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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. Gore right now, ad-free, by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber.
Sign up for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcasts show page or visit pushkin.fm slash plus.
Now onto the episode.Previously on Fiasco.
The vice president stepped elbows deep into the Elian Gonzalez controversy.
I used to be a Democrat up to the time of Elian Gonzalez.He was guilty 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 ask for your help and your vote because I want to fight for you.God bless you, Florida.
Murray Edelman was just out of college and working a summer job at the U.S.Census Bureau when he met an older statistician named Warren Metofsky.It was 1966.
The following year, Mitovsky got an exciting new job with the CBS News elections desk, and he started trying to convince Edelman 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 Edelman were to follow Mitovsky to CBS News, He would be entering a TV news tradition dating back to the 50s, when the three broadcast news networks, NBC, ABC, and CBS, started using computers to cover elections.
— And the computer shows the Kennedy victory.Gentlemen, let me tell you this, if they ever teach this machine to talk, you and I, well, we're out of business.
Warren Mitovsky'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 Edelman saw the appeal of the work and accepted Mitovsky's invitation.
CBS News coverage of election night reporting from election headquarters correspondent Walter Cronkite.
The last election Edelman watched as a civilian was in 1966.
And we were watching the returns and I was thinking, 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 projections.
Edelman 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 wearing 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 1968, Edelman and Mitovsky spent every presidential election working side by side, keeping track of the most important races on 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 may choose to do a little dial-twisting to see how our competitors are doing, but we hope and trust you'll be back.
Throughout the 70s and 80s, the three networks invested heavily in their election night coverage.
With CBS News eager to gain any advantage over its competitors, Mitofsky and Edelman were given the resources to create a new analytical method that would end up transforming election coverage. It was called exit polling.
— An exit poll, as we call it, a poll of voters as they left the polling places across the country at randomly selected precincts.
— Exit polls were inspired by a marketing technique used in the film industry, where audiences would be shown movies early and then interviewed about what they liked and didn't like.
Mitofsky and Edelman 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 a series of questions.
— It could tell you, like, gender.It could tell you men voted this way, women voted this way, by race.It describes the electorate.It gives you a whole snapshot of the electorate.
— As the exit poll survey results came in, analysts working under Mitovsky and Edelman would mine them for insights into 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.
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 1980, NBC realized 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.
Decision 80.NBC News reports the results of our national election.
That November, NBC accurately called 11 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' coverage of the 1980 presidential election.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.
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 H.W.Bush, was hesitant to declare victory.
I did hear the NBC report.I think it's too early, but I must say it's more encouraging to have these so-called exit polls speaking favorably
After NBC's big night in 1980, 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 1990 midterms, 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 newcomer CNN, decided to come together and create a jointly-owned exit polling consortium.
The consortium would come to be known as Voter News Service, or VNS for short.Warren Mitovsky was put in charge, and Murray Edelman became his number two.
Together, they oversaw a 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 Edelman'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.
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 200 close races.Well, if you're willing to say, I'll be wrong two out of 200, 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 90s wore on, the network started calling races too early for Edelman's taste. The drive to outpace the competition seemed to be overpowering the need to be sure and the need to be right.
Edelman feared that at some point, the networks would get overconfident with an important race.Then, on November 7, 2000, it happened.
Good grief.11,000 votes is less than a half a point.That would be something if the networks managed to blow it twice in one night. Speak for yourself.
Edelman told me he would come to divide his career into two distinct eras, before and after 2000.
You've asked me to remember the most miserable day of my life.
We're not there yet.I know.I'm Leon Nafak.From Prologue Projects and Pushkin Industries, this is Fiasco.Bush v. Gore.
some strange, unusual things happening in Florida.What 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 face.
I've just never seen anything like this.I'm at a loss.
Episode 2, Real Numbers.What went on behind the scenes on election night 2000 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 2000 election was going to be extremely close.Polls had been tight all over the country for 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, too.
— This is the first time since 1948 when control of the White House, the Senate, and the House of Representatives all have been legitimately up for grabs on Election Day.
— A week before Election Day, Murray Edelman decided it would be worth sending out a gentle warning to all the networks, including Fox News, which had joined VNS after its founding in 1996.
Edelman urged the networks to be careful about calling races when the margin between two candidates was half a percentage point or less.
Edelman 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 count.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 who are 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, Edelman 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 gotten 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 Edelman's advice.Aside from sounding the alarm, there wasn't really anything else you could do.
What happened next, after the break?
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This one-of-a-kind series will shine the spotlight on small business owners like you who faced a do-or-die moment that ultimately made their business what it is today. Learn more at chase.com slash business slash podcast.Chase.
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Election Day, the day to choose a new president for a new century.
As voting continues, literally at this hour, the candidates for 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, a local Fox affiliate in Portland, Maine, reported that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving in 1976.
— 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 24 years ago, I was apprehended in Kennebunkport, Maine, for a DUI.I'm not proud of that.I find it interesting that four or five days before the election, it's 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 happen 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 7 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 25 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 25 electoral votes, his path to victory was painfully narrow.
— Top advisers are really crunching the numbers now.Florida was very important.— It is very, very dicey for George W. Bush to win this election without Florida.
— In order to stop Gore from getting the 270 votes in the Electoral College, Bush would have to win Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Michigan— an ambitious and unrealistic trifecta.
— It's looking tough for Bush.If Al Gore wins Pennsylvania and New Hampshire, then he really only has to pick up one more state
Bush stood stone-faced, 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-Cheney 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 bittersweet for the Bush family.Of course, the brother of the 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 project that Pennsylvania, in fact, is going to go to Mr. 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, 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'd 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 Edelman and VNS, he told his cousin Jeb that all he saw was a screen full of gore.
Murray Edelman 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, Edelman looked at the numbers to see if he agreed with the projection.
After comparing VNS exit polls and incoming vote totals to data on past elections, Edelman concluded that the Florida call was good.
Though only 4% of the state's votes had been counted, 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 looked really, really solid.It was beyond a maybe call.It was really solid.And so I called it at 7.52 p.m., which I call the pinnacle of my career.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, pollsters, 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 Karl 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 were 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 10 minutes before polls had closed in 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 Stevens 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 candidate's already lost Florida, it's not absurd to think that you might turn around and go home, because your vote's 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, and 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.
If 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 and a parade of other Bush surrogates were on live television, making the campaign's case to the public.
Let me tell you, Bernie, you all called Florida before Florida even closed its polls.Florida's a state which votes in two time zones.
I've been asking all evening, how can you have that many absentee ballots out and assume that Governor Bush has lost the state?
And as you know, Karl Rove... What are you suggesting, Mary?I'm suggesting when the real count isn't in the absentee ballots are counted, that they are extensive in there and that state's going to flip.I really feel that way.
At 9.55 Eastern Time, Bush himself came out and addressed the situation in Florida.
— This is Mr. Bush, at home or in a hotel.To be honest, I've forgotten where.
— 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.
The network's called this thing awfully early, but the people actually counting the votes are coming up with a little different perspective.And so we're pretty darn upbeat about things.
Okay, Governor Bush, pretty darn upbeat about this.
It was spin, but it was spin that Bush and his campaign staff sincerely believed. Here again is Bush media consultant Stuart Stevens.
There's a fog of war out there, and you're trying to figure out paths 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 Giacconi was also trying to figure out what was going on in Florida. Giconi worked on Meet the Press.It was her first job out of college.
The show was based in D.C., but for election night, Tim Russert and his staff were working out of 30 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 Russert era of Meet the Press.There was five to six of us, depending on the year.
Giccone 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.
Giccone 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 Giacconi saw in these numbers was that for the time being, Bush had a slight lead over Gore in the raw vote total.At 7.49 p.m., 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 Giccone 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 Giccone's boss, Tim Russert, were still saying Gore was going to carry the state.
— But I think the networks have all taken their time in making this projection.If it's wrong, we'll be the first to admit it.And obviously, the information that Mr. Roe provided will be factored into everyone's 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 the information given to him was accurate or not.I just, 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 Giacconi 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 remembered that word triggered.Triggered an automatic recount, right, within 0.5%, 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, Marie Edelman 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 Edelman's longtime colleague, Warren Mitovsky.He had left voter news service after the 92 election, and was now calling races for CBS and CNN.
After Mitovsky's departure, Edelman 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 go, because I'd been under his shadow for my whole career, pretty much.
Now Edelman'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, we'll 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 Edelman didn't think the call needed to be pulled back yet.And when Mutofsky called him a second time, Edelman 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 Mitovsky felt strongly that the Florida call needed to be retracted.At 9.54 p.m., 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 BNS.Dan Rather delivered the news on the air moments later.
— This knockdown-dragout battle drags on into the night, and turn the lights down, the party just got wilder.Florida comes out of the Gore column, back up in the air.
ABC and Fox News pulled Florida out of the Gore category next.
— We now believe the state of Florida is too close to call.We, and most other news services, had called it for Mr. Gore.We now believe it is too close to call.It's always been the biggest state where the race is close.
— Finally, at 10.15 p.m., Edelman concluded that he needed to pull back Florida, too.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.
Well, do you ever like seeing you're wrong?I mean, it's not fun.And you get this really heavy feeling.I don't recommend it.It's a really awful feeling.
Edelman wasn't sad because he wanted Gore to win the election.It was because his numbers, the projections generated by his VNS model, had been wrong.
Remember, before the election, Edelman 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, Edelman 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.
Edelman told me that he 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.
Sometimes I've said you're kidding or some stupid thing like that, but I don't quite believe it at first, and then it just starts, the reality comes over your whole body.I was like that, I was like, oh, I made a really big mistake.
And that was hard, it was hard to deal with.
Candy Crowley joins us from Austin.Candy.— I think you can hear the crowd reaction.They're obviously very energized in this crowd, and I can assure you, in the Bush campaign.
— 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 Backus 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, Bacchus'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, it's 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 floor to call for Gore might be shaky.But it still came as a crushing disappointment when the network's NVNS pulled it back.
the sort of stomach fell out.Everyone was like, where can we find the votes?What's not out?What's still?I mean, everyone was starting to say, OK, if we don't win Florida, how do we win this thing?
If you take 25 votes away from Al Gore and put it in the undecided column, and should they break for Bush, the entire calculation of the last hour and a half changes dramatically.
Backus and her colleagues started contacting voting precincts in 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 270 Electoral College votes without winning Florida's 25.
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 rang so strong in southeast Florida.
All the chips have been pushed onto the map. down to the southeastern corner of the state of Florida.
There's a big, big stack of chips in that state, and both candidates are counting on winning it because that could get them to where they need to get to."
A little after 2 a.m., the VNS projection model was showing that Bush was going to win Florida by 29,000 votes — the exact margin that Murray Edelman had warned about in his memo.By this point, 96 percent of Florida's votes have been counted.
The head of the projections desk at NBC News called Edelman 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 that, he said, oh, Fox just called it.I got to go.
It was 2.16 a.m.when Fox News reported that George W. Bush was the projected winner in Florida. — 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-elect of the United States.He has won the state of Florida, according to our projections.
— Florida goes Bush.The presidency is Bush.That's it.Let's pause for a second.Let that sink in.Bush wins.If our CBS News estimates— — The election was over.
George W. Bush was going to be president.
— This is the scene in Austin, Texas, tonight.It's been a long, suspenseful evening.
— Edelman declined to join the networks in projecting Florida for Bush.The margin was just too narrow.So as the calls came down, VNS stayed on the sidelines.Edelman 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.You really want to do that to four out of the six people that pay your salary?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 2.30 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 15 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 3 a.m., Bush was up by just 4,600 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 Nick on speakerphone.Nick's like, Michael, we could win this.We should not be quitting.You need to stop this.
Houli, Backus, 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 may not have occurred to Michael that he was actually in the car, but we knew we had to get to him.Like, Gore's going down to the motorcade and they're driving, you know, like, it's all happening on live television.
How Gore now on his way to the War Memorial Auditorium, the vice presidential motorcade, moving.
You just can't help but think that looks more like a funeral procession tonight than a political procession.
Finally, Michael Hooley got word to a Gore aide who was able to intercept the vice president before he went out on stage.Meanwhile, Backus started calling everyone she knew at the networks.
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.
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The first person Bacchus reached was Michelle Giacconi, the young researcher at NBC who'd been obsessively watching Florida all night.
She and Backus had first encountered each other while Giacconi 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 said, yes.
Giacconi 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, I'm running outside the room, screaming into the phone.Now everybody in the room is looking at me.
I duck down the hallway, run into the control room, which is pitch black, everybody has headsets on, except for Jeff Zucker.
And Jeff Zucker, 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 Backus was watching the NBC newscast from the Gore boiler room.
By this point, Tom Brokaw and Tim Russert 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.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 Shipman, what do you have for us? of the
It was at around 3.30 in the morning when Al Gore placed that second call to George W. Bush and retracted his concession.At 4 a.m., Gore's campaign chairman, Bill Daley, addressed the crowd of supporters gathered at the war memorial.
— 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 a most important reason, and that is, for under Florida state law, this triggers 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'm always reminded of those West Texas saloons where they had a sign that 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 Backus 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 going to drown my sorrows.And then all of a sudden, oops, I'm not going to drown my sorrows.
I still have another two innings to play or, you know, 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'd been hit by a truck.Everyone was exhausted and deflated.And now the race wasn't even over?
Here again is Bush media consultant Stuart Stevens.
— It's a weird feeling.I mean, you're prepared to win, you're prepared to lose.It's a weird feeling. I've been doing campaigns for a long time.I'm used to that end-of-the-world feeling when campaigns end, win or lose.I look forward to that.
But this was purgatory.It's like watching a loved one go into the emergency room and wondering if they're going to come out.There's nothing you can do.
Over the next 36 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 were on most issues, the two campaigns agreed on this one thing.What the networks did on election night 2000 had real-world consequences.
The irony was, as much as we honestly believe that you don't win elections until 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 2000 election and its agonizing aftermath tested that natural state of affairs.
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 2.30 in the morning that said George W. Bush was the 43rd president of the United States?
Did the fact that Bush won and then unwon after Gore unconceded shape the way the next 36 days played out?
I don't have any definitive answers here, but I do see one way in which the coverage of election night 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 they expanded the range of what was possible.They underscored the futility of trying to predict what would happen next.
Murray Edelman still vividly remembers the aftermath of that night, when the projection model he'd been using since 1967 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 I've 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.Edelman 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 happened to favor Gore.Separately, the VNS model had underestimated the number of absentee ballots, which favored Bush.
All that created what Edelman now calls a perfect storm. At the time, Edelman 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.
Edelman really believed in exit polls, both as an analytical tool and as a means of giving voice to demographic groups.
During the 90s, Edelman 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 22,000 votes just before Fox called the race in his favor.
VNS was disbanded in 2003 after its computers crashed during the previous year's midterms.Warren Mutofsky died in 2006, and Edelman spoke at his funeral. he still believes in the value of projecting elections.
He doesn't think 2000 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 gonna wait till it's 100%?
Just after 4 a.m., 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 Gore staffers for the flight.
Alper had spent election day in the boiler room with Jenny Backus 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 is a plane.And somebody saying, oh, right, well, we have a Lieberman plane.
And we had a scheduling and advance 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 72 seats.Alper wanted to fill all of them.By 4.30 in the morning, there were more than 100 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.When we were on the plane, we used the PA system to train folks while we were flying down.
Someone christened the plane Recount 1.It left the cold, dark of Nashville just as the sun was rising.While some staffers read up on Recount's strategy, others tried to get as much sleep as they could.Many had been up for 24 hours.
People were tired, and it was intense.But the moment was not lost on all of us, that it was unusual.Who would have 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, Jill 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 episode of Fiasco, how a national election turned into a local story about Palm Beach County.The butterfly ballot was one way of signifying that something had gone horribly wrong with this election.
Fiasco is a production of Prologue Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madeline Kaplan, Ula Kulpa, and me, Leon Nafok. 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 Godmode, with additional music from Alexis Quadrado.Our theme song is by Spatial Relations.
Our artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips NY.Audio mix by Rob Byers, Michael Raphael, and Johnny Vince Evans of Final Final V2.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.
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