The Election of 2000

William E. Leuchtenburg

Reading the commentary on the recent election has left me with an overpowering sense of déjà vu. Since the shift of the electoral vote of a single state would have made the victor the loser, our attention, we are told, should focus on that one state, and not on all of the state, but on targeted counties and isolated episodes—from the impact of a single individual (Elián González) to the vicissitudes that impeded turnout. Where have I heard all this before?

When I was a graduate student in the 1940s, I was required to solve a problem. How does one account for the outcome of the presidential election of 1884? The shift of a single state, New York, I was informed, would have made James G. Blaine rather than Grover Cleveland the winner. Moreover, Blaine would have needed a transfer of fewer than 600 votes to have carried New York. How, then, does a historian explain Cleveland's victory? Did he capture that small number of decisive ballots because a Presbyterian clergyman was witless enough to characterize the Democrats, in Blaine's presence, as the party of "rum, Romanism, and rebellion," an allegation that energized Irish Catholics to support Cleveland? Or did Blaine lose because he dined with robber barons at Delmonico's, a "Belshazzar's Feast" that left him vulnerable to the charge that he was an enemy of the poor? Or should one attribute Blaine's narrow loss to the circumstance that it was raining on election day and farmers, predominantly Republican, would not chance a precarious buggy ride on muddy roads to reach the polls?

When in 1952 I inherited Allan Nevins's large course at Columbia on American political history since 1877, I found myself lecturing about that 1884 election. Fortunately, at an early stage, I got some sound advice. Lee Benson scoffed at the notion that you could interpret an election by looking at fewer than 600 ballots when many millions had been cast. One needed to examine the decision-making of the entire electorate, he said sensibly. Furthermore, each election had to be seen in relation to a generational pattern. The most significant feature of 1884, he emphasized, was that it was one of five contests in a row from 1876 to 1892 that turned on less than one percent of the popular vote. The historian's task was not to ruminate about bigoted parsons or muddy roads but to explain why that equilibrium had developed and why it persisted. This lesson was reinforced during many long, searching conversations with Warren Miller of the Survey Research Center in Ann Arbor when we were Fellows at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto in 1961-62. It was a lesson that in later years, when I wrote the presidential election night analysis for NBC, first for Huntley and Brinkley and then for John Chancellor, I bore constantly in mind.

Benson's sermon is no less valid today. Historians in future years who analyze the election of 2000 will inevitably give attention to Florida, not least because there is good reason to suppose that in a fair count Al Gore would have won that state and hence would be in the White House today. But the most important question about the election does not involve hanging chads or dimples. The conundrum the historian needs to solve may be simply stated: Why did the election end in a photo finish? Thanks in part to the victories of two Democrats, one of them the First Lady, the other a dead man, the Senate is 50-50; the two parties are almost equal in the House of Representatives; and the presidential race produced the first long count since Dempsey-Tunney. Why, after all the months of campaigning, was the nation, in the final contest of the millennium, so evenly divided? In sum, the issue is essentially the same as that in 1884. (And it is, as we say, "no accident" that the last times that a candidate with fewer popular votes won the White House came during the earlier period of equilibrium: 1876 and 1888.)

It is far from clear how one explains this equilibrium. The answer now most frequently heard is that Gore and Bush were so much candidates of the center that the electorate found it hard to distinguish between them. It was, in Ellen Goodman's words, "a campaign by two self-described moderates aiming to the center of the center of the undecided center of the country as if they were both trying to straddle a two-lane blacktop." George W. presented himself not as a snarling rightwing ideologue but as a man of compassion. Al Gore identified with the centrist Democratic Leadership Council and ran on a platform highlighting "fiscal responsibility" and support for the death penalty that, one White House correspondent said, "sounds as if it was written by the GOP." Maureen Dowd called the scuffle between a "matched set of dauphins," one a policy wonk, the other a frat boy who lacked gravitas, the "most banal race in history."

Yet despite the drift to the center, most voters had no difficulty in discerning a difference between the major party candidates. Those who identified themselves as liberals backed Gore, 80-13; conservatives supported Bush, 81-17. Of those voters who believed abortion should be legal in all instances, only 25 percent marked their ballots for Bush, whereas of those who thought abortion should be outlawed, no matter what the cause of pregnancy, Bush got 74 percent. Those favoring stricter gun control voted only 34 percent for Bush, while those opposed gave him 74 percent. Though not only Florida but also other states such as New Mexico were unnervingly close, the returns in many states--from Republican Nebraska to Democratic Massachusetts--showed a wide gulf between the parties. Polarized, too, were city and countryside. Residents of metropolises swarmed to Gore, 71-26; rural Americans fancied Bush, 59-37. American politics, wrote Newsweek, "had crashed under the strain of division, too much information and just plain weirdness. Voters were hopelessly Balkanized, as if two distinct countries voted, Gore controlling the coasts and the shores of the Great Lakes, and Bush nearly everything else." Hence, scholars in the future will need to probe deeply to comprehend why, with so much dissonance, the final result was, in essence, a dead heat.

Historians taking the long view are not likely to find the familiar conception of "party systems" very helpful. For more than a generation, the conviction that there have been, in the course of two centuries, five American party systems has dominated discourse on elections. That rubric, though it increasingly has been challenged, works well enough for most of our history. But there has not been a national realignment since the 1930s, though arguably there have been regional realignments in recent decades, notably in the South. Consequently, political analysts have been left wondering when the next realignment would come, a predicament that has been likened to waiting for Godot. For a time, it seemed that we might be entering a new Republican era, a Sixth American Party System. In the 1980s, the GOP accumulated the most electoral votes any party had ever won in a decade. But the 1992 election snuffed out that prospect. On the other hand, there is nothing in Gore's showing to bring to mind the enormous FDR triumph of 1936.

Nonetheless, nearly two-thirds of a century later, one can still discern in Gore's combination the lineaments of the FDR coalition of lower income, ethnic citizens. Voting broke nearly as sharply on class lines in 2000 as it had in 1936. Those with family income under $15,000 went to Gore, 57-37; those above $100,000 wound up in the Bush fold, 54-43. Gore carried union households, 59-37. African Americans, who first fled the party of Lincoln in 1936, gave Gore 90 percent to only 9 percent for Bush. Jews voted for Gore, 79-19, Hispanics nearly as decisively, Asians by a smaller margin. One feature of the FDR coalition, however, was conspicuously missing: the Solid South. Gore got less than one-third of the ballots of Southern whites; not even his home state of Tennessee cottoned to him. The South was solid to be sure, but solidly Republican, though Florida merits an asterisk.

The election booth is one site where the political historian and the social historian rendezvous, especially with regard to gender. Women preferred Gore to Bush by a huge eleven-point spread. Men favored Bush over Gore by the same eleven-point disparity. Gender alone, however, was not predictive. Bush actually won the majority of married women who voted, though by only one point; Gore, however, captured the ballots of unmarried women, 61-32. We need a credible explanation for why that happened.

Other questions abound. Why did the conservative majority on the U.S. Supreme Court, which had made a fetish of states rights, set aside the unanimous opinion of a state supreme court? Why, in a time of so much ostensible alienation, did the minor parties make such poor showings? How much did "Clinton fatigue" help or hurt his heir apparent? And will the consternation about "electile dysfunction" promote reform of voting procedures?

Many of the inquiries return us to the nineteenth century. Will George W., as the first president since John Quincy Adams to follow his father in the White House, be able to escape pater's shadow? Will Dubya, as winner of a tainted election, have the identical experience of Rutherford B. Hayes, who was called "His Fraudulency"? And, finally, will Bush, the fifth man to enter the White House with fewer popular votes than his opponent, become the fifth of that cadre to fail to win a second term? Especially noteworthy is the last time before 2000 that the loser of the popular vote prevailed--1888, when Benjamin Harrison bested Grover Cleveland. For the next four years, Cleveland was looking over Harrison's shoulder, and in a rematch in 1892 Cleveland won. No one can be certain who the Democratic nominee in 2004 will be, but this is one lesson out of the past that should cheer Al Gore.

William E. Leuchtenburg is the William Rand Kenan Professor of History at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Winner of both the Bancroft and Parkman prizes, he is past president of the American Historical Association and the Organization of American Historians. Leuchtenburg was a presidential inauguration analyst for PBS, CBS and C-Span; a consultant and elections analyst for NBC; a consultant for several Ken Burns documentaries, including The Civil War and Baseball; a consultant for South Carolina Educational Television; and a consultant for the Insignia Films production, "Lindbergh." His photograph is from The FDR Years, Columbia University Press.