2000 United States presidential election

Presidential election results map: Red denotes states won by Bush/Cheney; Blue denotes those won by Gore/Lieberman. Numbers indicate electoral votes apportioned to each state.

The United States presidential election of 2000 was the closest and one of the most controversial presidential elections in the history of the United States. It was a contest between Democratic candidate Al Gore, the Vice President of the United States, and Republican candidate George W. Bush, the Governor of Texas. The election was held on November 7, 2000.

On election night, the news media twice declared a winner in the state of Florida prematurely based on exit polls, before deciding the race was too close to call. It became clear that both candidates needed Florida's electoral votes to win the presidency. A month of controversial court challenges and recounts followed, until the Supreme Court of the United States in Bush v. Gore voted 7-2 to declare the ongoing recount procedure unconstitutional because it feared that different standards would be used in different parts of the state. It then halted further recounts by voting 5-4 to ban further recounts using alternate procedures. Bush was certified as the winner in Florida by a margin of 537 votes, thereby defeating Gore, who received more votes than Bush nationwide. It was the third time in American history that a candidate won the vote in the Electoral College without receiving a plurality of the popular vote. (This also happened in the elections of 1876, and 1888. However, in 1824 John Quincy Adams received neither the popular vote nor the Electoral College vote and was appointed President by the House of Representatives.)

Nominations

Democratic Party nomination

• Democratic candidates
  • Bill Bradley of New Jersey, former U.S. Senator
  • Al Gore of Tennessee, Vice President of the U.S.

Under the provisions of the 22nd amendment, incumbent President Clinton was not allowed to run for a third term. Numerous candidates for the Democratic nomination tested the waters, but only two serious candidates entered the contest, Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee and former Senator Bill Bradley of New Jersey.

Gore had a strong base as the incumbent Vice President; Bradley received some endorsements but was not the candidate of a major faction or coalition of blocs. Running an insurgency campaign, Bradley positioned himself as the alternative to Gore, who was a founding member of the centrist Democratic Leadership Council. While fellow basketball star Michael Jordan campaigned for him in the early primary states, Bradley announced his intention to campaign "in a different way" by conducting a positive campaign of "big ideas." He made the spending of the record-breaking budget surplus on a variety of social welfare programs to help the poor and the middle-class one of his central issues, along with campaign finance reform and gun control.

Bradley was easily defeated by Gore in the primaries, largely because of the support given to Gore by the Democratic Party establishment and Bradley's poor showing in the Iowa caucus, where Gore successfully painted the aloof autumn Bradley as being indifferent to the plight of the farmers in rural America. The closest Bradley came to a victory was his 50–46 loss to Gore in the New Hampshire primary.

None of Bradley's delegates were allowed to vote for him so Gore won unanimously. Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman was nominated for Vice President by voice vote. Before Gore chose Lieberman as his running mate, other politicians suggested as potential vice-presidential nominees included Massachusetts Senator John Kerry, Indiana Senator Evan Bayh, North Carolina Senator John Edwards, and Florida Senator Bob Graham.

Republican Party nomination

• Republican candidates
  • Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, former Governor of Tennessee, former Secretary of Education
  • Gary Bauer of Kentucky, J.D., former Undersecretary of Education, founder of the Family Research Council
  • George W. Bush of Texas, current Governor.
  • Elizabeth Dole of North Carolina, former Secretary of Transportation, former Secretary of Labor
  • Steve Forbes of New York, President and CEO of Forbes Inc., no prior public office
  • Orrin Hatch of Utah, U.S. Senator
  • John Kasich of Ohio, U.S. Representative for the 12th Congressional District of Ohio and Chairman of the House Budget Committee
  • Alan Keyes of Maryland, Ph.D., former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Economic and Social Council
  • John McCain of Arizona, U.S. Senator
  • Dan Quayle of Indiana, former U.S. Vice President
  • Robert C. Smith of New Hampshire, U.S. Senator. Smith dropped out of the Republican primary, denounced the Republican party, and sought nomination as a U.S. Taxpayers Party candidate. He then withdrew his candidacy for the UTP nomination and ran as an independent.

Following Bob Dole's loss to Bill Clinton in the 1996 election, George W. Bush became the frontrunner, acquiring unprecedented funding and a broad base of leadership support. Several aspirants withdrew before the Iowa Caucus, unable to secure funding and endorsements sufficient to remain competitive with Bush. These included Alexander, Dole, Kasich, Quayle, and Smith. Steve Forbes, who could self-finance, did compete in the early contests, but did not do as well as he had in 1996. By late February, Bauer, Forbes, and Hatch had all dropped out. That left Bush, McCain, and Keyes as the only candidates still in the race.

Bush, the governor of the second-largest state in the Union, the son of a former president, and the favored candidate of the Christian right, was portrayed in the media as the establishment candidate. McCain, with the support of many moderate Republicans and Independents, portrayed himself as a crusading insurgent who focused on campaign reform.

McCain won a startling 60-40 victory in the New Hampshire primary and seized the attention of the media. In the South Carolina primary, however, Bush soundly defeated McCain. Some credited Bush's win to the fact that it was the first major primary in which only registered Republicans could vote, which negated McCain's strong advantage among independents. Some McCain supporters blamed it on a campaign of dirty tricks such as push polling, including the false suggestion that McCain fathered an African-American child out of wedlock, perpetrated against McCain by his political enemies. Whatever the real reason, McCain's loss in South Carolina stopped his momentum cold. Although McCain won a few additional primaries, Bush took the majority and handily won the nomination at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia.

The tally was as follows:

• George W. Bush 2038
• Alan Keyes 2
• John McCain 1

McCain finally endorsed Bush, and gave a strong speech at the convention.

Governor Bush asked former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to head up a commission to help select a running mate for him. Bush ultimately asked Cheney himself to be his running mate. Cheney was nominated by voice vote. He changed his voting registration from Texas back to Wyoming in order that he and Governor Bush not both be considered residents of Texas; otherwise, by law, each Texas elector could not vote for both of them.

Reform Party nomination

• Reform candidates
  • John B. Anderson of Florida, former U.S. Representative for the 16th Congressional District of Illinois, former Independent Presidential candidate
  • Patrick J. Buchanan of Virginia, former speechwriter and Senior Advisor to President Richard Nixon
  • Charles E. Collins of Georgia, former school board chairman from a rural Florida county
  • John Hagelin, of Iowa, Ph.D., past and then-current Natural Law Party candidate
  • Donald Trump of New York, billionaire real estate developer

The nomination went to Pat Buchanan and runningmate Ezola Foster of California, over the objections of party-founder H. Ross Perot and despite a rump convention nomination of John Hagelin by the Perot faction (see Other nominations below). In the end, the Federal Election Commission sided with Buchanan, and that ticket appeared on 49 of 51 possible ballots.

Other nominations

There were four other candidacies on the majority of the 51 ballots (50 states plus the District of Columbia):

• Harry Browne of Tennessee and Art Olivier of California (Libertarian, 50 ballots)
• Ralph Nader of Connecticut and Winona LaDuke of Minnesota (Green, 44 ballots)
• Howard Phillips of Virginia and Curt Frazier of Missouri (Constitution, 41 ballots)
• John Hagelin of Iowa and Nat Goldhaber of California (Natural Law, 38 ballots)

Also, Joe Schriner of Ohio ran as an Independent write-in candidate, having started his run in Republican primaries.

The General Election Campaign

In the campaign, Bush criticized the Clinton administration policy in Somalia, where 18 Americans died in 1993 trying to sort out warring factions, and in the Balkans, where United States peacekeeping troops perform a variety of functions. "I don't think our troops ought to be used for what's called nation-building". Bush said in the second presidential debate. Bush's use of non-interventionism as a major theme in his first campaign would prove ironic in coming years.

Ralph Nader was the most successful of third-party candidates, drawing 2.74% of the popular vote. His campaign was marked by a traveling tour of "super-rallies"; large rallies held in sports arenas like Madison Square Garden, with retired talk show host Phil Donahue as master of ceremonies. After initially ignoring Nader, the Gore campaign made a big publicity pitch to (potential) Nader supporters in the final weeks of the campaign, downplaying Gore's differences with Nader on the issues and claiming that Gore's ideas were more similar to Nader's than Bush's were, noting that Gore had a better chance of winning than Nader. On the other side, the Republican Leadership Council ran pro-Nader ads in a few states in an effort to split the "left" vote. In the aftermath of the campaign, many Gore supporters blamed Nader for drawing enough would-be Gore votes to push Bush over Gore, labeling Nader a "spoiler" candidate.

The sharpest differences among partisan groups came on the topic of morality. Already by 1992, Republicans were much more concerned than Democrats or independents about what many perceived as the moral decay of society, in the form of permissive attitudes toward sex, abortion, gays and lesbians, and secularism. The difference grew larger by 2000, especially if one adds together the moral decay category and the category having to do with corruption and scandals in Washington. Morality was mentioned most frequently by Republicans as the "single most important problem" facing the nation. Therefore during his campaign Bush frequently referred to restoring moral integrity not only to the White House but to the nation as a whole. Gore on the other hand studiously avoided the Clinton scandals, as did Lieberman, even though Lieberman had been the first Democratic senator to denounce Clinton's misbehavior. Gore avoided appearing with Clinton, who was shunted to low visibility appearances in minority areas.

The election

The outcome of the November 7 election was not known for more than a month after the balloting, because of the extended process of counting and then recounting of Florida presidential ballots. State results tallied on election night gave 246 electoral votes to Bush and 255 to Gore, with New Mexico (5), Oregon (7), and Florida (25) too close to call that evening. Mathematically, Florida's 25 electoral votes became the key to an election win, and although both New Mexico and Oregon were declared in favor of Gore over the next few days, Florida's statewide vote took center stage even as voting continued in western states.

Florida

Main article: United States presidential election, 2000 Florida results

In the hours after the polls closed, Florida's vote tally added up in such a way that the spread between Bush and Gore's vote totals were less than one tenth of one percent. The margin, narrowly in favor of Bush, was narrow enough to trigger a mandatory recount. In addition, Gore asked for hand recounts in three counties, as provided for under Florida state law. This set into motion a series of recounts (portions by machine, and portions by hand), questions about portions of the Florida vote, and finally lawsuits. These ultimately ended in a December 12 5-4 United States Supreme Court decision which ended the Florida recounts and allowed Florida to certify its vote, which was 8-7 among Florida electoral representatives and Bush up to viable January 20 tallies, and award its 25 electoral votes to George W. Bush. The nine members of the Supreme Court voted along party lines in the split decision, suggesting that partisan politics had infiltrated the nation's highest court.

Post recount

After Florida was decided, Texas Governor George W. Bush became President-elect and began forming his transition committee. In a speech on December 13, Bush said he was reaching across party lines to bridge a divided America, stating that "the President of the United States is the President of every single American, of every race, and every background."

On January 6, 2001, a joint-session of Congress met to certify the electoral vote. Twenty members of the House of Representatives, most of them Democratic members of the Congressional Black Caucus, rose one-by-one to file objections to the electoral votes of Florida. However, according to an 1877 law, any such objection had to be sponsored by both a representative and a senator, and no senator would co-sponsor these objections. Therefore, Gore, who was presiding in his capacity as President of the Senate, ruled each of these objections out of order.

Bush took the oath of office on January 20, 2001.

Vote tallies

National results

Vice President Al Gore came in second in the electoral vote, but received 543,816 more popular votes than Bush. Such a close national contest contributed to the controversy of the election; the vote tally in Florida remains a point of dispute (see United States presidential election, 2000 Florida results). If there had been around 500, or at least 656 House seats, then Al Gore would have won the electoral vote anyways .

Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state of Tennessee, which both he and his father had represented in the Senate. Had he won Tennessee, he could have won the election without Florida. Gore was the first major party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972.

Electoral results

Presidential candidate	Party	Home state	Popular vote		Electoral vote	Running mate
			Count	Percentage		Vice-presidential candidate	Home state	Electoral vote
George W. Bush	Republican	Texas	50,460,110	47.9%	271	Dick Cheney	Wyoming	271
Al Gore	Democratic	Tennessee	51,003,926	48.4%	266	Joe Lieberman	Connecticut	266
(abstention) (a)	—	—	—	—	1	(abstention) (a)	—	1
Ralph Nader	Green	Connecticut	2,883,105	2.7%	0	Winona LaDuke	Minnesota	0
Pat Buchanan	Reform	Virginia	449,225	0.4%	0	Ezola B. Foster	California	0
Harry Browne	Libertarian	Tennessee	384,516	0.4%	0	Art Olivier	California	0
Howard Phillips	Constitution	Virginia	98,022	0.1%	0	Curtis Frazier	Missouri	0
John Hagelin	Natural Law/Reform	Iowa	83,702	0.1%	0	Nat Goldhaber	California	0
Other(b)			54,652	0.1%	—	Other(b)		—
Total			105,417,258	100%	538			538
Needed to win					270			270

Source (Popular Vote): Leip, David. "2000 Presidential Election Results". Dave Leip's Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections. Retrieved August 7, 2005. {{cite web}}: Check date values in: |access-date= (help)

Source (Electoral Vote): 2000 Electoral Vote Totals. Official website of the National Archives. (August 7, 2005).

^(a) One faithless elector from the District of Columbia, Barbara Lett-Simmons, abstained from voting in protest of the District's lack of a voting representative in United States Congress. (D.C. has a non-voting delegate to Congress.) She had been expected to vote for Gore/Lieberman.
^(b) Candidates receiving less than 0.05% of the total popular vote.

Detailed results by state are also available.

State results

Detailed results by state are available

Close states are listed below:

1. Florida, <0.01%
2. New Mexico, 0.06%
3. Wisconsin, 0.22%
4. Iowa, 0.31%
5. Oregon, 0.44%
6. New Hampshire, 1.27%
7. Minnesota, 2.40%
8. Missouri, 3.34%
9. Ohio, 3.51%
10. Nevada, 3.55%
11. Tennessee, 3.86%
12. Pennsylvania, 4.17%

Aftermath

Electronic voting

Since the Presidential Election was so close and hotly contested in Florida, the United States Government and state governments pushed for election reform to be prepared by the 2004 United States Presidential Election. Many of Florida's year 2000 election night problems stemmed from voting machine issues like rejected ballots, "hanging chad", and the possibly confusing "butterfly ballot". An opportunistic solution to these problems was assumed to be the installation of modern electronic voting machines.

Electronic voting was initially touted by many as a panacea for the ills faced during the 2000 election. The United States Presidential Election of 2000 spurred the debate about election and voting reform, but it did not end it. See Electronic voting: problems.

• National Committee on Federal Election Reform
• The Constitution Project - Election Reform Initiative

Exit polling and declaration of vote winners

The Voter News Service's reputation was badly tarnished by its treatment of Florida's presidential vote in 2000. Calling the state as a win for Gore 12 minutes before polls closed in the far western part of the state broke its own guidelines. More seriously, inconsistent polling results caused the VNS to change its call twice, first from Gore to Bush, and then to "too close to call". An attempt by VNS to use computer tallying during the 2002 congressional election was a failure, and the VNS disbanded.

More consequences

In the aftermath of the election, the Help America Vote Act (HAVA) was passed to help states upgrade their election technology in the hopes of preventing similar problems in future elections. Ironically, the electronic voting systems which many states purchased in order to comply with HAVA actually caused problems in the following presidential election of 2004.

Democrats blamed third party candidate Ralph Nader for taking the election away from Gore. Nader received some 97,000 votes in Florida. According to the Washington Post, exit polls there showed that "47 percent of Nader voters would have gone for Gore if it had been a two-man race, and only 21 percent for Bush," which would have given Gore a margin of some 24,000 votes over Bush. Some Democrats claim that had Nader not run, Gore would have won both New Hampshire and Florida and won the election with 296 electoral votes. (He only needed one of the two to win.) Nader's reputation was still hurt by this perception, and may have hindered his future goals as an activist. Defenders of Nader, including Dan Perkins, argued that the margin in Florida was small enough that Democrats could blame any number of third-party candidates for the defeat, including a "Workers World Party," which received 1,500 votes.

See also

• United States presidential election, 2000 Florida results
• Canada and the 2000 United States presidential election
• United States Senate election, 2000
• George W. Bush presidential campaign, 2000
• Al Gore presidential campaign, 2000
• List of narrow elections
• History of the United States (1988–present)
• United States presidential election, 1876

References

¹36 Days. New York: Times Books, 2000

Books

• Steed, Robert P. (ed.), ed. (2002). The 2000 Presidential Election in the South: Partisanship and Southern Party Systems in the 21st Century. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• de La Garza, Rodolfo O. (ed.), ed. (2004). Muted Voices: Latinos and the 2000 Elections. ISBN 0-7425-3590-8. {{cite book}}: |editor= has generic name (help)
• Abramson, Paul R. (2002). Change and Continuity in the 2000 Elections. ISBN 1-56802-740-0. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Bugliosi, Vincent (2001). The Betrayal of America: How the Supreme Court Undermined the Constitution and Chose Our President. Thunder's Mouth Press. ISBN 1-56025-355-X.
• Corrado, Anthony (2001). Election of 2000: Reports and Interpretations. Chatham House Publishers. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Denton, Robert E., Jr. (2002). The 2000 Presidential Campaign: A Communication Perspective. Praeger.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
• Dershowitz, Alan M. (2001). Supreme Injustice: How the High Court Hijacked Election 2000. ISBN 0-19-514827-4.
• Dover, E. D. (2002). Missed Opportunity: Gore, Incumbency, and Television in Election 2000. ISBN 0-275-97638-6.
• Gillman, H. (2001). The Votes That Counted: How the Court Decided the 2000 Presidential Election. ISBN 0-226-29408-0.
• Jacobson, Arthur J. (2002). The Longest Night: Polemics and Perspectives on Election 2000. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Palast, Greg (2002). The Best Democracy Money Can Buy. Pluto Press. ISBN 0-7453-1846-0.
• Posner, Richard A. (2001). Breaking the Deadlock: The 2000 Election, the Constitution, and the Courts. ISBN 0-691-09073-4.
• Rakove, Jack N. (2002). The Unfinished Election of 2000. ISBN 0-465-06837-5.
• Sabato, Larry J. (2001). Overtime! The Election 2000 Thriller. ISBN 0-321-10028-X.
• Sammon, Bill (2001). At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election. Regnery Publishing, Inc. ISBN 0-89526-227-4.
• Dougherty, John E. (2001). Election 2000: How the Military Vote Was Suppressed. ISBN 978-1589390652.

Journal articles

• Miller, Arthur H. (2003). "The Role of Issues in the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election". Presidential Studies Quarterly. 33 (1): 101+. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)
• Wattenberg, Martin P. (1999). "The Democrats' Decline in the House during the Clinton Presidency: An Analysis of Partisan Swings". Presidential Studies Quarterly. 29.
• Wattier, Mark J. (2004). "The Clinton Factor: The Effects of Clinton's Personal Image in 2000 Presidential Primaries and in the General Election". White House Studies. 4.

Papers

• Keating, Dan (The Washington Post). "Democracy Counts, The Florida ballot recount project", paper prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association, Boston, 2002.

External links

• 2000 popular vote by counties
• Wrong way elections table at the Center for Range Voting
• Better World Links on the United States Presidential Election 2000
• CBS News Coverage of Election Night 2000: Investigation, Analysis, Recommendations (231 kB PDF).
• Humorous Portrayal of Bush-Gore During Deadlock
• Popular vote data from the FEC
• Presidential Primaries, Caucuses, and Conventions
• Report from United States Commission on Civil Rights
• Selected primary candidates for the election
• Supreme Court Decisions of December 9th 2000
• Timeline of the 2000 Presidential Election
• Top Democratic Party contributors
• Top Republican Party contributors
• UK Guardian newspaper special report on United States 2000 election
• Battlefield Florida - A Chat with Lance deHaven-Smith author of a 2005 book on the problems in Florida
• [1] Cartogram by state.
• [2] Map by counties.
• [3] Cartogram by counties.
• [4] Map by counties, with adjustements by 70% or more leaning towards one party or another.
• [5] Cartogram by counties, with adjustments by 70% or more leaning towards one party or another.
• [6] Maps of the 2000 election