The Butterfly Effect
At 7:49PM on Election Night, the race was effectively called.
Inside 30 Rockefeller Plaza, Tom Brokaw in a tone echoing the Voice of God, made the call: Vice President Al Gore had won the crucial swing state of Florida and its 25 electoral votes. “It turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother’s keeper,” Brokaw joked. To his right, Washington Bureau Chief Tim Russert informed the viewers at home that his opponent, George W. Bush, would have to sweep the remaining swing states—of which there were then 11 more—to have a chance. Russert’s prediction that the race would center on “Florida, Florida, Florida” was now prophecy. In Nashville, where Gore planned his celebration, advisors were beginning to call him “Mr. President-Elect.”
At 10:17, Brokaw broke back in, “what the networks giveth, the networks taketh away. NBC News is now taking Florida out of Vice President Gore’s column and putting it back into the too close to call column.” Exactly four hours later at 2:17AM, Doris Kearns Goodwin was helping fill the airtime, remarking that, “in a time of peace and prosperity like this, it’s possible that a country…” when Brokaw interrupted, “STOP! Doris, Doris, Doris!” “Uh Oh, something’s happened!” said Kearns-Goodwin. Brokaw then broke the news: “George W. Bush is the President-Elect of the United States.” Gore called Bush to concede.
Then the returns from Palm Beach County came in. Bush’s lead was down to a few thousand votes in Florida. Then it was down to a few hundred. Gore called Bush back, this time to take back his concession. Bush told Gore, “My little brother tells me that we’re definitely going to carry Florida,” referencing Jeb Bush, then the Governor of Florida. Gore shot back, “Well, I don’t care what your little brother says. I’m formally telling you I am no longer conceding, thank you, good night.”
The race—and the decisive state of Florida—wouldn’t be decided for another 36 days.
In a race against time, more than 50 suits were filed, mostly focused on the balloting errors across the state involving little punched holes, some of which weren’t punched all the way, some of which were slightly perforated, leading to a maddening, complicated mess which left Gore down by 537 votes. Still, as these “hanging chads” were examined and the recount went on, a decision still needed to be made before the Electoral College met on December 18. Ultimately, Bush v. Gore made it to the Supreme Court, where on December 12, nine Justices—two of whom were appointed by Bush’s father—decided in a 5 to 4 decision that no new recount could take place, and that Bush was the winner. As Townes Van Zandt once wrote, “The desert’s quiet and Cleveland’s cold—and so the story ends we’re told.”
But the 2000 Election didn’t come down to the Supreme Court. It came down to a woman named Theresa LePore.
LePore was then the Supervisor of Elections for Palm Beach County, Florida and that year, she had to decide a ballot with a unique challenge: ten different presidential candidates had met the requirements to be on the ballot in Palm Beach in 2000. In a real sense, it was a result of the backlash to the two-party system itself. Since 1980, the wealth inequality in the United States—that is, how much money the very rich have versus the rest of Americans—had skyrocketed as wages had stagnated. The Great American Pie had continued to grow, just as it had since the end of WWII, but the average American’s slice had become smaller and smaller. After decades marred by Vietnam, Watergate, Stagflation, Iran-Contra, and Monica Lewinsky, the American electorate wanted new options.
The previous election in 1996 witnessed the lowest voter turnout—49%—in modern American history. The 2000 election barely beat it, as 50.5% percent of voters turned out. And if voters were tired of the same old Washington politics, the 2000 election served up two options handpicked by the Old Guard: Al Gore, the son of a U.S. Senator, and George W. Bush, the son of a President. On the campaign trail in 2000, Vice President Gore largely promised to continue the progress made by his boss, President Bill Clinton, while George W. Bush promised a return to the policies of his father and Ronald Reagan.
They didn’t so much offer a new make as an upgraded model.
To meet the demand, a record number of independent candidates ran across the nation. In 1992, independent Ross Perot had won nearly 20 million votes and roughly 19% of the vote—in 1996, Perot won a little over 8 million votes and about 8.4% of the vote. In 2000, the options were led by Ralph Nader, the Green Party candidate, and Pat Buchanan, the Reform Party candidate. Nader had long been a reformer, pushing for national seatbelt laws and investigating the Federal Trade Commission. Buchanan, on the other hand, had been a hard-charging Republican who had been a speechwriter for President Nixon and served as President Reagan’s Communications Director.
This all came to the fore in Palm Beach—a blue dot in then purple Florida—where an Election Day voter would have pulled the curtain behind them and opened their ballot and found 10 different options for President of the United States. To fit all the candidates on one page, the ballot listed five options on each side of two columns, with ten bubbles down the middle of the page. Because of this two-sided display, it was called a “butterfly ballot.” The first choice on the left side, George W. Bush, corresponded to the first bubble in the middle. The first choice on the right side, Pat Buchanan, corresponded to the second bubble in the middle. The second choice on the left side, Al Gore, corresponded to the third bubble. And so on, in disjointed order.
That day, 2,000 voters filled in the second bubble—for Buchanan—thinking they had just voted for Gore. Heavily Democratic and heavily Jewish, Palm Beach did not fit the typical voter for Buchanan, whose scorched earth 1992 Republican Convention ‘culture war’ speech was once said to have “sounded better in its original German.” But the die had been cast—without the ability to redo the election, and the Supreme Court’s unwillingness to continue the recount, the election was over. With proper ballot design, Gore would have won by nearly 1500 votes instead of losing by 537.
Of course—Gore could have won in other ways too. He lost New Hampshire, and its 4 decisive electoral votes, by 7,000—while Nader received over 22,000 votes. In Gore’s home state of Tennessee, he lost by about 25,000 votes while Nader and Buchanan combined for just about that much. In a world of What If’s, Gore was left to think about What Happened.
George W. Bush would become the 43rd President of the United States. Within nine months of taking office, he would face the greatest domestic crisis since Pearl Harbor, when the United States found itself under attack on September 11, 2001. While in the days and weeks after, Bush would project an image of strength that resonated throughout the nation in the short term, he would soon find himself making decisions that would ultimately cost the United States trillions of dollars and thousands of American lives, as America became entangled in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the latter of which would go on for two more decades.
His inability to reconcile foreign crises with domestic crisis would also exacerbate the Great Recession that began at the end of his second term. Perhaps more so than the wars in the Middle East—which disproportionately sent lower and middle-class kids around to world to fight and die in vain—the Great Recession would create a festering resentment within millions of Americans who decided, quite understandably, that Washington didn’t work, and it certainly didn’t work for them.
In the coming years and decades, that resentment would remain and only grow.
Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/30/upshot/florida-2000-gore-ballot.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2020/11/04/supreme-court-election-bush-trump/
https://www.today.com/video/how-election-night-2000-unfolded-93164613703
https://www.britannica.com/event/Bush-v-Gore
https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/publications/butterfly-did-it-aberrant-vote-buchanan-palm-beach-county-florida