June 17, 2004
Oftentimes here in Massachusetts one sees bumper stickers that say things like "Let's not elect Bush in 2004, either!", implying that the George W. Bush campaign somehow fraudulently obtained the office of the president in 2000 and that he is illegitimately occupying that office today. Folk singers in local venues croon about how Bush "stole the election", and my progressive friends fervently declare for "ABB" (Anybody But Bush) in '04. Progressive singer-songwriter Pat Humphries at a concert last year called him the "President-Select", eliciting a hearty laugh from the audience.
In this climate of near-religious anti-Bush zeal, I decided to study the election results of 2000 and see just how much of a theft this really was. I found the numbers online at the FEC's website.
What I found only confirmed my previous belief that neither major presidential candidate in 2000 had a clear mandate from those who voted; in terms of electoral votes, the election was essentially a coin toss.
Consider the numbers. Bush won 50,456,002 votes, or 47.87% of the total, and Al Gore 50,999,897 votes, or 48.38%, so in terms of the total national electorate, Gore actually won, if only by a tiny percentage. However, voters preferred Bush in 30 states, versus the 20 states plus DC that preferred Al Gore. The electoral college votes favored Bush by a very small margin, and it's still the electoral college that determines the winner.
If we look at the election in terms of ideological blocs, it becomes clear that the country generally favored the progressives over the conservatives, and in a parliamentary system Gore might have put together a winning coalition. For example, if the ultra-conservative Pat Buchanan voters had gone with Bush, he would have still fallen short of Gore by 95,000 votes. On the progressive side, had the 2,882,955 Nader supporters voted instead for Gore, their 2.74% of the vote would have swung the election decisively in Gore's favor, giving him an absolute majority.
As for the various conspiracy theories accusing the Supreme Court or Jeb Bush or unnamed Republican operatives of awarding the election to the Republicans by denying Gore a recount, an after-the-fact study conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago suggests that Gore's recount would still have found a majority for Bush. However there were thousands of ballots in the liberal Palm Beach area that were punched for both Gore and Buchanan, obviously mistakes on the part of the voters. One can speculate that had the ballot system more accurately captured the will of the people, Gore would have won, but unfortunately for Gore no actual recount would have obtained such a result.
The United States was deeply divided in 2000; neither major candidate was particularly inspiring. Enough progressives disliked Gore that they cast a protest vote for spoiler candidate Ralph Nader, thus keeping Gore out of the White House, though in a perfect world probably Gore should be president today, not Bush. Since the election, Mr. Bush's popularity has waxed and waned depending on events largely beyond his control; his response to the 9/11 attacks won him high approval ratings, and initial American military victories in Iraq went well, but the problem of Iraqi insurgents has cost him dearly. It could be that Mr. Bush's chances for reelection evaporated along with hopes for a stable Iraq, but only time will tell.
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Last updated: June 18, 2004