Word: texans
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...variations among competing surveys -- including one showing deadlock a week before the election -- were caused by difficulties in calculating the increase in turnout. The Perot factor was also hard to parse. The Texan drew many of the voters who said they valued change, and might have continued to surge had he not wounded himself with his reckless charges about Republican dirty tricks. When asked the hypothetical question of how they would have voted had Perot not been on the ballot, Clinton edged Bush by 7 percentage points...
...once considered voting for Perot, 38% pulled the lever for Clinton, vs. only 33% who stuck with Perot to the end. Perot won a bigger share of the vote than any other independent candidate in this century, save Teddy Roosevelt, who got 27.4% in 1912. But the maverick Texan got little boost from his final TV blitz. On election night he said he would continue to be "the grain of sand" that irritates an oyster into producing a pearl...
...friends and one Scott Barnes, a notorious conspiracy-theory peddler. Apparently Perot himself initially believed the threat about wiretapping enough to go to the Dallas police, offering technical assistance for an undercover operation to catch the criminal. Despite his close ties to the police, he was turned down. The Texan did, however, persuade the FBI to launch a fruitless investigation...
...support, White House Press Secretary Marlin Fitzwater told reporters Perot was "a paranoid person who has delusions." That pop-psych diagnosis was motivated by politics, of course, but it also squared with Perot's long history of obsession with plots. In one of his half-hour commercials, the Texan revived a claim that he had been the target of five armed terrorists hired by North Vietnamese to assassinate him 20 years ago. A single guard dog ostensibly scared the gunmen off his property. Perot never reported the incident to authorities, though he has frequently complained about minor incursions...
Perot's vagaries stopped but did not reverse his meteoric rise in the polls. Several tracking surveys showed his support at 16%, down a bit from around 20% but still more than enough to make Perot's wild-card effect on the campaign both important and unpredictable. The Texan is putting on a last-gasp TV advertising blitz like none ever seen before. His campaign has spent just under $60 million so far, and that figure will grow sharply in the final week...