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President Huddleston's push for the Secure Borders Act had enraged several factions in his party, who had never really accepted Huddleston as the party's standard-bearer and a primary challenger emerged in the form of civil rights leader Jesse Jackson of Illinois. Jackson believed that he would be joined by others of the party's liberal wing to make his campaign a credible challenge to the president, but a combination of political calculation (replacing a moderate sitting president for a stridently liberal black man who had never held elective office) and Jackson's own inflammatory statements about Jews (notably referring to New York City as "hymietown") kept the campaign a combination of vanity project and protest against Huddleston that stood no chance of taking the nomination. Nevertheless, Jackson succeeded in damaging Huddleston and made the Democrats wary of the fall campaign.

On the Republican side, the party's top-tier candidates had previously been content to sit out 1992, viewing facing Huddleston as an uphill struggle with no clear chance of success. However, the Secure Borders Act had caused the president's approval ratings to sink to approachable levels and several, like Governor Tom Ridge of Pennsylvania, attempted to jump in to the primary field at the last minute. The results, like the 1980 Democratic primaries, were disastrous. The Republican Party's rules about winner-take-all primaries and a very divided vote led to the frontrunner (and eventual nominee) becoming Illinois Congressman Phil Crane. Crane selected Mississippi Senator Thad Cochran as his running mate, making the ticket the most conservative the Republicans had nominated in over two decades.

Crane had been a vocal right-wing member of the House Republicans for over a decade and his selection as the Republican nominee led to the party's moderate and nearly-defunct liberal wing to bolt. Along with Jackson supporters, they coalesced around former Connecticut Senator Lowell Weicker, whose independent candidacy would be a vehicle for liberal dissatisfaction with the two major parties. Weicker's campaign initially hoped to name Jackson as the vice presidential nominee to increase cross-party appeal, but Jackson declined, planning on making a bid for the presidency in 1996 as a Democrat. Instead, former Illinois Congressman John B. Anderson, a fierce Crane critic, came out of retirement to be Weicker's running mate.

The election campaign was one of the oddest on record. The death of Soviet leader Viktor Grishin in April and the establishment of a troika (with Mikhail Gorbachev, Grigory Romanov and Viktor Chebrikov sharing power) caused foreign policy to take the center stage, which benefited Huddleston. The Crane campaign was also hurt by Dan Crane, Phil Crane's younger brother and fellow congressmen, having lost re-election in 1988 after it had emerged that he had an affair with a 17 year-old intern and the candidate's refusal to distance himself from his brother. The Huddleston campaign also attempted to mollify left-wing critics by announcing a plan to discuss implementing a negative income tax.

Weicker, surprisingly for an third-party candidate, polled as high as 15% in some polls, but his support slowly bled away as Election Day approached, with most votes going to Huddleston as Crane floundered.



Weicker was unable to win a single state, but his presence caused Crane to win several states that otherwise would have likely went to Huddleston had the former senator not run, preventing a crushing Democratic victory. As it was, Crane failed to win his home state of Illinois and for the first time since 1964, the majority of the South went Democratic. The congressional elections saw a massive Democratic victory, with the party controlling 62 seats in the Senate after the election and a majority of nearly 40 seats in the House.