Personal Reflections About What Elections I Was Eligible Have Taught Me — And What We Could All As a Society Learn From
Part 1: The Real Reason Al Gore Lost in 2000
There are many reasons that people who wouldn’t normally care about elections do. With me, I think it comes down to two reasons. The first has been made clear in my columns: my abiding love for American history. The second is less obvious to readers of my column but is more personal: the numbers of it.
As I’ve mentioned in a few of my articles I’m on the spectrum and I have always found, for whatever reason, a comfort in arithmetic. I can’t explain what is: maybe it’s the fact that numbers are the same no matter where you are and in a world where everything changes, you always know that the multiplication tables will always be the same. Numbers are constants and I’m always found them comforting. (That is almost certainly one of the major reasons I love baseball so much as well, considering how close math and history are aligned there.)
I should be clear though on one critical difference: when I talk about math in politics I mean things such as the numbers in Congress, the primary system and the history of elections. I do not mean polling. I admit these days I follow polling with the avidness of almost all Americans who claim to be interested in politics but as someone whose studied electoral history all his adult life I know very well that the one constant in the history of polling is that it’s an inexact science.
We are all familiar with the most famous political photograph testifying to that fact: a triumphant Harry Truman holding up a newspaper that reads: “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN” after he has just beaten the odds to win election in his own right. As I wrote in my series on Thomas Dewey last year much of this was due to the fact that pollsters were so certain of the result that many of them just stopped polling weeks before the election.
But before and after that famous photo, the one thing you could absolutely count on from any major pollster during the 20th century wasn’t only that they were wrong as often as they were right but they could be spectacularly wrong. By the time I was eligible to vote in my first presidential election in 2000, I was aware of some of the most egregious blunders in prognostication in history. I’ll just give you a sample, some of which you may be familiar with, some I know you won’t be:
- On Election Day 1916 the New York Times published on its front page that Charles Evans Hughes had defeated Woodrow Wilson for the Presidency even though the votes from California which hadn’t been fully counted yet weren’t in. Hughes went to bed thinking he was President and Wilson actually began making contingency plans in case of it. Two days later California went for Wilson by 1300 votes and with those 13 electoral votes Wilson had 277 to Hughes’s 254.
- During the lead-up to the 1936 election, Literary Digest the first major polling operation began the polling that it had used to successfully predict the winner in every election since they’d started doing so in 1920. For weeks, their polls showed Alf Landon, the Republican nominee, comfortably ahead of FDR until in their final issue they were confident predicting Landon would win in 32 states to FDR’s 16. On election day FDR won every state but Maine and Vermont with 523 electoral votes to Landon’s 8, the greatest electoral landslide to that point in history. Literary Digest folded not long after.
- During the 1944 Presidential election many believed the election would be incredibly close and that Thomas Dewey would prevail. FDR won in 36 of 48 states with 432 electoral votes to Dewey’s 99.
- In the last week leading up to the 1960 Presidential election, the pollsters essentially looked at the polls and determined that JFK would win the Presidency in a landslide over Richard Nixon. The 1960 election was the closest to that point in history, with JFK winning by just 112,000 votes out of 67 million cast — and many considered fraudulent counts in Texas and Illinois.
So well before we were proliferated with the avalanche of polling the internet and TV give us on a minute by minute these days I had become very sure of something that is all the more clear in our polarized society: polling can be twisted to mean whatever the pollster wants us too.
But that doesn’t mean that we should discount math, rather that we should consider what the numbers mean. And I think that my personal experience with the facts and figures in the six Presidential elections to date I have been eligible to vote might provide some clarity to what the endless spin and pontificating can’t. And since there is so much discussion these days about the Senate as well, I think it might be worth considering what I’m come to learn from watching it closely over the past decade because there are some lessons that I think we all need to know rather than what we think we do.
I realize this can be a touchy subject, so I’m going to keep my editorializing to a minimum and focus on the figures. This will still inevitably trigger some people but at this point I know that’s practically a given. All I can say is I’ve done my homework and I’ve crunched the numbers on everything I’m going to write. The rest is up to you.
Let’s start with the first Presidential election I voted in which was Al Gore vs George W. Bush in 2000. I greeted it the same way that millions of 18–21 year olds have basically considered elections today: with a complete lack of enthusiasm. However my problems had nothing to do with partisanship (my parents were Democrats but I hadn’t decided yet if I would be one) or policy (I wasn’t old enough to really understand the difference between both parties on any major level) but history.
Because even at 21 I didn’t believe in political dynasties. And while the two candidates were completely ideologically different in one critical area to me there was none: both men were children of political privilege. Everyone knew who Bush’s father was, and I knew very well that Al Gore was as much a junior as W. (I’ll get to that in a minute.) I felt very strongly that candidate for the highest office in the land had to be based on more than who their father was. And I spent that entire election looking towards the period with great reluctance, something that for the record the entire nation spent all of 2000 thinking.
I don’t remember the circumstances but around October I started, purely for my own amusement, what amounted to an effort to forecast the results. I barely used the Internet back then (I know, I’m ancient) and polling was nowhere as prolific online as it would be just a decade later. My methodology was both analog and historical.
I took all the books I had showing the electoral patterns of all 50 states over the 20th century. I focused almost entirely on the period from 1960 to 1996 as my metric, knowing that was the critical juncture. And eventually I came to the unofficial conclusion that it was going to be a very close election but that Al Gore would narrowly win.
Now because any record I have is long lost I must tell you I have no clear memory of what the final count was. What I do remember very clearly was that Florida was not part of my calculations in a Gore victory. No the reason I was sure Gore would win was because I was certain he was going to carry Tennessee.
I based this more on a historical fact of elections in the second half of the 20th century that I’m willing to bet most casual students are aware of: in the 20th century no President had ever won election and not carried his state of birth. Furthermore between 1960 and 1996 only one nominee of a major party ticket had ever not carried the state of his birth: George McGovern whose home state of South Dakota was lost in the Nixon landslide. Even Mondale had carried his home state of Minnesota (by a slim margin)
It’s worth noting that we were not yet in the era where the South was solidly Republican. In 1992 and 1996 the south had been split fairly evenly between both Democrats and Republicans. No doubt this was due to a Bill Clinton-Al Gore ticket, where Tennessee and Arkansas had gone blue both times. But in 1992 they had also carried Louisiana, West Virginia, Missouri, Georgia and Kentucky (though they didn’t carry now purple states North Carolina or Florida or even the reliably blue Virginia). In 1996 the ticket had lost Georgia but carried Florida and essentially carried all the other states I listed in 1992.
I remark on this because Gore was the first Democratic candidate to run for President since Mondale who didn’t carry a single state in the entire South. In many ways that is the real reason he lost the 2000 election more than anything else. One can make all of the arguments about the polarization of America one wants and I don’t deny the significance of Florida — but if Gore had carried just one of the southern states that he and Clinton had carried in both of their successful runs for President, he would have won in the electoral college and Florida would have been a footnote in Presidential history rather than the saga it became on election night and the two months afterwards.
I have no clear memory of election night 2000 other than when things started to get hazy around the time Florida went back for Bush. I remember I had classes the next night and I went to bed sometime around midnight and none of the networks or cable had yet called the election. I do remember thinking several things about the results in the immediate aftermath.
The first was that for all intents and purposes the public had basically split down the middle. You can make all the arguments about Gore winning the popular vote (and I will in due time) but half a million votes out of more than 101 million votes cast is hardly the theft that so many people have made it out to be, both at the time and all the more so in the quarter of a century afterwards. This has to be made clear in the larger point in the Congressional elections.
Essentially they were unchanged after the 2000 elections. The Republicans lost two seats and the Democrats gained one, leaving the House essentially the same. The Senate was left in a deadlock even though the Democrats did gain four seats, it was still tied 50–50. The total margins between Democrats and Republicans in both houses were, if anything, even closer: Senate Democrats got 55,000 more votes than Senate Republicans out of 73 and a half million cast and Congressional Republicans got 400,000 more votes than Congressional Democrats out of 93.5 million cast. The message from Americans across the country for Congress was basically the same as for the Presidency: we can’t really choose between either one of you. Whoever won in 2000 had no clear mandate from the country as to who they trusted and if Gore had won, he would have probably faced an uphill battle considering only one House of Congress was (marginally) under Democratic control and the House was still under Republican control. He would likely have as many problems throughout his first two years than We did, if not more so. I recall having at least one discussion with my father after the results in the Senate were declared that regardless of who was President, the Vice President might very well break John Adams’s record for most tie-breaking votes in the Senate. (I don’t know if that came to pass either in Bush’s years as President or in the years that followed.)
And maybe that’s why even after the Supreme Court ruled, even after the horrors of everything that was his Presidency were well underway and even to this day, I have never been able to look at George W. Bush as an illegitimate President the same way that millions of Americans have ever since. And I think it comes down to what I said at the start: Al Gore couldn’t carry his home state. I’ve always had this feeling, wrong or not, that there has to be a correlation between a candidate’s appeal to his home state and national. You can make any argument you want — and I expect them to come out of the woodwork — about how different the south is from the rest of ‘America’ but it doesn’t change the fact that Gore, like his father before, him represented the state of Tennessee as an elected official. If he could not convince him to vote for him as President, then why should we be shocked that the rest of the nation had similar problems?
In 1992 Clinton carried Tennessee with 47 percent of the vote to Bush’s 42 percent and Perot’s 10 percent. In 1996 he carried it with 48 percent to Dole’s 45 percent and Perot’s 5 percent. But in 2000 Al Gore lost his home state with 47 percent of the vote to Bush’s 51 percent. Some would argue Perot’s presence was the main reason Clinton carried Tennessee both times; there’s just as valid an argument Gore’s presence is the main reason.
For nearly a quarter of a century we’ve been told the narrative behind Gore’s loss and all of the villains: Jeb Bush, Katherine Harris, the hanging chad, the butterfly ballot, the Supreme Court, one narrative even put the handling of Elian Gonzalez. (Interestingly in certain circles Pat Buchanan is given full responsibility but Ralph Nader is still completely absolved. Another day.) All of them involve Florida because the story is clear one.
But in all that time I still know absolutely nothing about the campaign Gore ran in Tennessee. I don’t know what presence the DNC had there; I don’t know how many campaign stops Gore made there; I don’t even know if they took it for granted or they tried at all. I do get the logic: Florida is a story that fits the Hollywood version of politics with clear villains and tragic victims. But campaigns are just as frequently lost on details that are more meaningful. Tennessee’s loss is insignificant in the narrative of 2000 because Florida being stolen is a better sound bite than the fact that your candidate lost the election because he lost the state he served.
It’s also significant, it should be added, because Florida is a bigger state, a swing state and therefore more ‘important’ in the eyes of both parties and particularly a party that has spent the better part of the last half-century become more reliant on electoral prizes and less on smaller rural states. Florida, I should mention, was not considered a swing state and had only gone Democratic in 1976 under Jimmy Carter. Clinton hadn’t been able to carry it in 1992. During that same period Tennessee had gone Democratic more often than Florida had so you’d think the Democrats would have given at least some consideration.
And as the 21st century has unfolded the idea of a candidate needing to care their home state has taken less significance. It hasn’t affected the Democrats: every Presidential candidate so far this century has carried their home state — though every Democratic candidate has also been from a deep blue state.
The Republicans, however, have been moving away from this for a while. Mitt Romney lost not only the state he served as Governor but the state he was born in and that his father had served as governor (Massachusetts and Michigan) and for the last three election the Republicans have nominated a candidate who lost his home state twice and is almost certain the lost it a third year in a row.
Of course Trump’s adopted home state is Florida and it’s worth noting after the Republicans narrowly lose in 2012, they’ve won it the last two elections and may very well win it this time around. So maybe they took another lesson from 2000.
In my next article I will deal with my fascination with Presidential primaries during the first two decades of my experience with elections and why I will never be one who argues against them.