On election night 2000 an ad hoc network of statisticians, news producers, TV anchors, and political operatives tried to figure out what the hell was going on in Florida–and failed spectacularly.
For a full list of sources, check out the Fiasco website.
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode, I want to let you know that you can binge the entire season of Fiasco Bush v goor right now ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcast show page, or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode. Previously on Fiasco.
The Vice President step elbows deep into the La and Gonzales controversy.
I used to be a Democrat at the time over the lean Gonzalez.
He was skilled to by association.
Suddenly it's a two front war against George Bush and a new headache consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
Homestead Air Force Base has become all things to all people.
Gore had a choice to make, and he decided to avoid the choice. It was Waffle City.
I asked for your help and your vote because I want to fight for you. God, bless you, Florida.
Thank you.
Murray Adelman was just out of college and working a summer job at the US Census Bureau when he met an older statistician named Warren Mitofski. It was nineteen sixty six. The following year, Mitofsky got an exciting new job with the CBS News elections desk, and he started trying to convince Aidelman to join him there.
He knew I was one of the sharper things at the bureau at the time, and so he kept after me to come to New York and I didn't want to.
If Adelman were to follow Mitofsky to CBS News, he would be entering a TV news tradition dating back to the fifties, when the three broadcast news networks NBC, ABC and CBS started using computers to cover elections.
And the computers shows a candidate victory. Gentlemen, let me tell you this, if they ever teeth this machine to talk you and I while we're out of business war in.
Matovski's job at CBS News was to best these machines. His mission was to build a new statistical model that could more accurately and more quickly predict election results while vote totals were still coming in on election night. Despite his initial reluctance to move to New York City, Murray Adelman saw the appeal of the work and accepted Matovsky's invitation.
CBS News coverage of election night, reporting from election headquarters correspondent Water Crunkuites.
The last election Adelman watched as a civilian was in nineteen sixty six, and.
We were watching the returns and I was saying, that was a cool job. You know, you get to actually predict something and you get the result like right away. You know, I thought it was really cool.
You'll see figures changing rapidly on these boards and on these banks behind me, the mistakes, and we hope there won't be any come from us.
We are going to have what we call for Adelman.
Worked at CBS News as a consultant while attending graduate school at the University of Chicago. During this time, he co founded the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front, a radical civil rights organization that formed after the Stonewall riots.
I had this button that said Gay Revolutionary. I was worrying that at CBS, and I remember some producer in the office sort of looked at it and she said, oh, as we were getting in the elevator. And so a lot of those years at CBS and in my professional life was making space for who I was.
Starting in nineteen sixty eight, Adelman and Metowski spent every presidential election working side by side keeping track of the most important races in the map and analyzing the returns as they rolled in. Their most important task was to make predictions about who was going to win what race once every ballot had been counted.
We do so badly want to be accurate.
We want you to have.
Accurate returns, fast returns put forward to you in a clear.
Concise way.
Network executives thought of election night as an opportunity to secure prestige, bragging rights, and most importantly, audience share.
You mad too to do a little dial twas thing to see how our competitors are doing. But we hope and trust fee.
Will be back.
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the three networks invested heavily in their election night coverage, with CBS News eager to gain any advantage over its competitors. Mitofsky and Aedelman were given the resources to create a new analytical method that would end up transforming election coverage. It was called exit polling an.
Exit polls we call it a poll of voters as they left.
The polling places across the country and randomly selected precincts.
Exit polls were inspired by a marketing technique used in the film industry, where audiences would be shown movies early in an interview about what they liked and didn't like. Vitovsky and Aightlman adapted that approach to voting by sending an army of temp workers contracted by CBS to sample precincts around the country. The workers would stand around outside polling places and approach people who had just voted. Then they would ask them as series of questions.
I could tell you like gender, tell you men voted this way, women voted this way. By race. It describes the electrode. It gives you a whole snapshot of the electrode.
As the exit poll survey results came in, analysts working under Matovsky and Ailmen would mind them for insights and de voter behavior. Those insights would then be passed on to CBS News anchors, who would turn them into fine grained analysis about what the election results were showing.
The single hotest thing our poll trained up is the difference between the sections Carter and Reagan are dead even among women.
CBS News was initially the only network using exit polls to enrich their election coverage, but soon enough the others started doing it too. Then, in nineteen eighty, NBC realized that they could predict the winner of a race based exclusively on exit polls, meaning they wouldn't even have to wait for the real vote totals to come in before making a projection.
The decision eighty NBC News reports the results of our national election.
That November. NBC accurately called eleven states based solely on exit polls instead of vote totals. It was a bold strategy that allowed the network to all but declare the election for Ronald Reagan in their first minute of coverage.
Good evening, and welcome to NBC News's coverage of the nineteen eighty presidential elections. We have been polling around the country and what we're learning in the key states makes us believe that Ronald Reagan will win a very substantial victory tonight, very substantial.
The general principle of the networks is that they do not call a state unless they have data in from voters. That they have some after the polls close, they have real data in, and so NBC used the exit poll as their real data, and so races that closed at eight o'clock they could call on the basis of the exit poll.
By incorporating exit poll data into their prediction model so aggressively NBC was able to trounce both ABC and CBS. The call came so early in the night that even Reagan's Vice President elect, George HW Bush was hesitant to declare victory.
I did hear the NBC report. I think it's too early that I must say. It's more encouraging to have these so called exit polls speaking favorably.
After NBC's big night in nineteen eighty, all the networks started using exit polls to do projections. Election night coverage was an arms race, and no one could afford to get left behind. The problem was that conducting exit polls nationwide cost a ton of money, and by the nineteen ninety mid terms, budget conscious news executives were willing to try something different and cheaper. Instead of each network spending millions of dollars running its own separate exit polling operation, NBC, ABC and CBS, along with newcomers CNN, decided to come together and create a jointly owned exit polling consortium. The consortion would come to be known as Voter News Service or VNS for short. Warren Mitofsky was put in charge and Murray Adelman became his number two. Together, they oversaw one stop shop for election night coverage, conducting exit polls, keeping track of incoming vote tallies, analyzing the data using the proprietary model, and calling winners and losers. In exchange for funding VNS, the news networks received a live feed of Mitofsky and Adelman's conclusions, and the anchors would narrate the election accordingly.
Warren and I were calling the races. We would enter it into the system. The networks would all see it, and they could then do whatever they wanted with it.
We're going to make another projection. Now we project that Bill Clinton is going to be the next president of the United States. We projected Ohio.
The advent of VNS did not kill off election night competition between the networks. It just became less expensive. Yes, the networks were now all working off the same VNS data and the same VNS projection model, but they could make their own choices about when it was safe to call a race. Under the VNS system, each news organization was free to set its own standards for how likely someone's victory needed to be before a winner could be declared.
You have a statistical model. All right, and the model says, well, you might be wrong one out of two hundred close races. Well, if you're willing to say I'll be wrong two out of two hundred, you have an edge. And so there's real benefits to just being faster and a little riskier, because the chance of it catching up with you are very, very small.
As the nineties wore on, the network started calling races too early for Adelman's taste. The drive to outpace the competition seemed to be overpowering the need to be sure and the need to be right. Adelman feared that at some point the networks would get overconfident with an important race. Then on November seventh, two thousand, it happened.
Good grief, eleven thousand votes. It's less than a half a point. That would be something if the network's managed to blow it twice in one night.
Speak for yourself, Adelman told me he would come to divide his career into two distinct eras before and after. Two thousand.
You've asked me to remember the most miserable day of my life.
You know we're not there yet.
I don't.
I'm Leon Nafok from Prolog Projects and Pushkin industries. This is fiasco bush v Gore.
Some strange, unusual things happening in flog.
Well, the networks give us, the networks take it away.
All the networks and all the pollsters are going to get lots of egg on their faith.
I've just never seen anything like this.
I'm at a loss.
Episode two, Real Numbers. What went on behind the scenes on Election Night two thousand as statisticians, political operatives, and TV anchors walked the line between reporting the news, predicting the future, and shaping reality. There were a lot of states where the two thousand election was going to be extremely close. Poles have been tight all over the country from mid months, and they were only getting tighter as election day drew near.
The race is as hot and tight as a too small bathing suit on a too long car ride back from.
The beach, and all the polls indicate this remains a race too close to call.
It wasn't just the presidency that hung in the balance. The House and the Senate were also up for grabs, and many of those races looked close to.
This is the first time since nineteen forty eight, when control of the White House, the Senate and the House of Representatives all have been legitimately up for grabs on election day Republic.
A week before election day, Murray Adelman decided it would be worth sending out a gentle warning to all the networks, including Fox News, which had joined Venness after its founding in nineteen ninety six. Adelman urged the networks to be careful about calling races when the margin between two candidates was half a percentage point or less. Adelman reminded the networks that it was always possible for final vote totals to shift slightly from where they stood at the end of the night. It happened with every election. Ballots would get lost or found, Counting errors would be discovered, and so on.
There's a lot of ways you can have errors in the vote code. The precincts have to count it right. Then they have to get it to the county. The county has to count it right. We have people there getting it as it's being added up. They have to report it right. The person has to enter it right. There's a lot of steps for error.
In his memo, Adelman gave historical examples of races where the final vote total had shifted by half a percentage point or more, even after most voting precincts had submitted their tallies. His point was that with very close races, it was better to wait and get it right than to be first and get it wrong.
So that's what I sent out to everybody. I never said don't call them. That wasn't my job. That would have got me grief. I just said, just be very careful.
It was just a warning submitted for the network's consideration. Remember, the networks owned vns. They didn't have to follow Aedelman's advice. Aside from sounding the alarm, there wasn't really anything else you could do. What happened next after the break.
Election day, the day to choose a new president for a new censure as.
Voting continues literally at this hour, the candidates with the major parties are right now at their home bases in Tennessee and in Texas. They are waiting for the election results to roll in.
On the afternoon of election day, George W. Bush was in Austin working out at a gym at the University of Texas when he got a call from his chief political advisor, Karl Rove. Rove was calling to brief his candidate on the campaign's first wave of internal polls. Bush did not like what he heard, and he confessed to Rove that he could sense defeat in the air, what he called the smell. Bush's campaign trajectory up to that point had been jagged. He had started off with a comfortable advantage over Gore, then fell behind, then vaulted ahead again to a small lead going into November. Finally, a few days before the election, the local Fox affiliate in Portland, Maine reported that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in nineteen seventy six.
Bush swept across the battleground states.
Of the Midwest today, competing with front page stories about his arrest.
Obviously, there's a report out tonight that twenty four years ago, I was apprehended in chenny Buckport, Maine for a DUI.
I'm not proud of that.
I find interesting that four or five days before the election is coming to the surface.
On election night, as polls around the country started to close, Bush surrounded himself with his family to watch the returns on TV from a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Austin. In addition to his wife Laura, his mother Barbara, his sisters, and his daughters. Bush was joined by his father, the former president, and his brother Jeb, the governor of Florida. George Bush had watched both of them lose big elections in the past, and as his campaign wound down to its final hours, the contest looked so excruciatingly close that he had no idea whether they were about to see the same. Thing happened to him.
It's the closest election in a generation that we're going to see in the course of this evening, whether in fact it will live up to its billings.
If you've ever longed for those nights when people waited late to find out who their leader was, pull up a chair, this may be it.
By this point, Bush and his family had migrated to the Shoreline Grill, a restaurant near the Four Seasons. There, in a private dining room, Bush watched the news. A little before seven o'clock Central time, NBC's decision desk made a deeply disappointing call.
We're going to now project an important win for Vice President Al Gore. NBC News projects that he wins the twenty five electoral votes in the state of Florida. It turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper.
Bush was once again hit with the smell of defeat. Without Florida's twenty five electoral votes, his path to victory was painfully narrow.
The top advisors are really crunching the numbers.
Now.
Florida is very important.
It is very, very dicey for George W. Bush to win this election without Florida.
In order to stop Gore from getting to two hundred and seventy votes in the electoral College, Bush would have to win Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Michigan, an ambitious and unrealistic trifecta.
Looking tough for Bush.
If al Gore wins Pennsylvania in New Hampshire, then he really only has to pick up one more state.
Bush stood stonefaced taking it in. His brother Jeb might have felt even worse. Jeb Bush was the governor of Florida for practically the entire campaign. It was assumed that he would help deliver the state to the Bush Chainey ticket. When all the networks, including Fox News, confirmed that Florida was going for Gore, Jeb hugged George and said sorry, brother, before leaving the restaurant. According to some reports, he had tears in his eyes.
I think the results in Florida have got to be a bittersweet for the Bush family. Of course, the brother of the governor sitting governor in Florida, that can't be a happy one.
For the Bush family.
As the Bushes retreated to the Governor's mansion, the networks continued delivering unwelcome news. First Michigan and Illinois went blue, then Pennsylvania.
We now projected Pennsylvania. In fact, he is going to go to mister Gore, so that gives him the Big three. That gives him Florida and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those were the toughest battleground states of the year, and ABC News now projects.
As the news came in, as Jeb Bush called his cousin John Ellis in New York, this was not merely a family check in. Ellis ran the decision desk at Fox News, and he had been in regular communication with the Bush family throughout the night. As Ellis looked at the Florida numbers being pumped into Fox's computers by Murray Adelman and VNS, he told his cousin Jeb that all he saw was a screen full of Gore. Murray Adelman and the rest of the VNS team were working out of temporary office space at the World Trade Center in Manhattan when NBC called Florida for Gore. Adelman looked at the numbers to see if he agreed with the projection. After comparing VNS exit polls and incoming vote totals to data on passed elections, Adelman concluded that the Florida call was good. Though only four percent of the state's votes have encountered, this was not a case of the networks declaring a winner too quickly out of an unhealthy sense of competition. The VNS model clearly showed that Gore was going to win.
I mean it was it looked really, really solid. It was beyond a maybe, it was really solid, and so I called it at seven fifty two PM, which I called the pinnacle of my career. That was it was all downhill after that moment.
On any given election day, the two campaigns battling for the presidency revolve around two distinct centers of gravity. One is composed of the candidate and his inner circle. The other is a rapid response team staffed by political operatives, polsters and campaign advisors. Their job is to gather information about the race all through the day and night and fight for any potential advantage they can find. Bush's rapid response team was operating out of an office belonging to Carl Rove. Stuart Stevens, a media consultant to Bush, spent most of his evening in Rove's orbit worrying about the returns.
It was really tense, and there are a lot of highs and lows, you know. The worst point was when they called Florida for Gore.
But if the Bush team ever wallowed in despair over Florida, they moved on quickly to indignation and outrage. For one thing, they thought the networks were not giving enough weight to absentee ballots, which the Bush campaign believed would favor them. Also, NBC had called Florida around ten minutes before poles had closed and the part of the state known as the Panhandle. Unlike the rest of Florida, the Panhandle was on Central Time, and it just so happened to be heavily Republican. Stuart Stephens thought that by calling Florida for Gore before the polls and the Panhandle had closed, the media was robbing Bush of an unknowable number of votes.
You never can calculate what this means. But if you're headed to the polls to vote in Florida for your candidate and you hear on the radio that your canad it's already lost Florida, it's not. I'm sorry to think that you might turn around and go home because you're both not going to matter.
There was something else bothering the Bush operatives too. According to their internal polling numbers which they got from campaign workers on the ground at which the TV news networks did not have access to, the race in Florida was way too close for anyone to say with confidence that Gore was going to win. To Stevens Rove and the rest of the Bush campaign, it seemed clear that the networks had jumped the gun, so they went to work.
All these networks have political producers. You're calling them and saying, look, we can't prove to you that we're going to win Florida, but you can't prove to us we're going to lose Florida. I think everybody was calling anybody you knew.
Soon Karl Rove in a parade of other Bush surrogates were on live television making the campaign's case to the public.
Let me tell you, Bertie, you all called Florida before Florida even closed its poll.
Florida's a state which some two times.
I've been asking all evening, Uh, how can you have that many absentee ballots out and assume that Governor Bush has lost a state?
And as you know, Karl, what are you suggesting, Mary, that I'm suggesting when the real count isn't in the absentee ballots are counted, that they are extensive in there, and that day's going to flip.
I really feel that way now.
Having said that, at nine to fifty five Eastern time, Bush himself came out and addressed the situation in Florida.
This is mister Bush at home or in a hotel, to be honest, I've forgotten where I watch.
Usually presidential candidates stay out of public view on the night of an election until it's time for someone to concede and someone else to declare victory. Speaking from the governor's mansion in Austin, Bush hit a note of unequivocal defiance. Florida was still very much in play, and.
The network's call this thing awfully early, but the people are actually counting the votes are coming up with a little different perspective, and so pretty dawn out beat about things.
Okay, Governor Bush, pretty darn upbeat about this.
And as you we heard, he was spin. But it was spin that Bush and his campaign staff sincerely believed. Here again is Bush Media consultants, Stuart Stevens.
And there's a fog of war out there, and you're trying to figure out past to victory. And I don't think that we were overstating the case. What we were saying was accurate. We were saying, you should just pull it back, it's too close to call, which is a pretty reasonable, as it turns out, very accurate request.
While the Bush team mobilized, a young researcher at NBC News named Michelle Jaconi was also trying to figure out what was going on in Florida. Jaconi worked on Meet the Press. It was her first job out of college. The show is based in DC, but for election night, Tim Russert and his staff were working out of thirty Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Meet the Press at that time was also the politics and polling unit of NBC News. I was, you know, a researcher, and it was a very tiny team. In the res era of Meet the Press. There was five to six of us, depending on the year.
Jacconi had spent the weeks leading up to election day putting together a comprehensive guide to every notable race that might come up during live coverage. As part of her research on Florida, she discovered that the Florida Secretary of State's office was going to be posting raw vote totals on its website in real time as ballots were being counted. Jacony was delighted by this high tech act of transparency, but what she saw when she looked at the website on election night made her very uneasy.
I just remembered it was so close, and then I thought they must know something about the outstanding vote that I don't know.
What Jacconi saw in these numbers was that, for the time being, Bush had a slight lead over Gore in the raw vote total. At seven forty nine pm, when NBC projected that Gore was going to win Florida, Bush was actually up by a few percentage points. The reason VNS and the networks believed Gore was going to win was that, according to their models, the as yet uncounted votes would favor Gore and eventually put him ahead. But the longer Jaconi looked at the incoming vote totals online, the more uncertain she was that Gore was actually poised to overtake Bush's lead. Meanwhile, all the news anchors, including Jacconi's boss Tim Russert, were still saying Gore was going to carry the state.
AEP balanced. But I think the networks have all taken their time and making this projection. If it's wrong, will be the first to admit it. And obviously the information that mister Reill provided will be factored in. There was calculation, but every network looked at this based on the samplings we're getting and awarded it to Vice President Gore.
I just remembered being petrified for my boss being on air and not knowing if information given to him was.
Accurate or not.
I thought that they put a story to bed that should not have been put to bed, and I was scared that the reputation of my boss was on the line. And I just was scared.
But Jacony was also kind of excited. She had studied Florida election law, and she had learned that when the margin between two candidates was half a percentage point or less, it triggered an automatic statewide recount of all ballots.
I just remember that word trigger triggered an automatic recount right within point five percent, meaning that nobody would have to ask for a recount, that it would be automatic based on how people marked their ballots, and that I just thought, what a fascinating scenario if that were to happen.
Back at VNS headquarters, Murray Aidelman was focused on just about everything but Florida. He had called the state hours earlier, and he had moved on. But then, what was the first indication that there was something wrong with the numbers?
Well, the first indication was when I got a call from Warren.
Warren, as you'll recall, was Aidelman's longtime colleague, Warren Ntowski. He had left Voter News Service after the ninety two election and was now calling races for CBS and CNN. After Mitowski's departure, Adelman had been handed the reins to the VNS projections operation for the first time.
He wanted to take me with it, but I didn't. I didn't go because I had been under a shadow for my whole career pretty much.
Now, Adelman's former mentor was on the phone demanding to know what VNS was doing about Florida.
You know. He started off saying, have you been watching Florida? I said, nowhere, and I've got a thousand other things to do right now. He said, well, well take a look at it, because the status has gone down.
According to the VNS projection model, Gore and Bush were now neck and neck. But Adelman didn't think the call needed to be pulled back yet, And when Matoski called him a second time, Adelman told him so.
And I said, well, I've got people looking into it. And he said, well, I think we should retract the call. And I said, I'm not ready to do that yet. I don't think it's there yet.
But Mitofski felt strongly that the Florida call needed to be retracted. At nine fifty four PM, he sent his decision to the producers he was working with at CBS and CNN. He attached an explanation, we don't entirely trust all the information we have in from VNS. Dan rather delivered the news on the air moments later.
This knockdown, drag out battle drags on into the night and turned the lights down. The party just got wilder. Florida comes out of the Gore column, back up in the air, there's dose.
ABC and Fox News pulled Florida out of the Gore category.
Next, we now believe that the state of Florida is too close to call. We and most other news services had called it for mister Gore. We now believe it is too close to call. It's always been the biggest state for the racist cloth.
Finally, at ten fifteen PM, Adelman concluded that he needed to pull back Florida two. Typing into his terminal, he informed the networks that VNS was retracting its call. We don't have the confidence we did, he wrote.
I think for me it was partly not wanting to see it. Yeah, what, Ian, Well do you ever like saying you're wrong? I mean, it's not fun and you get this really heavy, failing so real. I don't recommend. It's a really awful feeling.
Adelman wasn't sad because he wanted Gore to win the election. It's because his numbers, the projections generated by his VNS model, had been wrong. Remember, before the election, Adelman was worried that the networks would be irresponsible and call races before they were ready. But this this was his data, his exit polls, his vote tallies, that had led the networks to incorrectly call one of the most important states in the country. And maybe worst of all, Aedelman didn't even know what had caused the error.
We didn't really know what happened. We just know that the estimate changed as more information came in. We didn't know where the problem was.
Adelman told me that you could only compare the feeling to one thing.
You must have had the feeling when you found someone died. It's like you don't quite believe it at first, you know, like sometimes I've said you're kidding or some stupid thing like that, but like I didn't don't quite believe it at first, and then it just starts the reality comes over your whole body. Oh, it was like that. I was like, oh, it made a really big mistake and that was hard. You know, that was hard to deal with.
Candy Crowley joins us from Austin the Candy.
I think you can hear the crowd reaction.
They're obviously very energized in this crowd.
I'm not going to assure you in the Bush campaign, well we knew.
While the Bush team celebrated their attracted Florida call in Austin, al Gore's staff was recovering from shock. The nerve center of the Gore operation was in a single story building in Nashville, where a team of data analysts and operatives worked in a windowless space known internally as the boiler room.
It's kept very separate from the candidate. You're not going to ever see the candidate in the boiler room. This is really the turnout operation, where we're tracking what's coming in from the states, and we're feeding it in and we're making decisions.
Jenny Beckis was the communications officer for the Democratic National Committee. She spent election day giving input on get out the vote efforts and talking to reporters about how various states were looking earlier in the day, Long before she turned her attention to Florida backus's primary concern had been a snowstorm in New Mexico that had the potential to affect voter turnout.
Snow in New Mexico was like a big, big thing that was in our heads. But I remember, like I was really confident that we had been smart and strategic about where we had resources, and I think Gore closed pretty strong.
As Gore racked up one battleground state after another, many of the donors and prominent supporters who had been hanging out at the campaign headquarters left the building to start celebrating. Knowing that Gore would be giving his victory speech at the War Memorial Auditorium in downtown Nashville, they headed there to wait for his win to become official.
If you're about to have somebody win the presidency, its power closest to the throne. So a lot of people had just wanted to be at the hotel or at the War Memorial because that's where Gore was, and if Gore wins, they're close. The rest of us are in a closet trying to figure out what's happening in the snow.
In New Mexico, there had been a sense in the boiler room that the Florida call for Gore might be shaky, but it still came as a crushing disappointment when the network's and VNS pulled it back of.
Stomach fell out. Everyone was like, where can we find the votes? What's not out? What's still, everyone was starting to say, Okay, if we don't win Florida, how do we win this thing?
If you take twenty five votes away from al Gore and put it in the underside of column, should they break for Bush? The entire calculation of the last hour and a half, it changes dramatically.
Bacchus and her colleague started contacting voting precincts and swing states around the country. They were looking for updated vote tallies, desperately trying to figure out if there was a pathway to victory that did not include Florida.
New Mexico hadn't closed, and Nevada was still out there, and so there were little slivers of hope still going on, and Wisconsin was still really close, so we could still win. We could win on the other path, and we were waiting to see if we were going to get there.
But as the night stretched on, it became increasingly clear that it was going to be Florida or nothing. Because of how the other swing states broke. Neither candidate could get the two hundred and seventy electoral College votes without winning Florida's twenty five.
It could still go either way.
The Bush people think they'll win it on the strength of absentee ballots. The Gore people think they'll win it because they ran so strong in Southeast Florida.
All the chips have been pushed out of the map down in the southeastern corner of the state of Florida. There's a big, big stack of chips in that state. Both candidates are counting on winning it because that could get them to where they need to get to.
A little after two am, the VNS projection model was showing that Bush was going to win Florida by twenty nine thousand votes, the exact margin that Murray Adelman had warned about in his memo. By this point, ninety six percent of Florida's votes have been counted. The head of the projection of the desk at NBC News called Adelman to ask if it was time to pull the trigger for Bush.
And he said, what do you think we're thinking of calling it? And I said, did you read my memo? And before he really got to answer than that, he said, oh, Fox just called it. I gotta go.
It was two sixteen am when Fox News reported that George W. Bush was the projected winner in Florida.
Fox is now projects George W.
Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the winner of the presidency of the United States.
Fox's call had been ordered by the head of the network's decision desk, George Bush's cousin John Ellis. Within minutes, the call was backed up by NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC.
George Bush is the president of elect of the United States. He has won the state of Florida. According to our projections.
Florida goes Busch. The presidency is Bush.
That's it.
Let's pause for a second. Let that sink in. Bush wins if our CBS News.
As the election was over, George W. Bush was going to be president.
The scene in Austin, Texas tonight, It's been a long, suspenseful evening.
Carl Adelman declined to join the networks and projecting Florida for Bush. The margin was just too narrow, so as the calls came down, VNS stayed on the sidelines. Dlman didn't think he had any other options.
If I put a message out, what am I going to say? I think this was a bad call. Do you really want to do that to four out of the six people that pay your salary? You know, that's I'm not going to do that, so I didn't do anything.
At his hotel suite in Nashville, al Gore was lying on the floor watching television in silence when he saw the networks flash their pre made banners that said President elect George W. Bush. Gore turned to his staff and said, I'm really grateful to you all. I want to concede. I want to be gracious about this. At around two thirty in the morning, Gore called Bush on the phone and congratulated him on his victory. Then he got into the limo that would drive him to the War Memorial for what would be his concession speech.
Al Gore called George Bush on the telephone, congratulated him, said he'd run a good campaign, words to that effect.
Gore's decision to concede was made so quickly that no one from the candidate's inner circle had checked in with Jenny Backus or the others still working in the boiler room.
It was maybe fifteen of us in the room at that point because everyone was leaving to go down, but Michael wasn't coming out of that room yet.
Michael was Michael Hooley, a Boston lawyer who was overseeing the boiler room operation. Hooley's contact in Florida was a field operative named Nick Baldick, and Nick Baldick had been watching Bush's lead in the vote total steadily drop. Just after three am, Bush was up by just forty six hundred votes, a margin so narrow that, according to Florida law, the race was headed for an automatic recount.
Michael said, you know, get in here like so I went into the room. He put a Nick on speakerphone. Nick' said Michael, we could win this. We should not be quitting. You need to stop this.
Hooley, Bacchus and their colleagues rushed to contact anyone they knew who might be with the vice president. The problem was that he was already in transit, and they didn't know exactly where he was or how to reach him.
We were not really paying attention to Gore. We were so wrapped up in what they were saying about those numbers and like it may not be over, and like trying to do the math a hundred different ways. It might not have occurred to Michael that he was actually in the car, but we knew we had to get to him. Like Gores going down to the motorcade and their drive. You know, like it's all happening on live television.
How Gored now on his way to the War Memorial Auditory of the vice presidential motorcade moving.
You just can't help but think that looks more like a funeral procession tonight in a political procession.
Finally, Michael Hooley got word to a Gore aid who was able to intercept the Vice president before he went out on stage. Meanwhile, Beckus started calling everyone she knew at the networks if she wanted to tell them that, despite their earlier proclamations about Bush being president elect, Gore was no longer planning to give up the fight. What happens next after the break the first person Backus reached with Michelle Jaconi, the young researcher at NBC who had been obsessively watching Florida all night. She and Beachus had first encountered each other while Jacony was doing her research in preparation for election day.
And she says, Michelle, stop that reporting right now. I can assuredly say al Gore is not going to concede. And I said, can I report that on the record?
And she says yes, Jacconi rushed into the control room and ran to the producer who was directing coverage future CNN president Jeff Zucker.
My heart now is beating so fast and running outside of the room, screaming into the phone. Now everybody in the room is looking at me. I ducked down the hallway, run into the control room, which is pitch black. Everybody has headsets on except for Jeff Sucker. And Jeff'sucker, who's running coverage, is standing up pacing, and I look at him, and I have the phone to my ear, and I said, al Gore is not going to concede. And he stops, and he grabs my shirt and says, can I report that.
Jenny Bachus was watching the NBC newscast from the Gore boiler room. By this point, Tom Brokaw and Tim Russard had been making note of the razor thin margin between Gore and Bush and wondering aloud why Bush had not yet come out to deliver his victory speech.
I'm curious about why we're not seeing the governor yet.
They also began to familiarize themselves with the intricacies of Florida election law, starting with the fact that the state's top election official was the secretary of state.
Will someone find out for me whether the Secretary of State is a Democrat or a Republican? Okay, he's a Democrat or she is? Is it a man?
Who?
Do we know who that secretary of State is? Let's try to find that out if we can.
Maybe we could talk to him or her.
Keep Yeah, we're working on that, We're told in the control.
Room, phone calls were flying between the network and the campaign. Then an NBC reporter stationed in Nashville delivered the latest. Gore had placed a second call to George Bush and he had taken back his concession.
Claire ship and what do you have for US's.
How long we're hearing tonight?
Is it one of the reasons for al Gore's delay?
This is, according to some of his low level staffers, as if he is actually.
Called George W.
Bush and taken back concession bone call, so an extraordinary move.
It was at around three point thirty in the morning when al Gore placed that second call to George W. Bush and retracted his concession. At four am, Gore's campaign chairman Bill Day addressed the crowd of supporters gathered at the War Memorial.
I'll let me say I've been in politics a very long time, but I don't think there's ever been a night like this one. Just an hour or so ago, the TV networks called this race for Governor Bush. It now appears, it now appears that their call was premature. This is a very significant for most important reason, and that is for under Florida state law, this triggers in an automatic recount, and until the results in Florida become official, our campaign continues.
On TV news, anchors tried to summon whatever authority they had left to explain that Florida was once again being pulled back.
I thank you.
I'm always reminded of those West Texas saloons where the head a sign says, please don't shoot the piano player. He's doing the best he can. And we do the best we can on these calls. But we have to stand up and take.
At Gore Headquarters, the boiler room that had been nearly empty just a few minutes earlier slowly began to repopulate with stunned campaign staffers. Here's Jenny Beckett again.
So some people start coming back, and they've been drinking, and like they smelled a little bit like they had been like, you know, having a bunch of beers moaning the loss of the campaign, and then all of a sudden, they're sort of like, oh my god, you sort of have already mentally processed. I've played this game, I did my best. All right, fine, I'm gonna drive my sorrows. And then all of since, oops, I'm not gonna dry my sorrows. I still have another two innings to play or overtime. We're in overtime. That's what we were.
We're in overtime. If the Gore campaign in Nashville was euphoric, their counterparts at Bush headquarters in Austin felt like they had been hit by a truck. Everyone was exhausted and deflated, and now the race wasn't even over here again is Bush Media Consultants Stuart Stevens.
It's a weird feeling. I mean, you're prepared to win, you're prepared to lose. To weird feeling.
You know.
I've been doing campaigns for a long time. I'm used to that end of the world feeling when campaigns in win or lose. I look forward to that. But this was purgatory. It's like you know, watching a loved one like go into the emergency room and wondering if they're going to come out. It's like nothing you can do.
Over the next thirty six days, both sides would blame the TV networks for stacking the decks against them with their coverage of election night. The Bush side blamed NBC for calling Florida before the polls were closed in the Panhandle. The Gore side blamed Fox, especially John Ellis, for giving Bush a temporary victory and setting up the narrative that Gore was a sore loser trying to overturn the election. As far apart as they wore on most issues, the two campaigns agreed on this one thing. What the networks did on Election Night two thousand had real world consequences.
The irony was as much as we honestly believe that you don't want elections, so you have all the numbers. In some ways, you can win or lose an election based on what the TVs say.
I've been trying to think about what Backus might have meant by that. On the face of it, it shouldn't be possible for the outcome of an election to be determined by what people are saying about it on TV. The cause and effect arrow is supposed to point the other way. First, the outcome is determined, and then the people on TV try to explain why it came out the way it did. The two thousand election and its agonizing aftermath tested that natural state of affair. Starting with Election Night, both campaigns had to ask themselves did the narrative that emerged from media coverage have any bearing on who got to be president? At the end of the story. Did it matter what reporters and pundits said about what was happening. It seems obvious there's a feedback loop between perception and reality, but how that feedback loop actually works is not self evident. What were the consequences of the TV networks showing those graphics at two thirty in the morning that said George W. Bush was the forty third president of the United States. Did the fact that Bush won and then unwon after Gore unconceded shape the way the next thirty six days played out. I don't have any definitive answers here, but I do see one way in which the coverage of Election Knight had an unmistakable impact on everything that came after. Between the Gore call that turned out to be wrong and then the Bush call that also turned out to be wrong, the American people witnessed mistakes that had never been made on such a spectacular scale before. And these mistakes were destabilizing, not because they made everyone feel like they couldn't trust Tom Brokaw, but because as they expanded the range of what was possible, they underscored the futility of trying to predict what would happen next. Murray Aidelman still vividly remembers the aftermath of that night when the projection model he'd been using since nineteen sixty seven went wobbly on him. He remembers it as a turning point in his life.
I just remember having this really big heaviness over my body and just so so depressed, and you know, it's like these things used and counted on and suddenly they all turned, you know.
After the election, vns's exit polling operation was widely blamed for the blown calls in Florida. Adelman knew it wasn't that simple. His exit poll in Florida had in fact performed well. The survey results were within the margin of error. It was just that the error in the exit poll and the raw vote totals that came in early in the evening both have and to favor Gore. Separately, the vn S model had underestimated the number of absentee ballots, which favored Bush. All that created what Aidelman now calls a perfect storm. At the time, Aidelman was unable to respond to the criticism of his exit polls because the networks that paid his salary had instructed him not to comment. It was painful for him. Adelman really believed in exit polls, both as an analytical tool and as a means of giving voice to demographic groups. During the nineties, Adelman had pushed for VNS exit polls to include a question about sexual orientation, a move that helped establish the LGBT community as a political constituency with quantifiable voting power. In any event, exit polls only contributed to the first Florida call, the one for Gore. The later call, the one for Bush, turned out to have been the result of a crucial data entry error that inflated Bush's lead by twenty two thousand votes just before Fox called the race in his favor. VNS was ended in two thousand and three after its computers crashed during the previous year's midterms. Warren Thetowski died in two thousand and six, and Adelman spoke at his funeral. He still believes in the value of projecting elections. He doesn't think two thousand proved it's not worth doing, or that there's something inherently irresponsible about it.
Your job is to call races. Your job is to look at data and decide. And it's always safer to wait. It's always safer to not say anything. But then you're not doing what you're there for. That's what the job is is. The job is taking risks. If you didn't take a risk, who needs a decision person If you're going to wait till it's one hundred percent.
Just after four am, the Gore campaign was scrambling to charter a plane from Nashville to Florida. Jill Alper, a political consultant working with the DNC, was tasked with rounding up Gor staffers for the flight. Alper had spent election Day in the boiler room with Jenny Bachus and Michael Hooley. Now that it was over, or rather now that it had failed to end, she was in charge of the logistics of whatever happened next.
I remember saying, you know, gee, what I need as a plane, and somebody saying, oh, right, well, we have the Liberman plane and we had a scheduling and advanced operation right there, so they could start, you know, renting cars and finding hotel rooms and putting the logistics into place.
Joe Lieberman's plane had seventy two seats, and Alper wanted to fill all of them. By four point thirty in the morning, there were more than one hundred staffers waiting to get on.
People ran back to their hotel rooms and their apartments and got their things, and you know, off we went. And when we were on the plane, we used the PA system to train folks. While we were flying.
Down, someone christened the plane Recount one. It left the cold dark of Nashville just as the sun was rising. While some staff read up on recount strategy, others tried to get as much sleep as they could. Many had been up for twenty four hours.
People were tired, and it was intense, but the moment was not lost on all of us that it was unusual. Who would ever thought, right, you'd be on a plane heading to Florida to start a recount that could determine who the president is.
When the Gore plane landed in Tallahassee, Joe Alper looked out her window. The Florida sun was shining, and there on the tarmac was the plane of Governor Jeb Bush.
At this point, it was like really clear that there was going to be a showdown in Florida, right. I mean, we already knew we were into serious stuff, but they were just right there.
On the next step. So to Fiasco, how a national election turned into a local story about Palm Beach County. The butterfly bell was one way of signifying that something had gone horribly wrong with this election. Fiasco is a production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries. The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madelin kaplan Ula Culpa, and me Leon Nafock. Our script editor was Daniel Riley. Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer, and we received additional editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our music and score are by Nick Sylvester of god Mode, with additional music from Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y Audio mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V two Special thanks to Luminary for a list of books, articles, and documentaries that we relied on in our research. Click the link in the show notes. Thanks to the NBC News Archive and CNN for the archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks for listening.