In 2000 in Florida, minority votes were systematically suppressed, in part through the use of a so-called felon list that kept tens of thousands of Black voters from casting a ballot because of past criminal convictions but also included an estimated 20,000 wrongly included names.
In Florida, typically more than 85% of Black voters vote Democratic in presidential elections (it was 89% this year). More than 50% of the names on the felon list were Black.
And while this year, Republican secretaries of state are by and large standing up to Trump, even in the face of death threats, in 2000, Florida’s secretary of state, Katherine Harris, put her thumb on the scale for Bush. She and her staff attempted to short-circuit vote recounts requested by the Gore campaign in largely Democratic counties.
Republican partisans didn’t chant “Stop the Steal” that year, but they did pioneer the use of aggressive tactics to influence the election outcome after the fact. In Miami-Dade County, they staged a protest that bullied the local canvassing board into stopping a manual recount of votes in what became known as the “Brooks Brothers riot.”
In fact, the Bush team marshaled often contradictory arguments with the only organizing principle that it helped their candidate win — just like Trump forces have spent the past month doing, though far less effectively.
Harris, with the urging of Bush’s team, sought to dissuade local canvassing boards from doing a manual recount of votes in Democratic counties by citing a narrow interpretation of Florida’s election rules. At the same time, Bush’s legal team was fighting to ensure that overseas military ballots, which leaned Republican, were counted even if they didn’t adhere to the state’s electoral laws.
In 2020, Democrats openly fretted about the possibility that Republican state legislators in key battleground states would ignore vote tallies and award their state’s electoral votes to Trump.
In 2000, what may have stopped this from happening was not a fealty to the will of the voters but rather the fact that it wasn’t necessary. After the liberal-leaning Florida Supreme Court ordered a full recount in three Democratic-leaning counties, James Baker, the former secretary of state who spearheaded the Bush effort in Florida, publicly stated that “one should not be surprised if the Florida legislature seeks to affirm the original rules” that had given Bush his narrow vote lead. It was an open invitation to the state’s Republican-controlled House and Senate to ignore the final vote count if it favored Gore and hand the state and the presidency to Bush.
Finally, Trump’s oft-stated hope that the Supreme Court would award him the presidency did not come out of left field. It came out of Florida.
In 2000, the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court ruling that called for a broad recount of all so-called undervotes in the state — 60,000 votes that for a variety of reasons had been discarded (because it had been too difficult to interpret them or there had not been enough time to determine voter intent).
In a 5–4 vote, the Court’s conservative bloc, relying on the Constitution’s equal protection clause, used the dubious argument that since there wasn’t a uniform standard for determining voting intent when counting undervotes, it would disadvantage some voters. Never mind that each Florida county already had its own procedures and standards for counting votes or that the Court failed to identify any victims of this supposed violation, which is a crucial aspect of the legal interpretation of the Equal Protection Clause.
Even more remarkable is that in a Supreme Court decision a week earlier, the Court had rejected an equal protection argument raised by the Bush lawyers. The conservative bloc, it seemed, had already made up their minds and was merely looking for an excuse to justify their decision.
As outrageous as the final Bush v. Gore decision was, the writing had been on the wall. Three days earlier, the Court granted the Bush campaign’s request for a stay in the voting in Florida. In case there was any question about the implicit message being sent by the decision, Justice Antonin Scalia, in a brief concurring opinion, ended the mystery. He suggested that to allow the vote to go on would “threaten irreparable harm to [Bush] and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election” if the recount found that Gore actually had the most votes in Florida. The implication was clear: that the conservative justices were more concerned about Bush’s “legitimacy” than the legal case they were being asked to decide.
After the Court’s stay made it was hard to imagine any scenario under which it would allow Florida to continue the count and give Gore the victory. On December 12, the decision in Bush v. Gore confirmed that assumption.
Yet, it’s what came afterward that is perhaps Bush v. Gore’s most benighted legacy.
After the divisive recount drama, many pundits assumed that Bush would strive to bridge the nation’s divide and reach across the aisle to Democrats.
Writing for the Brookings Institution, Thomas Mann said that Bush’s narrow victory, when combined with his loss of the popular vote and his reliance on the “judicial activism” of the high court, created “the most inauspicious of circumstances” for his presidency.
In the New York Times, R.W Apple, then the dean of the Washington political press corps wrote, “With Congress narrowly divided and his own mandate all but invisible, Mr. Bush will need to foster the kind of bipartisan cooperation he promised during his campaign.”
Considering that in 2000, Bush had embraced the mantle of “compassionate conservatism” in direct contrast to the hard-edged conservatism of Newt Gingrich and his band of House Republicans, such a notion hardly seemed far-fetched.
But Bush governed with the same ruthless, win-at-all-costs strategy that his campaign team used during the Florida recount. Before the terrorist attacks of 9/11, he rammed through a massive tax cut and pulled the United States out of international agreements supported by his predecessor, Bill Clinton.
After 9/11 Bush’s efforts to unite the country were primarily focused on building support for the invasion of Iraq — and occasionally questioning the patriotism of those who opposed it. His chief aide, Karl Rove, would infamously slander Democrats by suggesting that after the 9/11 assaults, they “offer(ed) therapy and understanding for our attackers” while Republicans “prepared for war.”
In 2004, Bush would narrowly win reelection: His tainted victory four years earlier had long been forgotten by Republican voters and the media at large.
In the words of Tom Schaller, a professor of political science at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, Bush’s victory in 2000 and his first term were the “first application of Gingrich-style politics to presidential politics.” This was “streetball politics” and one Schaller says that “cared little about elite opinion.”
In the years since, the “Gingrich-style” has come to define Republican politics up and down the ticket, whether it was the impugning of John Kerry’s patriotism by Bush’s allies in 2004 and the “lock her up” chants in 2016 or the mindless obstructionism of Senate Republicans for electoral benefit during the Obama years and their norm-busting blocking of a vacant Supreme Court seat in 2016.