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All 538 electoral votes of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win |
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Turnout | 50.2% 3.1 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Presidential election results map. Red denotes states won by Bush/Quayle, blue denotes those won by Dukakis/Bentsen, light blue is the electoral vote for Bentsen/Dukakis by a West Virginia faithless elector. Numbers indicate electoral votes allotted to the winner of each state.
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The United States presidential election of 1988 was the 51st quadrennial United States presidential election. It was held on Tuesday, November 8, 1988. Incumbent Vice President George H. W. Bush won the Republican nomination, and chose Senator Dan Quayle of Indiana as his running mate. The Democrats nominated Governor Michael Dukakis of Massachusetts, with Senator Lloyd Bentsen of Texas – who had coincidentally defeated Bush in a U.S. Senate race 18 years earlier – as his running mate. Due to the restrictions of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution, incumbent President Ronald Reagan was not eligible to seek a third term. Running an aggressive campaign, Bush capitalized on a good economy and Reagan's popularity. Meanwhile, Dukakis's campaign suffered from several miscues, including failure to defend against Bush's attacks. This allowed Bush to win with a substantial margin of the popular vote, while winning the Electoral College by a landslide. Since the 1988 election, no candidate has managed to equal or surpass Bush's number of electoral votes won or popular vote percentage.