Presidential elections were held in the United States on November 8, 1988. The Republican ticket of incumbent vice president George H. W. Bush and Indiana junior senator Dan Quayle defeated the Democratic ticket of Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis and Texas senior senator Lloyd Bentsen. The election was the third consecutive landslide victory for the Republican Party.
Incumbent President Ronald Reagan was ineligible to run for a third term due to the term limits established by the 22nd Amendment to the United States Constitution. As a result, it was the first election since 1968 to lack an incumbent president on the ballot. Bush entered the Republican primaries as the front-runner, defeating Kansas senator Bob Dole and televangelist Pat Robertson. He selected Indiana senator Dan Quayle as his running mate. Dukakis, campaigning on his state's record of strong economic growth, won the Democratic primaries after Gary Hart (a prominent "Atari Democrat" representing the party's moderate wing) withdrew and Ted Kennedy (representing the party's traditional liberal wing) declined to run. Dukakis selected Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen as his running mate.
Bush ran an aggressive campaign that concentrated mainly on the strong economy, reduction in crime, and continuance with Reagan's policies. He attacked Dukakis as an elitist "Massachusetts liberal" and soft-on-crime, to which Dukakis ineffectively responded. Despite Dukakis initially leading in the polls, Bush pulled ahead after the Republican National Convention and extended his lead after two strong debate performances. Bush won a decisive victory over Dukakis, winning the Electoral College and the popular vote by sizable margins. Bush is the only sitting vice president to be elected president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Despite his loss, Dukakis flipped nine states that had voted Republican in 1984: Hawaii, Iowa, Massachusetts, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Washington, West Virginia, and Wisconsin.
Voters 44 years of age or younger (born in 1944 or later) were estimated by the exit poll to comprise 55% of the electorate. As such, Baby boomers and Generation X constituted the majority of the voting public.
As of 2026, this remains the most recent election in which a candidate won over 400 electoral votes, as well as 40 or more states. It is also the most recent open seat election in which the outgoing president's party retained the White House, and the most recent time in which a party won the presidency for a third consecutive term. As of 2026, this is the earliest election in which at least one of the major party nominees for president (Dukakis) or vice president (Quayle) is still alive.
Republican Party nomination
Republican candidates
- George H. W. Bush, incumbent vice president from Texas
- Bob Dole, U.S. senator from Kansas
- Pete du Pont, former governor of Delaware
- Ben Fernandez, former special ambassador to Paraguay, from California
- Alexander Haig, former secretary of state, from Pennsylvania
- Jack Kemp, U.S. representative from New York
- Paul Laxalt, former U.S. senator from Nevada
- Pat Robertson, televangelist from Virginia
- Donald Rumsfeld, former secretary of defense from Illinois
- Harold Stassen, former governor of Minnesota
Withdrawn candidates
While Bush had long been seen as Reagan's natural successor, there was still a degree of opposition within the party to his candidacy. Historical precedent was not seen to favor Bush's chances, as no incumbent vice president had been elected as president since Martin Van Buren in 1836. Dole attracted support among those who were concerned that Bush, whose electoral experience outside of his campaigns with Reagan was limited to running unsuccessfully for the Senate and twice successfully for the House of Representatives in the 1960s, had not done enough to establish himself as a candidate in his own right. Others who wished to further continue the shift towards social conservatism that had begun during Reagan's presidency supported Robertson.
Bush unexpectedly came in third in the Iowa caucus, which he had won in 1980, behind Dole and Robertson. Dole was also leading in the polls of the New Hampshire primary, and the Bush camp responded by running television commercials portraying Dole as a tax raiser, while Governor John H. Sununu campaigned for Bush. Dole did nothing to counter these ads and Bush won, thereby gaining crucial momentum, which he called "Big Mo". Once the multiple-state primaries such as Super Tuesday began, Bush's organizational strength and fundraising lead were impossible for the other candidates to match, and the nomination was his. The Republican Party convention was held in New Orleans, Louisiana. Bush was nominated unanimously and selected U.S. senator Dan Quayle from Indiana as his running mate. In his acceptance speech, Bush made the pledge "Read my lips: No new taxes", which contributed to his loss in 1992.
Democratic Party nomination
In 1984, the Democrats had nominated Walter Mondale, a traditional New Deal-type liberal, who advocated for those constituencies that Franklin D. Roosevelt forged into a majority coalition, as their candidate. When Mondale was defeated in a landslide, party leaders became eager to find a new approach to get away from the 1980 and 1984 debacles. After Bush's image was affected by his involvement on the Iran-Contra scandal much more than Reagan's, and after the Democrats won back control of the U.S. Senate in the 1986 congressional elections following an economic downturn, the party's leaders felt optimistic about having a closer race with the GOP in 1988, although probabilities of winning the presidency were still marginal given the climate of prosperity.
One goal of the party was to find a new, fresh candidate who could move beyond the traditional New Deal-Great Society ideas of the past and offer a new image of the Democrats to the public. To this end party leaders tried to recruit New York governor Mario Cuomo to be a candidate. Cuomo had impressed many Democrats with his keynote speech at the 1984 Democratic Convention, and they believed he would be a strong candidate. After Cuomo chose not to run, the Democratic frontrunner for most of 1987 was former Colorado senator Gary Hart. He had made a strong showing in the 1984 presidential primaries; after Mondale's defeat, he had positioned himself as the moderate and centrist many Democrats felt their party would need to win.
Questions and rumors about extramarital affairs and past debts dogged Hart's campaign. Hart had told New York Times reporters who questioned him about these rumors that, if they followed him around, they would "be bored". In a separate investigation, the Miami Herald had received an anonymous tip from a friend of Donna Rice that Rice was involved with Hart. After his affair emerged, the Herald reporters found Hart's quote in a pre-print of The New York Times Magazine. After the Herald's findings were publicized, many other media outlets picked up the story and Hart's ratings in the polls plummeted. On May 8, 1987, a week after the Rice story broke, Hart dropped out of the race. His campaign chair, Representative Patricia Schroeder, tested the waters for about four months after Hart's withdrawal, but decided in September 1987 that she would not run. In December 1987, Hart surprised many pundits by resuming his campaign, but the allegations of adultery had delivered a fatal blow to his candidacy, and he did poorly in the primaries before dropping out again.
Senator Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts had been considered a potential candidate, but he ruled himself out of the race in the fall of 1985. Two other politicians mentioned as possible candidates, both from Arkansas, did not join the race: Senator Dale Bumpers and Governor and future president Bill Clinton. Joe Biden's campaign also ended in controversy after he was accused of plagiarizing a speech by Neil Kinnock, then-leader of the British Labour Party. The Dukakis campaign secretly released a video in which Biden was filmed repeating a Kinnock stump speech with only minor modifications. Biden later called his failure to attribute the quotes an oversight, and in related proceedings the Delaware Supreme Court's Board on Professional Responsibility cleared him of a separate plagiarism charge, leveled for plagiarizing an article during his time in law school. This ultimately led him to drop out of the race. Dukakis later revealed that his campaign had leaked the tape, and two members of his staff resigned. Biden later ran three more times for the Democratic nomination, unsuccessfully in 2008, successfully in 2020, and initially ran for re-election as the party's presumptive nominee in 2024, but ultimately withdrew from the race before he was officially re-nominated. He was inaugurated as the 47th vice president in 2009, serving two terms under President Barack Obama. He became the 46th president in 2021, over 33 years after his first campaign for the office ended, and served one term.
Al Gore, a senator from Tennessee, chose to run for the nomination. Turning 40 in 1988, he would have been the youngest man to contest the presidency on a major party ticket since William Jennings Bryan in 1896, and the youngest president ever if elected, younger than John F. Kennedy at election age and Theodore Roosevelt at age of assumption of office. He eventually became the 45th vice president in 1993, serving two terms under President Bill Clinton, then the Democratic presidential nominee in 2000, losing to George W. Bush, George H. W. Bush's son.
Primaries
After Hart withdrew from the race, no clear frontrunner emerged before the primaries and caucuses began. The Iowa caucus was won by Dick Gephardt, who had been sagging heavily in the polls until, three weeks before the vote, he began campaigning as a populist and his numbers surged. Illinois senator Paul M. Simon finished a surprising second, and Massachusetts governor Michael Dukakis finished third. In the New Hampshire primary, Dukakis came in first, Gephardt fell to second, and Simon came in third. In an effort to weaken Gephardt's candidacy, both Dukakis and Gore ran negative television ads against Gephardt. The ads convinced the United Auto Workers, which had endorsed Gephardt, to withdraw their endorsement; this crippled Gephardt, as he relied heavily on the support of labor unions.
In the Super Tuesday races, Dukakis won six primaries, to Gore's five, Jesse Jackson five and Gephardt one, with Gore and Jackson splitting the Southern states. The next week, Simon won Illinois with Jackson finishing second. Jackson captured 6.9 million votes and won 11 contests: seven primaries (Alabama, the District of Columbia, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, Puerto Rico, and Virginia) and four caucuses (Delaware, Michigan, South Carolina and Vermont). He also scored March victories in Alaska's caucuses and Texas's local conventions, despite losing the Texas primary. Briefly, after he won 55% of the vote in the Michigan Democratic caucus, he had more pledged delegates than all the other candidates. Jackson's campaign suffered a significant setback less than two weeks later when he was defeated in the Wisconsin primary by Dukakis. Dukakis's win in New York and then in Pennsylvania effectively ended Jackson's hopes for the nomination.
Democratic Convention
The Democratic Party Convention was held in Atlanta, Georgia from July 18–21. Arkansas governor Bill Clinton placed Dukakis's name in nomination, and delivered his speech, scheduled to be 15 minutes long but lasting so long that some delegates began booing to get him to finish; he received great cheering when he said, "In closing..." Texas state treasurer Ann Richards, who was elected the state governor two years later, gave a speech attacking Bush, including the line "Poor George, he can't help it, he was born with a silver foot in his mouth". With only Jackson remaining as an active candidate to oppose Dukakis, the tally for president was as follows:
Jackson's supporters said that since their candidate had finished in second place, he was entitled to the vice presidential nomination. Dukakis disagreed, and instead selected Senator Lloyd Bentsen from Texas. Bentsen's selection led many in the media to dub the ticket the "Boston-Austin" axis, and to compare it to the pairing of John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1960 presidential campaign. Like Dukakis and Bentsen, Kennedy and Johnson were from Massachusetts and Texas, respectively.
Other nominations
Libertarian Party
Ron Paul and Andre Marrou formed the ticket for the Libertarian Party. Their campaign called for the adoption of a global policy on military nonintervention, advocated an end to the federal government's involvement with education, and criticized Reagan's "bailout" of the Soviet Union. Paul was a former member of the U.S. House of Representatives, first elected as a Republican from Texas in an April 1976 special election. He was known as an opponent of the war on drugs.
New Alliance Party
Lenora Fulani ran for the New Alliance Party, and focused on issues concerning unemployment, healthcare, and homelessness. The party had full ballot access, meaning Fulani and her running mate, Joyce Dattner, were the first pair of women to receive ballot access in all 50 states. Fulani was the first African American to do so.
Willa Kenoyer and Ron Ehrenreich ran for the Socialist Party, advocating a decentralist government approach with policies determined by the needs of the workers.
Populist Party
David Duke stood for the Populist Party. A former leader of the Louisiana Ku Klux Klan, he advocated a mixture of White nationalist and separatist policies with more traditionally conservative positions, such as opposition to most immigration from Latin America and to affirmative action.
General election
Campaign
During the election, the Bush campaign sought to portray Dukakis as an unreasonable "Massachusetts liberal". Dukakis was attacked for such positions as opposing mandatory recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, and being a "card-carrying member of the ACLU" (a statement Dukakis made early in the primary campaign to appeal to liberal voters). Dukakis responded by saying that he was a "proud liberal" and that the phrase should not be a bad word in America. Bush pledged to continue Reagan's policies but also vowed a "kinder and gentler nation" in an attempt to win over more moderate voters. The duties delegated to him during Reagan's second term (mostly because of the president's advanced age, Reagan turning 78 just after he left office) gave him an unusually high level of experience for a vice president.