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The
closest presidential contest in a generation surpassed all expectations
Tuesday night as Texas Governor George W. Bush appeared to narrowly
defeat Vice President Al Gore only to be denied the victory as Gore
came within a few hundred votes of tying him in Florida.
Network commentators backtracked on their projections, the New York
Times stopped its presses and Vice President Gore retracted his
concession call to Bush as the race was declared too close to give
to either candidate. By state law, Florida returns will be recounted.
The nation will wait to learn who its next president will be.
In a night filled with extraordinary developments, Bush was projected
an early winner with 271 electoral votes to Gore’s 249. But
Florida’s 25 electoral votes were deducted from Bush’s
total an hour after his victory had been announced by the news media.
Florida had initially been called for the Democrats, but was later
given to Bush, who seemed to hold off a late surge by Gore. In the
early morning hours, Florida was again too close to call, divided
by a scant 900 vote margin with several thousand uncounted absentee
ballots, leaving the entire race for presidency in question.
The Vice President, who initially conceded defeat in a personal
phone call to the governor at 2:30 a.m. eastern time, retracted
his concession after Florida attorney general Bob Butterworth told
him Bush’s margin of victory could be as small as 600 votes.
Gore’s campaign manager Bill Daley spoke to thousands of cheering
supporters in Nashville.
"Vice President Al Gore and Senator Joe Leiberman are fully
prepared to concede and support Governor Bush if and when he is
elected president," Daley said before a re-energized crowd.
"This race is simply too close to call. Until the results become
official, our campaign continues."
Under Florida state law, a margin of less than one half of one percent
triggers an automatic recount. Several thousand Florida overseas
absentee ballots will also have several days to be counted.
Bush campaign consultant Don Evans gave a short response to Daley’s
remarks in front of a subdued crowd in Austin, Texas.
"The latest vote count in the State of Florida shows Governor
Bush winning that state by more than 1,200 votes. They’re still
counting, they’re still counting, and I’m confident when
it is all said and done we will prevail," Evans said.
The race was so close that an official winner won’t truly be
known until more than 15 million absentee ballots are totaled over
the next two days. Governor Bush will at least have to wait until
later Wednesday, if not longer, to hear if he would in fact be the
first son of a president to hold the office since John Quincy Adams
was elected in 1824. That race was so close it had to be decided
by the House of Representatives.
President George W. Bush would share Washington D.C. ruling rights
with a Republican controlled House of Representatives. Balance of
power in the Senate was still in the air in the early morning. If
Bush wins, it would be the first time since 1952 that Republicans
have controlled the White House and the House of Representatives.
"What’s clear if you sort of forget about all this stuff
at the end is that Bush ran a great campaign and Gore ran a weak
one," said John Ellwood, professor of public policy at UC Berkeley.
"It shouldn’t have been this close."
As the initial projections named Bush the next president around
2:00 eastern time, Republicans across the nation were celebrating
Wednesday morning. At the Contra Costa campaign headquarters of
state Senate candidate Dick Rainey, about 200 Bush supporters broke
into exuberant cheers when the Florida victory was announced.
The nearly concluded contest has confounded a legion of political
scientists, media pundits and professional pollsters for the past
year, and things only got more confusing early Wednesday.
"It’s certainly the most unpredictable election I’ve
ever seen," said Democratic pollster Paul Maslin.
"All our models predicted the Democrats would win based on
the economy," said UC Berkeley political science professor
Bruce Cain, who believes Gore failed to capitalize on one of the
best economies since World War II. "People couldn’t relate
to him. He ran away from his record and moved the party away from
the center."
In California, a state where President Bill Clinton remains enormously
popular, Gore's double-digit lead had fallen to 5 points prior to
the election, stoking Democrats’ fears about defecting populist
liberals and other undecided voters to Green Party candidate Ralph
Nader. But, preliminary totals indicated Gore won the state’s
54 electoral votes by six percentage points.
Nader played the spoiler in Florida, where he won almost a hundred
thousand votes -- and Gore may have lost by a few hundred. Across
the nation, Nader averaged three percent of the vote, drawing 2.4
million voters. That was 12 times the difference of Bush’s
lead over Gore.
However, his fierce campaigning did not garner the five percentage
points that would have qualified his party for federal matching
funds in the next presidential election.
In the final hours, the two candidates concentrated on appeals to
undecided voters in the key swing states. Gore went to Iowa, Missouri,
Michigan and Florida before heading home to Carthage, Tennessee.
Bush made stops in Arkansas and Tennessee, home turf of the President
Clinton and Al Gore, prior to voting in Austin, Texas.
They also intensified their attacks on each other’s agendas.
Gore characterized Bush's tax cut as tantamount to "class warfare
on behalf of billionaires." Bush said Gore would bloat the
government with costly social programs and chided Gore for scaring
senior citizens about Bush’s proposals to privatize parts of
social security.
Battling for electoral votes state by state, candidates traded leads
throughout the night as Gore won in some traditionally Republican
states while Bush prevailed in Democratic strongholds like Tennessee
and Missouri.
The vice president came out early, winning in key battleground states
according to early exit polls. He carried Michigan, Pennsylvania
and New York. In key battleground states, it was also a toss-up.
Gore won in Minnesota, while Bush took Missouri. It became apparent
close states scattered across the nation would determine the election.
"I think it looks like Bush just had a lead that was greater
than Gore had time to catch up to," said pollster David Binder.
"His message ‘Gore trusts the government, I trust you’
was a very effective appeal to moderates."
Bush seemed to withstand problems in the final days of the campaign.
Even as he attacked the character of the previous administration
and President Clinton, a Maine TV news reporter broke the story
that Bush had been arrested there for drinking and driving in 1976.
Bush gave up drinking altogether 10 years later, but the event again
brought up the issue about his reluctance to provide details of
admitted "youthful indiscretions" and his refusal to answer
questions about whether or not he engaged in illegal drug use.
In a campaign that seemed to defy tradition, Gore, who was openly
criticized by reporters and pundits for exaggerating on certain
points, was having trouble taking credit for the administration’s
economic success.
"I think there was a lot of stupidity on the part of the Gore
camp. They allowed Gore to continue exaggerating when it was very
obvious he was going to get jumped on for that," said Cain,
who thought Gore should have placed more stress on prosperity as
a campaign theme.
But the Vice President, who repeatedly told voters they should regard
him as his own man, seemed concerned that any association with Clinton
would remind voters of the president’s marital infidelities
and other White House scandals.
"Gore was trying to separate himself from the achievements
of the last eight years," Cain said. "I think he could
have separated from Clinton and still been his own man."
Many Gore loyalists were privately critical that he failed to utilize
Clinton, who is considered one of the great political stumpers.
Clinton made a campaign push only in California during the campaign's
last week. Gov. Gray Davis said he asked Clinton to come to California
specifically to increase turnout of Gore voters.
Pollster Merv Field estimated over 70 percent of California’s
registered voters went to the polls Tuesday.
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