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. 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. 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%. 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. Much of the blame was also laid on Dukakis' campaign, which was criticized for being poorly managed despite being well funded. 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.

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. 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. 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.