely undertaken in secrecy.^[84] In September 1988, awareness arose of active transition planning when the campaign filed paperwork to establish a Massachusetts nonprofit corporation named "Dukakis Transition '88".^[84]

The transition planning was formally chaired by campaign chairman Paul Brountas.^[84] However, Marcia Hale was overseeing much of the effort out of an office in Boston.^[84] One of the individuals involved in the transition planning was Harrison Wellford, who had been involved in the pre-election transition planning of Jimmy Carter in 1976, and would later go on to play a role in the presidential transition of Bill Clinton.^[85]

In September, campaign spokesman Mark Gearan stated, "It's a very quiet operation housed separately from the campaign.^[84]

Despite having a pre-election transition planning effort of their own, the Bush campaign took a shot at Dukakis for having a transition effort, with Bush spokesperson Mark Goodin remarking, "As usual, they have the cart before the horse. If they spend less time planning for transition and more time campaigning, they would not be behind in the polls. Our position is you need to win the election before you worry about the transition."^[84]

If Dukakis had won, he would not only have participated in a presidential transition, but also a gubernatorial transition –as he would have transitioned out of the Massachusetts governorship and handed over that position to his lieutenant governor Evelyn Murphy.^[84] Had he won, he would have been the first sitting governor to transition into the presidency since Franklin D. Roosevelt was elected in 1932.^[84][18]

On November 8, 1988, Bush defeated Dukakis in both the popular vote and the Electoral College, winning 426 electoral votes to Dukakis's 111, with one West Virginia elector casting a presidential vote for Bentsen and a vice-presidential vote for Dukakis.^[9][10] In his concession speech that night in Boston, Dukakis thanked "hundreds of thousands" of supporters, said that Bush "will be our president and we'll work with him", and called Bentsen "one of the great assets of this campaign".^[86]

Subsequent assessments of the campaign have generally emphasized the same cluster of problems visible at the time: Dukakis's difficulty translating managerial competence into an emotionally compelling general-election persona, the Bush campaign's skill at using symbolic imagery and attack advertising, and the Dukakis camp's own message confusion and delayed response.^[27][29][12] Northeastern University's description of the campaign archive likewise characterizes the Bush-Dukakis race as "one of the most negative campaigns to date".^[6]

• Michael Dukakis announcement speech
• Michael Dukakis acceptance speech
• Acceptance speech at the American Presidency Project
• Concession speech at the American Presidency Project
• Campaign announcement at C-SPAN
• 1988 campaign commercials at The Living Room Candidate