The 1992 presidential campaign of Bill Clinton, then the governor of Arkansas, was announced on October 3, 1991, at the Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas. After winning a majority of delegates in the Democratic primaries of 1992, the campaign announced that then-junior Senator from Tennessee, Al Gore, would be Clinton's running mate. The Clinton-Gore ticket went on to defeat Republican incumbent President George H. W. Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle in the presidential election on November 3, 1992, and took office as the 42nd president and 45th vice president, respectively, on January 20, 1993. Candidate background Clinton was the governor of a traditionally conservative Southern state, Arkansas. He had been viewed as a viable presidential candidate before his actual bid in 1992. During the 1988 Democratic Party presidential primaries, where George H. W. Bush, the incumbent vice president, seemed all but inevitable as the president, many turned to Clinton as the next Southern leader of the party. Bill Clinton was seen as a potential candidate as he was a popular Democratic governor in a state that had voted for Republicans in four of the last five presidential elections. Breaking with the traditional left wing platform of the Democratic Party, Clinton espoused the ideas of the Third Way. A former chairman of the DLC, he ran as a New Democrat. Timeline Primaries In the wake of President George H.W. Bush's sky-high approval ratings after Operation Desert Storm, American media gave the Democratic party little chance of winning the presidency in 1992. Early Democratic front-runners included Bill Bradley, a New Jersey senator; Jesse Jackson, who finished second in 1988; Dick Gephardt, a Missouri representative and then House Majority Leader; Al Gore, then a senator from Tennessee; and Jay Rockefeller, a senator from West Virginia. But each bowed out early; neither Bradley nor Rockefeller considered themselves ready to run, Gephardt seemed to accept Bush's re-election as a sure thing, and Gore had opted to spend more time with his family in the wake of a tragic accident that threatened the life of his young son. The most notable front-runner, Mario Cuomo, decided not to run on December 20, 1991, the final day to apply to run in the New Hampshire primary. In the lead-in to the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic primary, the Clinton campaign was rocked by scandal when Gennifer Flowers accused Clinton of having a 12-year sexual affair. At