Please don't get mad at me, but why did Gore lose Tennessee?

[Nym90]

And he really wasn't a native of the state in any meaningful way.  He grew up in D.C. and spent only his summers in the state.  When he became a Congressman and then a Senator, he basically only spent campaign season there.  He didn't speak like them.  He didn't act like them.  He wasn't one of them.

Many people called this to happen early in the process, and yet no one in the media really believed it until election night.

In all fairness, John McCain's ties to Arizona are no stronger, perhaps even less so. But yes, I agree that by 2000 Gore had lost touch with Tennessee. He won every county in the state in 1990 in his Senate reelection bid, so the aforementioned problems you mention clearly weren't issues until after he left the state.

[Nym90]

My prediction of the 1992 map without Perot...

Perot makes all the difference for George Bush. It has often been suggested that when polled, 2/3 of the Perot voters said that they would have voted for Bush and the other 1/3 would have voted for Clinton.

That wasn't true based on the exit polls for 1992, which show they would've split evenly....so I'm not sure who is "often suggesting" it, but they aren't basing it off of any empirical evidence.

Also, don't forget that a lot of Perot's voters simply would've stayed home in 1992 if he hadn't run....and that they were pretty universally dissatisfied with the state of affairs in the nation, thus making them quite disinclined to vote to reelect the incumbent.

I think Perot did help Clinton, but no more than 1-2 percent nationally, and may have actually helped Bush in some areas, such as the Northeast (though Clinton won all of it anyway).