One minor correction to your statement above.
The reality was that an independent held a clear lead in a presidential poll, which is nothing at all like holding a lead in a presidential election.
Polls tell us what the polled individual thinks what they may do, while elections count what actually gets done.
From where I sit, if 39% strongly favored Perot, why did half of them not return when he got back into the race? No one else was added to the list, IIRC. It was the same players both before and after he dropped out then in.
Clearly his support was extremely soft, which doesn't get factored in with poll results.
You need to reread my sentence you copied forward. I said Perot had a clear lead in a presidential race, and he did. Polls are the most relied upon way we have of measuring who has a lead until the actual vote.
And following your logic, no statements can even be made about who leads until the voting is over.
Clearly his support was extremely soft, which doesn't get factored in with poll results.
I wouldn't say his support was soft. It was not, but his bizarre and nonsensical actions and explanations were so inexplicable that it was no surprise that he lost half his support. - If you can't understand how Perot's actions of dropping out and all that surrounded it would cause him to lose support, then it is you who has a problem or some serious lack of understanding.
Were you alive then and old enough to follow that campaign?
There is another fact from the NYT article you might contemplate. You clearly have little understanding of how extraordinary the Perot phenomenon in 1992 was, and you aren't the only one.