Bush V Gore and Florida and Trumpism.

[The Grand Nudger]

Go check out that scotus decision, and you'll probably find tons of articles from the time on how mystified the entire political and legal establishment was when gore bowed out. It really was just a decency decision on the advice of one trusted person over the advice of literally everyone else. The pr campaign framed him out and he didn't want to risk losing after making such a fuss because of the optics. Funny thing, had he followed through, he had won florida, and the presidency with it.

Clintons famous triangulation, yeah. He pioneered the form in contemporary politics, lol.

China isn't going to eat us, and they don't have to. We did this to ourselves. Now we're busy constructing myths to the contrary and retconning the recent past so that we can assert some future foreign adversary will be our end.

[Spongebob]

I have read a complete timeline of the post election chaos. Gore & his team likely made some mistakes related to recount requests in the early days after Florida's count was announced, but once the supremes got involved, it was out of everyone's hands. The supremes should never have gotten involved and that was Bush's greatest move because Scalia was a raving conservative and was biased as hell. Florida also had ridiculous recount procedures and wasn't remotely prepared for something like that. Neither was Gore for that matter. I suppose one could blame the Democratic party for not understanding the Florida electorate better and anticipating some type of problem there. Maybe they just assumed FL would go blue again like it did in 96. It's clear that both parties know far, far more about voting now than 20 years ago.

I point to China because they are clearly the rising global power. In the past 4 years China has dramatically increased its global economic power and influence and Trump practically rolled out the red carpet for them. He killed TPP, China rolled in a mopped up. Trump (alone) enacted massive tariffs, China found new markets all over the place and has built new partnerships everywhere. Now lawmakers are panicking over Chinese investment in US farmland, acting as if that was something new. It isn't new at all and it's going to be difficult to stop. So unless something major changes, China's global presence will continue to advance and overtake the US as the primary economic engine. And unlike the old Soviet Union, China doesn't really have an internal ticking time bomb that will blow out it's knees. But maybe I misspoke about the future of the US. China may not eat the US but it will become their finger puppet.

[The Grand Nudger]

He could have asked the supremes for a recount under conditions they would approve of, even after they stopped the first. He didnt. The gravity of his decision to be decent is hard to overstate, in retrospect.

[Spongebob]

So, after the first count, Bush led by 1780 votes, which was less than 0.5% and an automatic machine recount was triggered. After the recount, Bush led by only 327 votes. But for some reason, 18 counties didn't do a recount and the Gore team didn't challenge this (this was a big mistake). Gore requested a manual (hand) recount in 4 strong Democratic counties only (another mistake, he missed some other counties). However, they were already getting close to the FL law requiring that the state vote be certified 7 days post election. At that point it got into legal battles at the state level and eventually landed in the FL supreme court. The FL supreme court was on the side of completing the manual recounts and delaying certification, opposing the sec of state, who wanted to finish the deal.

By 12/8 several FL court cases had been filed and reviewed. On 12/9 Bush asked the SCOTUS to get involved and they put a stay on the FL recount. The majority's rule on the stay was that a recount of questionable ballots would create a cloud of illegitimacy on Bush's presidency and the Bush team's cause for the request was that a recount would cause irreparable harm. The minority's opinion was just the opposite and many legal scholars have sided with them in review that Bush failed to demonstrate this irreparable harm. At this point, there is zero anyone else could do. The case heard arguments and 7 judges agreed that the FL recount procedure was junk because different counties used different methods, so that basically killed the whole thing due to the whole "Equal Protection Clause" argument that ballots wouldn't be fair across the state.

Gore's team made some mistakes early on (before SOTUS got involved), mostly because they were just unprepared. You know that Gore conceded initially, then when he found out how close the vote was, he called Bush back and called a mulligan and thus began the recounting. Had he continued to challenge it after the SCOTUS verdict, it would have become a joke not much different than Trump. So I don't think "rolled over" is accurate in this case. "Got blindsided and was completely unprepared" is a more accurate description of what happened. But in the final analysis, I'm not sure which is worse. Neither inspire admiration.

Fast forward to Trump 2020. Many scholars have reported on the myriad ways Trump blew his re-election. We should be his biggest fans because if Trump had just behaved like a boring politician for about 8 months, he would still be POTUS. We owe him for wrecking his own election. And amid the wave of nonsense lawsuits, he probably had a few that were legitimate, yet still not grounds for calling an election. I think the most hilarious are those claiming states should throw out absentee votes when they went like 90% for Biden after Trump had been telling his base for 8 months NOT to vote absentee! What a great strategy, telling your own people not to vote!!! And they tried to claim states changed their laws last minute when this all happened years before.

[The Grand Nudger]

Gore had won, and conceded anyway. Trump lost, and never will. The jokes don't seem similar, to me, though both ended up being pretty terrible for the us. Especially in sum. A botched war, climate inaction, recession, pandemic...and insurrection.

[Spongebob]

I don't know what you base Gore winning on. Gore was leading early on and I think some news agencies may have called it for him, but as the day progressed Bush began to take the lead and no official count or recount ever ended with Gore winning. I haven't actually thought about this in years, but as I am revisiting it now I think Gore handled the situation pretty well. I've always been very skeptical of recounts anyway. Why is a recount more accurate than the original count? And if one recount is good, then why not 2 or 10? It has to end somewhere.

I've often advocated for abolishing the Electoral College mainly because Republicans keep winning when more people vote Democrat. But when you think about elections that are really close, the recount issue would likely go from one or two states to the entire US and that would be chaos. Maybe a better scenario would be splitting electoral college votes based on popular vote percentage.

[The Grand Nudger]

I base it on the mountain of reporting at the time, which I'm sure you can find and decide for yourself. The rest of the nation groaned but we loved the coverage. We were still watching when everyone else moved on to the next thing.

Hopefully, any recount ends with the winner being declared president - but that's not what happened in the instance in question. I don't think he'd have been a particularly good president, but it seems unlikely that he wouldn't have acted on climate change. To this day I believe that the better response to climate change could come from the right - but they've shown themselves to be entirely uninterested since. Not for nothing, it's the first thing dems negotiate away too.

About the ec...it's something to think about. The only time in the entire lives of the largest voting bloc the us has ever seen that a republican got more votes was bush's re-election. Wartime president and all. That's when they lost me. Came back to give obama a try the first go round...but he ended up being the same wartime president. The entire political establishment had drifted rightward at the time and not in the specific quadrant that interests me. Im not alone here, there are tons of people who have never in their political lives even seen a candidate they'd vote for.

[Spongebob]

I don't dispute that post-election studies have determined that Gore would have won if certain ballots in question were counted, but in the official count, Gore was not ahead. That system of punch cards was specifically crappy and a lot of votes just didn't get counted at all. I voted absentee in FL that year but in West Florida it was all pencil and paper, no punch cards.

[The Grand Nudger]

Yep, and that disparity between standards was the wedge scotus used to install Bush The Second. Gore had options remaining, but it probably would have been painful. More or less than our current predicament, I wonder? This is why I don't get the comparisons to trump. Its a bad faith argument started by the trumpets, not a factual appraisal of what happened then..or now.

[Spongebob]

This is only tangentially related, but did anyone else hear about Trump's reference to Thomas Jefferson's decision after the 1800 election? I was unaware of this until just recently and wasn't familiar with what actually happened, so I looked it up. Trump stated that if Pence had just done what Jefferson did, he (Trump) would still be in office. Turns out Trump, or whomever put the idea in his head, was completely opposite. Pence did exactly what Jefferson did, he read off the electoral votes and didn't question a damn thing even though Jefferson probably should have paused on Georgia's vote packet. Read up on this if you haven't; it's fascinating.