POLITICS-U.S.: Presidential Vote Count Goes Into Overtime

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Nov 8 2000 (IPS) - In the closest and most expensive election in memory, the race between Democratic Vice President Al Gore and Texas Republican Governor George W. Bush to become the next president of the United States remained undecided Wednesday as an official recount of all the votes cast got underway in Florida. Whoever wins Florida will win the presidency.

As of mid-morning Wednesday, Bush was leading Gore by less than 2,000 votes out of almost six million cast in Florida. Under state law, such a close vote requires a recount, which, according to state officials, may be completed as early as Wednesday evening, though the final outcome may take longer to determine.

Lawyers from both parties have been flooding into the state, suggesting that the recount itself may be subject to several court challenges.

While the race for the White House was still to be decided, Republicans retained a narrow hold on the US Senate and House of Representatives.

In one notable Senate race, First Lady Hillary Clinton easily defeated Republican Rep. Rick Lazio to become the next senator for New York. She not only became the first wife of a U.S. president to win elective office, but also set off a wave of media speculation about a possible Clinton presidential candidacy in 2004, if Gore loses.

In another big win for Democrats, Missouri Gov. Mel Carnahan, who was killed in an aeroplane crash two weeks ago, defeated right-wing Republican incumbent Senator John Ashcroft. It was the first time a dead person won a Senate seat, and Missouri’s new governor has vowed to name Carnahan’s widow to the seat.

And John Corzine, a former top Wall Street executive who ran as a progressive Democrat, narrowly won a Senate seat from New Jersey, after spending more than 50 million dollars of his own money, by far most spent for any senate race in US history.

But that was merely a drop in the three-billion-dollar ocean of campaign funding spent in national races this year.

Overall, Democrats, who held 46 of the Senate’s 100 seats before the election, will increase their total to at least 49, and possibly 50, depending on the final outcome of one extremely close race in Washington State.

If Democrats take 50 seats, the vice president – either Dick Cheney for the Republicans or Joe Lieberman for the Democrats – would determine which party constitutes the majority, although Lieberman, who won his Senate seat handily, would be obliged to resign it if Gore wins. That would pave the way for the Republican governor of Connecticut to appoint a Lieberman’s replacement.

The morning-after uncertainty in Florida capped a roller-coaster night of tension, during which Gore came within minutes of officially conceding.

There were also surprises which confounded conventional wisdom on a number of fronts.Going into the election, for example, most experts predicted that Bush would likely win the popular vote nationally but risked losing the all-important electoral vote if Gore won pluralities in most of a dozen key “swing” states which were considered too close to call.

But, just before dawn on the East Coast, and with almost all votes counted nationally, Gore led Bush by almost 200,000 votes out of some100 million cast – a gap which Bush is most unlikely to close before the final elections results are officially confirmed.

If Bush wins it would be the first time since 1888 that a candidate failed to win the popular vote but won the presidency.

With Florida and Oregon still to be decided, Gore leads Bush in electoral votes by a 260-246 margin.

U.S. presidents are elected on a state-by-state basis. The candidate who receives the most votes in a state is allocated a certain number of electoral votes, depending on the population of the state. It takes 271 electoral votes to win the presidency.

Florida, a populous state, has 25 electoral votes, so whoever wins the state will succeed Bill Clinton as the next president.

If Gore loses, a key factor will be the candidacy of Ralph Nader, the anti-corporate crusader who ran as the Green Party’s standard- bearer.

Although it appeared that Nader won only between two and three percent of the national vote – far short of his hopes of five percent – his showing in at least one key state, New Hampshire, was enough to give Bush a plurality and thus of all of that state’s electoral votes.

Similarly, Nader’s vote total in both of the two undecided states, Florida and Oregon, far exceeded the gap between the two major-party candidates.

The assumption going into the election was that the vast majority of votes for Nader would have gone to Gore if Nader, who had charged that both candidates were in hock to “corporate paymasters,” had not run.

In that respect, Nader, who won only a fraction of the 19 percent of the votes won by Texas billionaire H. Ross Perot in the 1992 presidential elections, performed the same function as a “spoiler” for Gore, as Perot did for then-president George Bush, who lost the election to Bill Clinton.

Perot’s Reform Party split badly earlier this year during a takeover effort by right-wing commentator Pat Buchanan, who received less than one percent of the vote Tuesday.

But Nader, who campaigned hard in the key swing states, including Florida, in the last days of the campaign, was unrepentant Wednesday morning. “Only Al Gore could defeat Al Gore,” he said. “(Gore) should have landslided George W. Bush given (Bush’s) terrible record in Texas,” he noted, adding that Democrats “should now either find its progressive roots or else become a ‘crypto-Republican’ party.”

Aside from Nader, however, Gore’s greatest disappointment must be his failure to carry a number of states taken easily by Clinton in 1992 and 1996.

These included West Virginia, Clinton’s home state of Arkansas and Gore’ s own home state of Tennessee.

In West Virginia, a coal-producing state where the incumbent Democratic senator won overwhelmingly, Gore’s loss was attributed, in major part, to his strong support for international efforts to curb greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.

His loss of Tennessee, however, was particularly painful, not only because he had represented the state for 16 years in the U.S. Congress, but also because its 11 electoral votes would have sealed his victory, even if Florida went for Bush.

Another major disappointment for Democrats was their apparent failure to regain the majority in the House of Representatives which they lost in 1994.

To do so, they had to made a net gain of 7 seats in the 435-seat chamber, a goal which most analysts believed was well within their reach.

But with seven seats still too close to call, the Republicans appeared to have narrowly held their majority with at least 218 seats firmly in their column.

Exit polls showed the persistence of significant gender and ethnic gaps in the elections, with white men forming the backbone of Republican and Bush support across the country.

Gore won a clear majority of the women’s vote, more than 90 percent of the African-American vote and more than 60 percent of the Latino vote, in spite of Bush’s strong popularity among Latinos in his home state of Texas.

All states with substantial Latino populations, except Texas and Colorado went for Gore. In Florida, where the Latino population is split roughly in half between Cuban-Americans and other Latinos, Bush reportedly received about 50 percent of the Latino vote, compared to Gore’s 48 percent.