In 2000, when Bill Clinton left office after being impeached and serving two terms in office, his approval rating as measured by Gallup was 66%—a higher exit poll than any other president since Truman. Al Gore, Clinton’s vice president, was running against George W. Bush, and because of Clinton’s strong approval ratings, many people thought early that the race was Gore’s to lose. However the election ended up being one of the closest in history, with five states decided by less than 1% of the vote. Florida was the closest state, and voting controversies arose almost immediately. During the automatic recount, many ballots were called into question, and it took over a month before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately decided to end the election and award the presidency to Bush. Even though the Supreme Court had issued its ruling, many people were still convinced that Gore rightfully should have won. Gore, however, felt that “for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy,” it was best to stop fighting and concede. He is correct that a peaceful transfer of power is a hallmark of America and generally a strong source of strength; however, in this instance, Gore had a solid case that his presidency was the more democratic outcome and thus by conceding, when and how he did, weakened democracy and surprisingly led directly to Trump’s “Big Lie” that the 2020 election was stolen.
On Dec. 13, 2000, 36 days after the election, Gore conceded the presidency to Bush, even though he and his followers believed with almost certitude that if all the voters who had attempted to vote for him in Florida had their votes counted, he would have won the election. The vote differential was slightly over 500 votes–only 0.007%– out of almost six million and there were a multitude of voting controversies that seemed large enough to easily tilt the election towards Gore. One such issue was the purging of voting rolls, which disenfranchised predominantly Black and Democratic voters. Additionally, older equipment in Black neighborhoods resulted in a disproportionately high percentage of uncounted votes from these areas. A U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report found that at least 77,000 mostly Democratic votes were left uncounted. A predominantly older Democratic community in Palm Beach, due to a poorly designed ballot, switched many votes from Gore to third party candidate Buchanan. According to an academic statistical analysis, 2,800 people intending to support Gore had their votes miscast. The most famous controversy was the “hanging chad”, where ballots with incompletely punched tabs were invalidated—this affected 61,000 ballots. Due to discrepancies in determining a proper ballot, the Florida Supreme Court ordered a recount of uncounted votes using a uniform standard, but this was appealed and the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there wasn’t time, so it didn’t matter the voters’ intent. It was against this backdrop, that Gore told his lawyers, “This is America. We’re done. We’re not going to fight anymore.” Gore did not want to besmirch the Supreme Court or the political process. In so doing, he prioritized respect for the institutions over ensuring that the people’s will was correctly executed. After conceding the election, George Bush became president and Al Gore left politics.
Sixty five days after the election, on January 7th, 2021, Donald Trump for the first time admitted that a new administration would take power on January 20th. During that extended delay there was never any credible evidence of voting irregularities. The election was not terribly close, with Biden winning by 74 electoral votes and 8% of the popular vote. However on election night, when it appeared that Biden would win, Trump declared his apparent loss “a fraud on the American public” insisting, “frankly, we did win this election.” The period before Congress certified the election was one of violence and both legal and political maneuvers to change the results of the election to favor Trump, irrespective of the will of the people. Trump has continued to claim that the election was stolen from him using the factitious arguments that he was too popular to lose, there was a massive technological conspiracy against him, the institutions and people investigating his claims of voter fraud are biased and incompetent, and many other explanations that have all been proven false and which he knew to be baseless. Since leaving office, he has remained one of the most influential figures in the Republican Party.
Using the yardstick of whether Gore’s or Trump’s very different after election strategy was more advantageous to their own political career, it seems clear that Trump came out on top. Although he did not remain president, he retains a strong hold on his party and has virtually tied odds of winning the upcoming presidential election, while Gore has remained out of politics since his concession. Personal political power is not a very noble metric for measuring the success or ethical nature of a political strategy but it nevertheless can be important to consider because, at least for some politicians across both aisles, maintaining power is an overarching consideration. From this perspective, the only lesson that Trump could take away from Gore’s actions, was that if we wanted to remain in power, conceding the 2020 election to respect the institution and for the sake of national unity was not an option. His actions since then, from continuous campaigning to running for president again, indicate that retaining power is paramount for him. However, one important factor that Trump must have considered when strategizing on how to maintain power can’t be simply that it was poor strategy when Gore conceded. After all, in almost every election, someone eventually concedes and it generally does not result in the politician’s political life being over. Instead, the point that Trump would have noticed about Gore’s concession that resulted in his creation of the Big Lie is that when Gore made his concession, Bush became president despite the fact that a large number of people still felt that Gore got more votes in Florida. Taking this observation to heart would give Trump the experience-proven expectation that getting fewer votes, as Bush did, was not a hard constraint against declaring victory and succeeding at taking or staying in power.
The fact that Gore got more votes in Florida is still unproven and probably depends on exactly how the voting was tabulated. However, in the last 23 years, many organizations have attempted to answer the question. According to several analyses, had there been a statewide recount– as mandated by the Florida Supreme Court– Gore would have probably won the election. From a moral and ethical standpoint, what is just as important as technically winning the election is the fact that there was a concerted, and probably illegal effort, to suppress the vote of citizens who wanted to vote for Gore. As outlined above, if all of the people who intended to vote for Gore had been allowed to vote, then the election would not have even been close and this is not contested. Mac Stipanovich, a republic operative working on the bush campaign in Florida when asked shortly after the election said that “if you ask me, do I believe that a plurality of the people who went to the polls that day … tried to vote for George Bush? I don’t think so”. According to New York Magazine, “there is absolutely no doubt that, had the will of every person who set out to vote in Florida been counted, Gore … would have won the election”. Given that the clear will of the people of Florida was for Gore to win, he had a very strong moral case to fight vigorously for that outcome. Yet, during the fight, he was cognizant of the historical nature of what was transpiring and instead choose restraint and a deferral to the institutions. However, because of his strong position, being timid during this time had the unintended effect of emboldening his opponents.
Al Gore believed deeply in the institutions of government. After the Supreme Court ruled against him, he promptly instructed his staff to “PLEASE MAKE SURE THAT NO ONE TRASHES THE SUPREME COURT.” Gore wanted his people to fight vigorously but only through the legal system. Republican operative Stipanovich said that it wasn’t a fair fight because “while the Democrats were bent over their calculators, we were breaking bar stools over their heads”. When Jesse Jackson organized a protest in Palm Beach to push for counting of all the votes, Gore asked him to “lower the temperature” and keep things civil. In contrast, Bush operatives organized a raucous protest to stop the Miami-Dade manual recount. It turned into a physical altercation that became known as the Brooks Brothers Riot because so many of the participants were Bush operatives still dressed in their Brooks Brothers suits. According to Bush campaign operative Brad Blakeman, “We scared the crap out of them when we descended on them” and the riot achieved its goal when the Miami-Dade canvassing board “pulled an extraordinary about-face” and stopped the manual recount. Had recounts continued, it is likely that Gore would have won. For Bush’s team, the lesson learned was that aggression against a reserved opponent can deliver results. According to The Atlantic, the reason Karl Rove, the Bush campaign chief strategist, used dirty tricks is simply because they worked. Karl Rove later became a strategist for the Trump 2020 campaign and brought that lesson with him.
Indeed, much of the Bush campaign team, including Ted Cruz, Roger Stone, James Baker along with many lower level operatives later joined the Trump 2020 campaign. When Al Gore conceded the election and instructed his people to show respect for the institutions— even if it meant giving his opponents the illegitimate victory, he ensured there would be a smooth transition and no political fallout for George Bush. To Bush supporters, this set a precedent that an election can be won with fewer votes, if facing an opponent who is unwilling or unable to challenge violence and political maneuvering.
The day after the Supreme Court released its decision, Gore declared, “This is America. We’re done. We’re not going to fight anymore’”. But not everyone on the campaign agreed. Gore’s staffers continued drafting improbable legal avenues to continue the fight. The rank-and-file democrats were still largely on his side and wanted him to continue the fight. Even though Gore believed that the path to strengthening America’s democracy was to concede, in an illegitimate election, it is imperative for politicians to stand up and fight for the democratic process. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns, “[it’s] just silliness … to assume that democracy is the default condition of modern states.” Even if Gore could not prevail in his continued fight to be awarded Florida, the act of fighting would have assured his voters that their support was not stolen freely and that their faith in the democratic process was not unwarranted. Across the political spectrum, large numbers of Americans want strong leaders who will fight for their rights and beliefs. For Republicans, this means putting aside any moral considerations in order to achieve their objectives and maintain power. However, in Gore’s case, he did not need to ignore his moral compass in order to continue fighting for the democratic outcome. He could have either continued with the less likely legal avenues outlined to him or accepted the results from the court but continued political activity to make Bush’s job of leading more difficult and to ensure that the same outcome did not happen again. In 2000, Gore encountered deliberate detractors of democracy’s systems and norms, and his actions, which seemed noble in the moment, paradoxically led directly to Trump’s undemocratic actions in 2020. If the history of Gore vs. Bush had been a protected political battle that rallied the opposition and exacted a political price in future elections, perhaps in the days following 2020, Trump would not have received the same reception for his Big Lie, and democracy would be stronger.
The Democratic Party is still dealing with the consequences of its earnest but childlike belief that politics in America is a pursuit governed by civility and decorum instead of the exercise of political power and persuasion. It is this naivete that enabled Mitch McConnell to hold Barack Obama’s Supreme Court opening for nearly a year so that it could eventually be filled by a Republican president. McConnell guessed correctly that the only retribution that the Democrats would muster would be high-minded political oration that had no effect on the end result or future elections. And for the almost four years of the Biden presidency, Democrats failed to control the narrative, which should have unequivocally shown Trump to be a felon with authoritarian tendencies who is unquestionably unfit to participate in American politics. However, this year, Kamala Harris has demonstrated a potential straying from the orthodoxy of “when they go low, we go high” strategy and has used aggressive rhetoric to try to control the news cycle gyrations with catch phrases such as “weird” and “unserious,” as well as crossing the boundaries of decorum by flatly calling Trump “fascist.” Twenty-five years of weakness can’t be overturned in six months; however, Harris seems to have realized that the only path to countering subversions of democracy is to become a party willing to stand its ground and fight with all its might to protect what we have already won. Whatever happens in this election, the Democratic Party needs to continue the path laid out by Harris and be willing to take the fight to the Republicans. The alternative is to admit defeat and passively watch as the United States continues down a path that seemed utterly impossible when Al Gore first chose to lay down arms and give up the fight for justice “for the good of the country.”
