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Bush Wins Election as Gore Retracts Concession

November 8, 2000

If initial election results hold up, Texas Governor George W. Bush will be the 43rd President of the United States. Bush, the Republican nominee, won 271 electoral votes on November 7, giving him one more than the 270 votes required. However, Bush's narrow victory of less than a thousand votes in the key state of Florida will result in an automatic recount under Florida law. Democratic nominee Vice President Al Gore has refused to concede defeat until the recount is finished. The Florida recount is expected to take 2-3 days. In addition, overseas absentee ballots in Florida are allowed to arrive up until November 17th, and will also be added to the count.

The latest vote count gave Bush a lead of only 926 votes in Florida, a margin well within the one-half of one percent that triggers a recount under state law. Two states -- Oregon and Wisconsin -- remain too close to call, but both combined do not have enough votes to provide either Bush or Gore victory without Florida. Thus, whoever wins Florida will win the election.

The election battle see-sawed back and forth through much of election evening. Florida did not originally appear critical to a Bush victory, who held a narrow lead in opinion polls before the election. Nationwide, the vice president trailed in the popular vote all night and into the morning until after 4 a.m., when he pulled ahead. But whatever the popular vote outcome, the candidate who wins Florida will become the next president.

The major TV networks, including CBS, ABC, NBC, and CNN, announced shortly after polls closed in most of Florida at 7:00 p.m. Eastern time that Gore would win Florida and all 25 of its electoral votes. The networks had pledged not to predict the outcome of any state race until the polls had closed in that state in order to not discourage voters from coming to vote. (Apparently, the networks were unaware that the heavily Republican panhandle of Florida is in the Central time zone and would remain open another hour.) The early call was based on exit polls and when actual returns started coming in, the networks retracted their projection of a Gore victory.

A little after 2 a.m. EST, the networks declared that Bush had won Florida. By that time, all of the states had been decided except for Oregon and Wisconsin, and it was clear that whoever won Florida would win the election. Gore, at his campaign headquarters in Nashville, telephoned Bush in Austin at 2:30 a.m. Eastern time to concede the election (both Nashville and Austin are in Central Time but we're using Eastern Time because we're eastern establishment snobs).

However, about two-thirds of the votes remaining to be counted in Florida came from the Democratic bastions of south Florida, in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale areas. Late into the night, Gore's deputy campaign manager Mark Fabiani still held out hope of a victory. "Bush is slightly ahead now, but that's because the Democratic strongholds in the state, Dade County and Broward County, have not had their votes counted yet," Fabiani said. At about 3 a.m., the networks retracted the Bush projection. Gore then called Bush back to retract his earlier concession. With thousands of Gore supporters standing in the predawn rain in Nashville, Tennessee, campaign chairman William Daley, son of the late Chicago mayor Richard Daly, announced that Gore would not concede the victory. "Without being certain of the results in Florida, we simply cannot be certain of the results of the national election," Daley said.

Both campaigns had scrambled to turn out the vote. Heavy turnout in St. Louis, a Democratic stronghold, prompted a judge to extend poll closing time there by three hours, while Al Gore went to the airwaves to advertise the extended poll closing time and to encourage more people to vote. A state appellate court judge later ordered the polls closed to conform to state law requiring uniform poll closing times. Bush ended up winning Missouri, but the late closing may have helped the dead Missouri governor to defeat Republican incumbent James Ashworth in a hotly contested Senate race. Gore's campaign sent Jesse Jackson to Pennsylvania on Tuesday afternoon and called on Massachusetts Sen. Ted Kennedy's organization to send volunteers to New Hampshire for get-out-the-vote efforts there.

Both Bush and Gore ended up with 48% of the popular vote. The vice president had a lead of less than 300,000 votes with 48,173,807 compared to 47,953,480 for Bush. Others, mostly Green Party candidate Ralph Nader and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, held the remaining 4%.

Bush won the South, the Plains states and the Rocky Mountain states. Gore won New York, California, Pennsylvania, Illinois and most of the Northeast. Bush won Gore's home state of Tennessee, making Gore the first major party presidential candidate to lose his home state since George McGovern in 1972. Bush also won President Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas, as well as traditionally Democratic West Virginia.

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A Charge to Keep
by George W. Bush
In this political autobiography, George W. Bush writes of the benefits of growing up as a son of George and Barbara Bush, as well as of his record as governor of Texas.