Florida was called really, really early for Gore on Election Night in 2000. It was known all along by everyone that Florida, a swing state, was going to be a close outcome, and there was still *plenty *of mathematical room for Bush to be the winner, not Gore.
Calling a state like Texas for Bush, early, or a state like Massachusetts for Gore, early, would have been perfectly understandable - those states are deep red and deep blue, respectively - but calling Florida that early for Gore? Why?
Shouldn’t a tightly-contested state like Florida have had nearly all of its precincts reporting in - or have one candidate holding a big lead - before it was called for either candidate?
There is a science to exit polling (which I don’t pretend to know). It basically boils down to samples in certain key areas. Say the polls show Gore leads in swing counties and Bush is not doing as well as he should in Republican counties. Based on historical data, one can predict that Gore will win.
There was a misentry of Gore votes by an exit pollster in one county, and due to Florida’s population shifts, areas that were historically Republican were less Republican, making Gore’s performance not as outstanding as previously believed. IOW, the models failed
CBS did an investigation of the media screwup which can be viewed here:
Wouldn’t the models have also been vulnerable to failure on account of the confusion factor in the ballots (people reporting to exit pollsters that they had voted for Gore, when their ballots were actually punched for Buchanan)?
IIRC, that was a minor aberration confined only to Palm Beach County. It maybe affected a few thousand votes, clearly enough to turn the election, but not enough to skew the exit polls.
I’m still amazed Gore really thought he could win that state given the kind of machinery that was there back then. All he needed to have done that year was spend just a tad more time and money in NH or TN, given that he got 267 EVs (before the faithless elector), and given that 3 is the min. EVs a state or district has, he’d have been president.
He lost Florida by 537 votes, according to official results. Why should he not have thought he could win it?
He lost New Hampshire by 6000 votes, and Tennessee by 80,000. What makes them more winnable than Florida?
He could have lost by 1 but my point is that the fix was in against him there no matter how hard he could have tried. In NH it was a lot more favorable: a Democratic governor had just been elected and had high approvals there. This was the guy who managed to appear less trustworthy than a faux redneck hick but actual WASP rich kid in GW Bush; Gore wasn’t terrible media savvy.
Ah. Tyvm.
Wasn’t there also an issue that calling the election so early was a problem because of something about the panhandle? Can’t remember right now, but I do recall it being an issue.
It was called for Gore after the polls closed in the Eastern time zone part of the state, but polls were still open in the panhandle which is on Central time. This caused an estimated 15,000 fewer votes in the panhandle, which is predominately conservative.
Uh, what? Do you really think the hanging chads or butterfly ballots were designed specifically to thwart a Gore victory?
I live in FLA and voted in that election. The basic ballot was the same everywhere in the state, a butterfly that was illegal in the stat. When the controversy began, it was very easy to see why the ballot confused voters, particularly oelder ones.
I don’t think it was fixed before, but i do believe the REP machine in FLA fixed it after. I don’t think all the votes were ever counted.
Not intentionally, but that was the happy result for Bush. The state was called for Gore because the early returns were matching what the exit polls said. It wasn’t until you started getting in the Palm Beach votes that there was a discrepancy between the exit polls and the tabulated ballots. As it happened, that ballot designed apparently confused more elderly Gore voters than Bush voters, hence the incomprehensible showing by Pat Buchanan in that area. Add to this mix a flaming batshit zealot Bush supporter as the Florida Secretary of State and a Supreme Court hell bent on giving the election to Bush, and the rest, as they say, is history.
That’s the after-the-fact claim, but the call was made only 11 minutes before the polls closed there. Only 1 person AFAIK ever claimed to have been deterred from voting because of that, not 15,000.
Agreed. I just can’t imagine a scenario where a significant number of voters are heading towards the polls 11 minutes before closing, hears on the radio a Gore win, and decides to turn around and head home.
This person didn’t want to vote for his/her Congressman, U.S. Senator, or local legislator? Didn’t want to cast a symbolic vote for Gore or Bush? This person cared enough about politics to be listening to the news media about the election but just said to hell with voting today?
I’m sure in a large state such as Florida this happened, but it was probably in the tens of people, not tens of thousands.
I thought the media refrained from calling races before all the polls are closed in the state. This even applies in states where the portion in the later time zone is quite small compared to the rest of the state.
[QUOTE=Wikipedia]
All five major US TV news networks (CBS, NBC, ABC, Fox and CNN) made the incorrect assumption that all of Florida’s polls closed at 7:00 p.m. EST. All five of them reported this incorrect information at the top of the 6:00-7:00 hour. In fact, the westernmost counties in Florida had polls open for another hour, until 8:00 p.m. EST, as they are in the Central Time Zone. This region of the state traditionally voted mostly Republican. Because of the above mistaken assumption, some media outlets reported at 7:00 p.m. EST that all polls had closed in the state of Florida. Also, significantly, the Voter News Service called the state of Florida for Gore at 7:48 p.m. EST. A survey estimate by John McLaughlin & Associates put the number of voters who did not vote due to confusion as high as 15,000, which theoretically reduced Bush’s margin of victory by an estimated 5,000 votes;[8] a study by John Lott found that Bush’s margin of victory was reduced by 7,500 votes.[9] This survey assumes that the turnout in the Panhandle counties would have equaled the statewide average of 68% if the media had not incorrectly reported the polls’ closing time and if the state had not been called for Gore while the polls were still open. This opens the possibility that Bush would have won by a larger margin and controversy would have been avoided if the networks had known and reported the correct poll closing times and called the state after all polls were closed. In a 2010 issue of TV Guide, the premature calls for Gore’s victory ranked #2 on a list of TV’s ten biggest “blunders”, and were blamed for ushering in a new era of public distrust of the media.[10]
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Thanks for that info. I’m often irritated that our results in Michigan are delayed by an hour because of the counties in CST (those in the UP that border Wisconsin). Since these counties are so small and their effect on the statewide total is negligible, there is no practical reason to delay.
I guess Al Gore was under the mistaken impression, going into the 2000 election, that we were living in a democracy, and that rigged elections had gone out with Mayor Daley.
I can understand his confusion, having been under that same impression myself.