1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky
election in Kentucky
The 1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky took place on November 8, 1988. All 50 states and the District of Columbia were part of the 1988 United States presidential election. Kentucky voters chose nine electors to the Electoral College, which selected the president and vice president. Kentucky was won by incumbent Vice President George H. W. Bush of Texas, who was running against Massachusetts Governor Michael Dukakis. Bush ran with Indiana Senator Dan Quayle for vice president, and Dukakis ran with Texas Senator Lloyd Bentsen.
In the 1980s, Kentucky was a swing state, having voted for the winner of every presidential election from 1964 on. However, Mitch McConnell's narrow win in the 1984 Senate election represented a significant shift of the state towards the Republican Party at the federal level.
Bush carried Kentucky by 11.6 percentage points on election day, the state weighing in as 4 points more Republican than the national average. Bush carried a majority of Kentucky's counties, including the most highly populated counties: Jefferson County, home to Louisville; Fayette County, home to Lexington; Daviess County, home to Owensboro; and Kenton and Campbell Counties, in the Cincinnati area. Dukakis' strength was mostly isolated to rural counties in the Eastern Coalfield and the Jackson Purchase.
“1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky” enters the record as election in Kentucky. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what United, States and presidential can confirm, complicate or overturn.
Why this record matters
“1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, United, States and presidential provides the most credible route into that argument.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 25, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q17100414. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1988, 1964 and 1984.
Institutional narratives can privilege the records that survived while minimizing voices that were never formally collected. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
Compare institutional narratives with records created by participants and affected communities. Dates and formal titles are useful anchors, but not substitutes for context.
- Event chronology
- Institutional context
- Locating named record creators
Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky”, its source revision and the description used here.
- Expand the search: follow 1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky primary sources, 1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky archive and United research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
- Which source most directly establishes the central claim about “1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky”?
- Which voices are present, absent or mediated by the institution?
- What chronology connects this entry to wider political or social change?
Search terms from this dossier
This entry incorporates text from “1988 United States presidential election in Kentucky” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.