I think I've said here before that one vote I would cast differently today is my 1992 (my first) presidential vote. I voted for Clinton, who, I think, was a decent president. But my current standards, given the options then, I wouldn't vote for him. I don't think he was trustworthy enough to be handed the keys. GHWB was, by most relevant standards, a good president, and he was definitely more trustworthy than Clinton, and he was a relative moderate.
I think it's fair to think that Perot took more votes from Bush than from Clinton. The recession really hurt Bush. Ironically, at least in California, my memory is that the "peace dividend" played a big role in the recession. California lost--I think--13 military posts/bases as a result of closure, thanks in large part to winning the Cold War. It was brutal--in the short term--for California's economy. If you go back and watch Presidio--a Sean Connery movie from the late 80s, I think--you'll see a San Francisco that had a huge military presence. The base closures in 1991 wiped that out (and not just in the Bay Area). It was hard on the area's economy; one of the few times that housing values have significantly dipped here.
Without the recession, not many people would have cared about "no new taxes." But combine that with the push for NAFTA, and Bush's huge victories over both the Soviet Union and Iraq were swept away. That's actually a pretty remarkable result--and grist for Clinton's "it's the economy, stupid" mill.
Once Clinton was President, even given my current political views, I likely would still have voted for him over Dole. To become the nominee for the Republicans, Dole had to go too far to the right, IMO. In my Democratic and aging memory, that was the era that Buchanan was really pushing the Rs to the right on social issues. Two years later, after the Lewinsky scandal was in full view, would I still have voted for Clinton over Dole? That's a close call. Realistically, I probably would still have voted for Clinton, but I'll say that I would at least have had to think hard about it.
The 2000 election will probably not get a lot of attention from historians because of what's happened since then, but my recollection of it was: things are going pretty well, so do we go with the guy who's pretty charming, doesn't seem that far to the right, and won't screw things up, or the guy who is kind of an annoying nerd, feels a little lefty on the environment, and won't screw things up? So we had a historically close election, a lot of drama, but not a lot of real angst at the time over the result. Can you imagine if we had the same scenario today as between Biden and Trump? It literally scares me to think about the consequences. Hopefully I'm just being melodramatic.
I recall looking back at the details of the GWB presidency when Trump was in his first term because of the liberal line of thought, "I'd even go back to Bush..." Nope. the GWB presidency was an epic failure in my mind. It was probably the combination of threatening Social Security and Katrina hitting at the same time in 2005 that fundamentally changed the national view of GWB, but there was an awful lot wrong with that presidency. Was Trump v.1 worse? I'm not at all sure. I thought Trump 1 was not good, but also not that effective at doing the things that he said he wanted to do. While I was very glad to be rid of him (I thought), it wasn't until after the 2020 election that he really scared me.
Back to 2000. I literally did vote for McCain in the California primary. My recollection, flawed as it may be, is that by the time California voted, the Republican primary was basically already decided, which I was disappointed in. In 2000, I thought McCain was a really good option. He was certainly always more conservative than me, and he had his own flaws, to be sure, but he struck me as honest, honorable, and more concerned about the country, than any particular election. But I think his loss in 2000 changed his approach to presidential politics. By 2008, he was willing to sell out his independence to capture primary votes. I have no regrets about voting for Obama. Once he was out of the presidential politics game, I think McCain went back to who he really wanted to be as a politician. Again, I disagreed with him about a lot of things, but when he wasn't trying to be the president, I thought he was a good voice in the room.
Now we are here in 2025. The landscape has changed a ton, and the parties have, too. People on the right think that the left has gone crazy. For my part, I think that the "mainstream" Rs have completely different policies, except on taxes and abortion, than they had even 12 years ago. And the electorate feels like it has dug in more for each side than it used to.
Things will continue to change. It will be a wild ride--as it often is.
