OA3: The 2000 Election (#NeverForget), Part 2

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:01:17 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 3 and we're going to continue right where we left off with Bush v. Gore. This is part 2. Take it away Andrew.

0:01:29 Andrew: So let's let's talk about what Al Gore did. And I should say, as you probably know, Al Gore instead picked Joe Lieberman, who was at the time regarded as, one of rightly so, as one of the most conservative Democrats in the Senate. He actually has a mixed record based on, you know, what what you want to look at. But but but certainly turned out to be a hawk in the roll-up to the Iraq War, turned out the sort of a moralizer on religious and First Amendment issues, and was the most vocal Democrat criticizing President Bill Clinton for the Monica Lewinsky affair. So basically doubling down on the first, uh, and I would add, I think somewhat fairly, uh, a terrible campaigner, uh, utterly devoid of charisma. I mean, for for all of the like Algors Or robot jokes that persist, uh, I mean Joe Lieberman is worse. I mean, he just, in my view, you you cannot, I cannot envision, uh, a worse candidate for the national stage than Joe Lieberman and somebody who makes it worse in all of the areas where you, I think, correctly identified as problem areas.

0:02:22 Thomas: Yeah.

0:02:43 Andrew: So, yeah, right.

0:02:42 Thomas: Well, I am one hell of a campaign manager where as we're finding out now, I think you're helping me along quite a bit, but let's, so far I'm winning this campaign. I'm I'm just killing this campaign, okay? How much do I get paid for this campaign? Do I get a percent? How does it, how managers. Okay.

0:02:50 Andrew: Yeah. So now let me deflate that a little bit because, yeah. You are, in this case you are Donna Brazil, so you have managed to parlay this into a career of punditry on CNN, and now you're the head of the DNC. So, uh, so good job, yep.

0:03:10 Thomas: Oh, wow. She was behind the, what's her name? Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Wow.

0:03:14 Andrew: Yep. Yes. Yeah, so congratulations and and I am sure she got a six-figure salary

0:03:18 Thomas: And that's, and that's with losing. So if I win, man, sky's the limit. Yeah. Okay. Awesome.

0:03:19 Andrew: Right yeah exactly the the The sky is George Stephanopoulos in Good Morning America. So now I'm going to deflate this a little bit because it's really, really easy to win with Gore in 2000. And the reason is because if you take away every other thing, it's important to remember, you need 270 electoral votes to win, right? Right? Because there are 538 total, you have 269, it's a split, and there are constitutional provisions that describe what happens there that we are not going into. I want credit for not going down that rabbit trail.

0:03:56 Thomas: Okay, good.

0:03:57 Andrew: But undisputed, Gore won 267. Now, if You go to Wikipedia, you'll see it says 266 because there was a faithless elector, and I could go into all that. That's another rabbit trail, uh, but he won 267 from the allocation from the states. He won the popular vote by half a million votes, 51 million to 50 and a half, sorry.

0:04:19 Thomas: Oh. I remember it.

0:04:19 Andrew: So in this scenario, all he needs to do of the states that he won is get three more electoral votes. So where could he get those three electoral votes? Obviously, we're going to talk, talk about Florida, because that was the uh situs of the lawsuit, that's what gave rise to Bush v. Gore. Florida has 25 electoral votes, though, so, you know, 22 of them are surplus, right? You don't need to win a state as big as Florida to win. Where could you have won? Well, we already talked about, he could have won in New Hampshire, right? He lost New Hampshire by 7,000 votes out of 560,000 that were cast.

0:04:54 Thomas: Boy, Boy, if I were campaign manager, I might have been able to drum that up just, you know, using the podcast. Rock the podcast vote. We could swing that.

0:04:59 Andrew: Yeah, right. Or alternatively, I could point out that Ralph Nader got 22,000 votes in New Hampshire. So again, you can use some models. You can talk about, you know, what percentage of Nader voters are Gore voters, what percent are staying at home. But it's not hard with conservative assumptions to say, boy, those 22,000 votes, you take half of them, half of of them would have swung New Hampshire and given us President Gore. So that's New Hampshire. Where else could Gore have won? He could have won West Virginia. West Virginia has five electoral votes and now Gore lost there by 40,000 votes out of 650,000 voters that were cast. It's a bigger margin. Why am I saying West Virginia?

0:05:48 Andrew: People listening to this now are thinking, you know, West Virginia, I think Barack Obama got like 38% of the vote in West Virginia, what the hell have you been talking about. In 2000, West Virginia was one of the most reliable core Democratic states that there were. West Virginia was one of only 10 states to vote for Michael Dukakis in 1988. West Virginia as close a state as any East Coast state was for Walter Mondale, who got shut out everywhere except Minnesota in 1984. West Virginia then obviously voted for Clinton twice. So it is a reliably Democratic state at this point in time. And the fact that Bush won there was due to the fact that Gore had no campaign infrastructure in West Virginia.

0:06:33 Andrew: Karl Rove and the Bush campaign very perceptively realized that changing demographics on the ground might make that a more amenable state.

0:06:43 Thomas: Was this the closest friggin election in history? Was there ever a closer one? This is insane how close this one.

0:06:50 Andrew: Well, I mean, a good answer to that is 1876, Samuel Tilden and Rutherford B. Hayes, which would require a lot to go through. Maybe we'll do that on another podcast. It's really, really... I mean...

0:07:01 Thomas: Now, how many votes did Nader get in 1876, though?

0:07:05 Andrew: Yeah, Ralph Nader was only 34 then. So, you know, right.

0:07:10 Thomas: So not quite old enough to run for president? Is that? Yeah, I gotcha.

0:07:12 Andrew: Yeah, it was a year shy. So but that's West Virginia. Could you gin up 40,000 votes out of 650,000 in West Virginia? How about in Arkansas? Arkansas at the time was six electoral votes. It is, as you might imagine, Bill Clinton's home state. And Gore lost by 50,000 votes out of almost a million. Nader got 13,000 in Arkansas, so not enough to swing it, but certainly enough to chip into that margin. And I would point out that Arkansas went for Clinton by 17 points in 1996 and by 18 points in 1992.

0:07:14 Thomas: Okay, right. Right.

0:07:48 Thomas: So mistake one could have helped that.

0:07:48 Andrew: So yeah, Do you think even if you're not convinced that Bill Clinton is going to help you, maybe sending him to his home state, where he was still immensely popular in 2000, would have helped. That's six electoral votes. And again, all these, as long as it's more than three, you don't need Florida. None of this would have mattered. And finally, there's Al Gore's home state, Tennessee, which is 11 electoral votes, and he lost by 80,000 votes out of over 2 million votes that were cast. Nader got 20,000 voters in Tennessee.

So I point all those out, number one, to illustrate some of the ground failings of the Gore campaign, but number two, when people are talking about, oh, in this election, oh well, I live in Wisconsin, or I live in Georgia or I live in or Iowa, and this state has been blue or has been red for the past three elections, and so it doesn't really matter if I vote third party. Those assumptions, even if we have good, reliable polling, and we certainly have more polling now than we did in 2000, it's not safe. They're not safe assumptions to make. But you have no idea, you I mean, I think I made this comment to Noah, who, you know, recently moved from Georgia to Pennsylvania and said, you Know, my vote's going to matter now. And I said, Look, like, your vote could have mattered

0:09:20 Andrew: In Georgia, you may still matter in Georgia. And it may matter because, yeah, I agree.

0:09:05 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah, vote in both states. Man,

0:09:28 Andrew: Because you just, it's very, very difficult to predict. Certainly, I would say impossible to predict in August how states are going to align. And, you know, I'm listing these things now where, you West Virginia, Arkansas and Tennessee are not close to being what we think of as toss up states now. But, you know, but they were, you know, 16 years ago.

0:09:49 Thomas: This is so interesting. And my biggest fear is if the polls start to go, look, oh, it's inevitable Hillary's going to win, and then people just don't show up. I mean, that's my biggest fear, that the voters are just like, ah, we got this.

0:10:00 Andrew: Yeah, well, and that's why I mentioned right now, like the real clear politics average is Clinton plus six and a half. If that drops to Clinton plus three, then it is a toss-up election. You might say it's 55-45 Clinton, but there is a strong electoral path for Trump if it is Clinton plus 3 nationally. Uh, and um, we have seen in in 2012, uh, in debate number one, uh, the polls moved four percent on the basis of that first debate, moved four percent towards Mitt Romney on the basis of the first debate, uh, yeah, which, you know, was sort of, you know, widely considered to be a disastrous, uh, a disastrous performance by

0:10:14 Thomas: Yeah? Really? Boy, that

0:10:48 Andrew: Obama and a great performance

0:10:48 Thomas: Is funny. Funny. I have no memory of that. I guess I wasn't really paying attention that much back then as I just, I don't know, maybe I didn't care as much about politics, but why was it such a disaster in three words in no time?

0:10:49 Andrew: Yeah Yeah.

0:11:00 Andrew: Yeah. So Obama was perceived as being kind of low energy and not trying that hard. Mitt Romney, it was his sort of first time on the national stage. He emphasized a lot of kind of centrist policy positions. And I think that there's a sort of snowballing effect, right? Like the press are not interested in covering how big a blowout is X going to be. But the best way to sort of keep people, keep eyeballs glued to MSNBC, CNN, Fox News, whatever, is by saying, oh, you know, this is a nail biter. It's going to be close. You know, keep paying attention. And so I think there's... there's always going to Be that built in elasticity of, you Know, prior to the first debate in September, it sort of looked like Obama was going to run away with it, which was the end result. I mean, you know, 332 electoral votes is a strong, if not, landslide victory.

0:11:05 Thomas: Huh? Yeah. But that's so interesting because my only memory of it, again, I, I think I just didn't think Mitt had a chance and I didn'T really pay attention, didn'T care much back Then, but my, my main memory is toward the end, Romney just looking I don't know if robot is the right thing, but looking like he didn't even know what to do. He just was kind of neutral on everything. I thought he was low energy and Obama was more dynamic, but it's interesting that in the first debate it was the other way around.

0:11:59 Andrew: Yeah, yeah. Go back to 2000. Let's go Back to Election Night. What happened? And what happened is Gore has 267 electoral votes based on the math.

0:12:38 Thomas: Hmm. Clinched, right? Those are confirmed.

0:12:41 Andrew: Correct. Okay. OK, Bush has two hundred and forty six clenched. OK, and at about early in the evening. So we don't, we don't necessarily have those totals yet. Early in the in the evening, every network calls Florida for Al Gore based on exit polls at about 8 p.m., right, soon after the polls close, uh, and exit polls, I think you know what they are, that is basically a a random sampling of people, uh, that come out from having voted and a polling organization, to say, so if you don't mind answering an exit poll, who did you vote for, and then based on those numbers they look at the numbers, they look at some of the early patterns, uh, to make sure that those confirm their numbers and they say, okay, based on our exit polling, uh, in Florida, they said, based on exit, exit poll, and Al Gore wins the state.

0:12:41 Thomas: OK.

0:13:33 Thomas: Right. And we saw this in the primaries where it was confusing. Some people called fraud, you know, when Clinton was declared a winner with zero percent of the votes reporting. Well, is a complex calculation and statistical analysis done by what we would hope would be, you with not really a dog in the fight, someone just trying to report the results as soon as they can. And it could be, you it be with 0% reporting or it could be with, you know, not until 100% reporting or something if it's close enough. But if they're, but presumably they must have gathered that statistically it was, it was a powerful enough result for Gore in Florida early.

0:14:14 Andrew: Exactly. And I would add that, you know, when you see something come in now, because they've changed a little bit, like how the media cover exit polls has changed as a result of what I'm about to tell you. So right now, when you see the result come in with 0%, that means the exit polls are showing a 20, 30, 40 point margin, And as soon as you see one representative precinct, you know that has a couple thousand people in it, and the margin is 20, 30, 40 points, you say, you Know what? That confirms what we saw with exit polling.

0:14:29 Thomas: Yeah, huge margin.

0:14:54 Andrew: We're going to call the race for Bush. Gore. In 2000, threshold was much lower. And so Gore had a good lead. Exit polls were confirmed by the early precincts that came in. Every network called Florida for Gore. As the night went on, Bush started running ahead and running well ahead of the exit polls in the panhandle of Florida, in the more conservative areas throughout the state of Florida. And was chipping into this Gore lead that had been built up, and doing so in a way that threatened the exit poll models.

0:15:35 Andrew: So by 10 p.m., Fox News was the first organization to do this, although I don't think there's any kind of Michael Moore-level conspiracy here. I think they just were more motivated. They were paying closer attention to the numbers on the ground. And they went back to their decision desk and they undeclared Florida. They took it off. There was no coordination of blue and red at this time. The reason we think of blue states now and red states is because of NBC's use of blue for the Democrat and red for the Republican in the 2000 race. In fact, most networks used it the other way around, but so they took off the blue Florida and put it back to the undecided gray at 10 o'clock, and then they waited for more results to come in. And at 2 a.m., Fox News call, and I should point out, I said Fox News was first to undeclare, all the other networks then undeclared. They all followed.

0:15:47 Thomas: You're right.

0:16:35 Thomas: Well,

0:16:35 Andrew: Right, so all of these decision desks looking at the numbers said where the exit polls are not matching the actual results on the ground, we got to get more data. So now we're waiting until 2 a.m. Now we have 267 to 245, 246, and Florida's 25 are the only votes that are out. And at 2 a.m., Fox News says Florida's going the Bush, and that's with that the election, and other networks did the same. I don't know if every network.

0:17:06 Thomas: How does, So how does... Oh, that math checks out. I thought it was still short, but that's all. Oh.

0:17:07 Andrew: Yeah. That that Is that Gets that gets him to 271, right? Yeah.

0:17:11 Thomas: Okay. Oh. Right. Okay, yeah, 270.

0:17:15 Andrew: Just Just Over the finish line, literally one, one electoral vote over the place. But now we have the opposite problem, which is that precincts were out in three counties, Broward County, Miami-Dade County, and Palm Beach County. And those are heavily Democratic areas. And this is a long-standing political technique that really dates back to the 1950s. And once you know this, this is a fun tip for election watching. I wish I'd shared this while primaries were still going on, because it totally changes how you watch primary results coming in. But both sides, precinct workers have a political affiliation, but precincts themselves have both, typically, have both Republicans and Democrats who are poll watchers, right?

0:17:15 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Okay. Sure.

0:18:06 Andrew: So you can't fudge numbers anymore. And I don't want to say that no fraud occurs, and I do not want to go down that route because I don't want to grab that whole Thing. Right. But what you can do from a strategic campaign management point is when you know an area is very likely to be overwhelmingly in your favor, you can slow down how those totals get reported. Right. You can tell your precinct workers, hey, count these a little more slowly. You can say, let's go back and triple count this and triple check this. Let me make sure I've got this right. Oh, it looks like I made an error here. I need to go back. You can slow down how they go about reporting their numbers and effectively delay the reporting in the areas that favor you the most. And the reason you used to do this is because there would be precincts that weren't monitored in a bipartisan way.

0:18:13 Thomas: Oh. Wow.

0:19:04 Andrew: And basically, whoever got to go last had the advantage of knowing how many, in a close election, had the disadvantage of knowing knowing how many votes behind they were, and you could creatively find new vote totals. And that, I think the outright fraud is a lot less today, but the tradition of holding back your core precincts and waiting for the other side to release theirs is a time-honored political strategy and So the Democrats had done this, uh, and so by, uh, 2 a.m. you've got all of this new data from the conservative panhandle, much more sparse, sparsely popular, right? So, so lower overall votes, even though they're coming in 70 to 30 for Bush, you know, not that many people live there as opposed to the, you know, millions of people who live in Miami. But you have lots of precincts in these three Democratic areas that haven't reported at all.

And again, the modeling is sort of less sophisticated back then. You see 98% of the vote is in, you know, 98% of the precinct are in, and Bush has a 2% lead. And so at 2 a.m., Fox News and then other networks call Florida for Bush. There is serious internal discussion. And Al Gore makes a concession call.

0:19:20 Thomas: Huh. Yeah.

0:20:25 Andrew: He does not go out on the air. He is stopped at the last minute by a staffer who tackles him, if some reports are to be believed. No, seriously.

0:20:34 Thomas: That was, oh, okay, that's so funny, because I'm, I'm wondering, with what you've sort of alluded to in in Gore's actions, I'm wondering what in the world was going on in his head. It really sounds Like he didn't want to be, be president sometimes, but, but now, but you've confirmed that further, but who knows?

0:20:47 Andrew: Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So by 4.30 in the morning now, after Gore has called George W. Bush to concede, but before he's gone on national television to conceded, the precincts from Broward, Miami-Dade, Palm Beach County come in and the networks all undeclare Florida again. They take it back from from red and put it gray on the map. The final day, election day, the next morning, reports a Bush lead that fluctuates between about 300 and 900 votes out of 5 million that were cast, and they eventually settle on a lead, a Bush led of 537, and that is a 0.001 percent margin.

0:21:11 Thomas: Huh? Gosh, incredible.

0:21:38 Andrew: And Florida has a state law that requires a machine recount, you got to run the voting machines again, of all votes, uh, that are within a half a percent. So this is one one thousandth of a percent, that's obviously within half a yeah and and so basically, uh, I don't know, in California do you, do you do all electronic voting, or do you have paper ballots?

0:21:54 Thomas: I would say that qualifies. Yeah. I, I

0:22:03 Andrew: Excellent.

0:22:03 Thomas: I vote by mail, so I don't know I have no idea, yeah

0:22:05 Andrew: Okay. Maryland still has a large number of elections where we use paper ballots. And in 2000, in Florida, all of the ballots, even though they are in some counties, you put the paper ballot into a machine to punch it. In others, you know, you kind of hand fill out the ovals and punch up all the circles. And you use tabulating machines that go through that are kind of like the old punch card readers. If that's a reference. Wow, I'm surprised you got that reference.

0:22:33 Thomas: It's like, like for taking a test or something where you, yeah yeah scantron yeah all

0:22:36 Andrew: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Like a Scantron thing. Right. And so, uh, they read all of the votes. Um, and that, uh. Also helps confirm the 537 number. But the machines are not capable of picking up a number of ballots where voters have made mistakes, but they've made mistakes that are nevertheless still legal votes. And so

0:22:58 Thomas: Right oh I was just going to ask, what is the legality of that, what it, yeah go ahead, right

0:23:08 Andrew: The question is, is, does a vote count only if you have fully complied with the rules that were set forth in your precinct? Or does a vot count when you intend to vote for George W. Bush or Al Gore?

0:23:20 Thomas: When it, yeah when it's clear that that's who your vote was, Wow. Interesting question.

0:23:26 Andrew: Yeah. And for some reason, you don't know why the machine is kicking it out. And there are a couple of different ways in which the machine was kicking it it out. But I think that discussion is going to have to wait for episode two.

0:23:43 Thomas: Man. Cannot believe how the time has flown by. This is the most interesting story because it's, gosh, what a crazy occurrence. So I don't really remember. I mean, I remember what happened, roughly speaking, but I don't remember election night too clearly. I had just started high school. I I had a lot going on. And so were you just out of your damn mind back then? What was, I mean, was this all just completely like, what is going on here? You know, what was the feeling at the time following along?

0:24:21 Andrew: Yeah, I was at a friend's house and we stayed up until 4.30 in the morning. I called out of work the next day. I was a young associate at Covington and Burling. And it was, I mean, we did not know who the president president was going to be on election night. I mean, it was just sort of a, you know, a crazy result.

0:24:38 Thomas: President. Yeah. Wow. Incredible. So that is It's going to have to wait for part three, so be sure to tune in for the next thrilling episode of Bush v. Gore. We'll see you then.

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