Down & Dirty

by Jake Tapper

  Clinton-Gore carried Tennessee’s 11 electoral votes in 1996, but only barely, and only after sinking unconscionable amounts of cash into the state in the last weeks of the campaign. (Whouley called ’em “the most expensive electoral votes in history.”) Tonight it is official: Gore can now officially consider D.C. his home, because Tennessee has rejected him. Bush is pleased.

  We’re escorted out of maison Bush. In minutes, the networks pull Florida from Gore’s column and put it back under “too close to call.”

  All the networks are taking their lead from the election-projections folks over at Voter News Service, or VNS, which was formed in 1990 as a cost-cutting measure. (Each network used to have its own projections staffs.) But it’s more than just costs that VNS has cut—it’s reliability, and quality, and accuracy.

  At this moment, the rocket scientists at VNS are projecting that Gore will beat Bush in Florida by 7.3 percentage points. Almost half of this—2.8 percentage points—comes from bad sampling at the polls, picking the wrong people at the wrong places. VNS’s exit poll in Tampa is off by a full 16 points, inflating Gore’s lead like hot air in a balloon.

  Its Miami numbers are totally crazy. They overestimate the black turnout and underestimate the Cuban-American turnout. Not surprisingly, these sample groups in Miami are much smaller than the ones the networks and AP used before VNS was created.

  Another 3.2 points in Gore’s 7.3-point “lead” come from VNS decision makers having picked a bad exit-poll model. More than 1.3 points from this figure come from an underestimation of absentee ballots. VNS thinks absentee votes will account for 7.2 percent of the turnout, when the real figure is 12 percent. They’re also underestimating how many of these absentee ballots will end up coming in for Bush—they guess that absentee voters will be Bush backers 22.4 percent more than regular voters, when the actual number is 23.7 percent.

  Why do they think this? Because, unlike in other states, VNS didn’t conduct any telephone polling in the Sunshine State to get a sense of what their parameters should be. It would cost too much, they decided. 4

  And then there’s the question of voters who went to the polls to cast a vote for a candidate, and for some reason that vote didn’t count—or counted for the wrong candidate, like, say, Pat Buchanan. To the VNS exit pollers outside, there’s no way to check if a voter who tells them they voted for Gore may have actually, officially done so.

  Moreover, VNS is beset with simple incompetence, the kind of mediocrity we settle for in normal life—think 411 or the Department of Motor Vehicles—that has disastrous consequences at moments of great importance, like Space Shuttle launchings and Election Night projections. Shortly after 9 P.M., one VNS operator, adding a number to Gore’s vote total in Republican Duval County, gets a little frisky with the keys. Instead of 4,301 votes, the operator adds 43,023. Whoa, boy! Lake County totals for Gore will be inaccurately added—twice—giving vote totals that exceeded the number of voters. But even after these figures are fixed, another vote total shortchanges Gore 4,000 votes in Brevard County, 93,318 votes instead of the actual figure 97,318. This last mistake isn’t fixed until 3:51 A.M. 5

  Within a half hour, Bush is up even further, 217 electoral votes to Gore’s 167, now that Florida’s 25 electors have been stripped from the vice president. Bush wins key second-tier swing states like Missouri, West Virginia, and New Hampshire. He’s only 53 electoral votes away from the big enchilada. But then Gore picks up California, and the race narrows even further. Soon it becomes clear: whoever wins Florida wins it all.

  Though Florida had gone for a Democratic presidential candidate only three times in forty years, demographic shifts in the state had made it far more up for grabs. Bush’s team could never conjure a strategy for an electoral victory that didn’t include the state; when Gore’s poll numbers started going soft and then south in states like West Virginia, Arkansas, and Tennessee, his team, too, began to realize how important a Florida victory would be.

  Gore’s selection of Lieberman as his running mate helped him shore up disproportionately Jewish and Democratic southeastern Florida. Bush had Jeb, of course, and Jeb’s organization, and the Panhandle and western side of the peninsula. So the battle was fought in the middle stretch of the state, between Tampa and Orlando—the fabled Interstate 4 corridor—which was full of younger voters, high-tech workers, and transplants from other swing states, like Michigan.

  Gore and the Democrats would end up spending around $8 million in the state; Bush and the Republicans $14 million. After the Democratic convention—where aides had arranged it so Florida’s delegates would be the ones to put Gore over the top, giving him the nomination—Gore spent fourteen days in the state, including high-profile days of debate preparation in Longboat Key. Bush spent nine days in the state, sending his parents and Ret. Gen. “Stormin’” Norman Schwarzkopf to stump for him. He spent his last Sunday before the election flying to four Florida cities.

  Now Bush wants to know: was this all for naught?

  At midnight, he directs Jeb: “Get me figures, little brother.” 6

  Jeb punches keys at a computer, entering figures for each precinct.

  “I can’t believe this is happening,” Bush says. “This is like running for a city council seat.”

  Bush leads Gore in the state, but as the last 10 percent of the precincts are counted, Bush’s lead narrows.

  In Nashville, Gore knows this. He’s been watching the returns come in with his family, on the ninth floor of the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel. But at around 1 A.M. eastern, he comes down to the seventh floor to watch with his staff.

  It looks promising. Bush’s lead narrows from 80,000 to 60,000 to 30,000.

  20,000.

  10,000.

  Gore and his team are well aware that a number of the last counties to report their tallies are largely Democratic ones in the southeast corner of the state—Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade.

  It looks as though Gore is going to pull into the lead again.

  Suddenly Bush’s lead pops up to an unsurmountable 50,000.

  Gore staffers curse under their breaths. There must have been Republican-leaning counties holding their returns to the end, they think.

  It’s quiet on the seventh floor. Nobody is talking. Gore puts his hands on the shoulders of his staffers, to buck them up.

  In New York City, Ellis calls his cousins in Austin.

  “Our projection shows that it is statistically impossible for Gore to win Florida,” he says to his cousins’ delight.

  At 2:17 A.M. EST, Ellis calls Florida for his cousin, thus giving him the presidency, Bush with 271 electoral votes (270 are needed to win), Gore 249.

  “It’s just Fox,” Rove says at Austin HQ.

  The guys in the office cheer, nonetheless. The women are a little more circumspect. But then NBC calls Florida for Bush, and the women cheer, too. Within thirty seconds, every other network follows Fox News Channel’s lead.

  Bush brother Marvin takes a moment to tease the Florida governor. “Jebby!” he jokes. “You can come in from the ledge now!” 7

  Now, of course, the VNS brain surgeons are fucking it up the other way.

  At 2:10 A.M., 97 percent of the state’s precincts have reported in. VNS wizards guess that 179,713 votes are still outstanding. It ends up being about 360,000. In Palm Beach County—decidedly Gore country—VNS guesses that there are only about 41,000 votes left to come in. It ends up being 129,000.

  In Tallahassee, Gore’s main man on the ground in Florida, Nick Baldick—who helped Clinton win the state in ’96—has been disappointed with the numbers coming in. But he’s not ready to concede just yet. Yeah, some of the news is pretty grim: Gore’s getting killed pretty bad in the north, Baldick thinks. Much worse than he’d thought. Clinton is hurting them, he thinks. We didn’t go on TV in time, didn’t let them know Gore was a vet and Bush was a National Guard draft dodger. Jews in the south are turning out huge (thank God for Lieberman!), but old people in the I-4 aren’t
going for Gore in the numbers they need them to. Yikes.

  Studying the returns, suddenly Baldick realizes something’s a bit off.

  “What the fuck’s going on in Volusia County?” Baldick thinks.

  The Gore team had anticipated winning Volusia County, around Daytona Beach on the northeast coast, by 10,000 or so votes—but on the Volusia County Web site Gore has only won by 942 votes. Baldick dispatches a ground staffer, Deborah Tannenbaum, to the board of elections there, in DeLand.

  When she calls him, she has good news. The Web site’s all screwed, she says. Gore actually won Volusia by 15,000 votes, she says.

  Baldick looks at the precincts that have yet to come in. Twelve in Broward, where they should be strong, a couple in Palm, ditto. One in Dade. Half of Sumter County and a little bit more than half in Union. Hmm.

  VNS clearly doesn’t know this—and in fact, based on Volusia’s computer screw-up, VNS thinks that Bush is ahead by 20,000 nonexistent votes. VNS’s fact checking is so sloppy, no one even realized the ridiculousness of an early report that 95 percent of largely Republican Duval County had voted for Gore.

  Baldick wonders if Katherine Harris has the new Volusia numbers or the old Volusia numbers. He wonders if Whouley knows about this. He has a line open with Whouley and Charlie Baker, another Gore field guy, in Nashville. He tells them not to put too much faith in the networks. We’re either gonna win by 50 or lose by 100, he says. But this thing’s still too close.

  “I can’t see why the networks are even thinking of calling it,” Baldick thinks.

  In Nashville, Gore goes back upstairs to talk to his family. On his way, he runs into his chief speechwriter, Eli Attie, a thirty-three-year-old moptopped New Yorker. Gore and Attie had spent some time earlier in the day working on his victory speech.

  “Do you have an alternative statement?” Gore asks him.

  Attie nods.

  “Why don’t you bring it to my room,” Gore says.

  In fact, Attie has a bunch of speeches on hand. One for victory. One for an electoral victory, but a popular-vote defeat. One for a victory but a loss in Tennessee. One for a result where it’s all too close to call, and the winner won’t be known ’til Wednesday; Tad Devine had told him that it might come down to the absentee ballots in one state. And finally, Attie has a concession speech, one he wrote on Sunday in Philadelphia, while sitting in the back of a van. Gore goes upstairs; campaign chair Bill Daley and chief media strategist Carter Eskew go with him. Daley is focused on what Gore’s going to do; he thinks he should concede. Eskew is focused on what Gore’s going to say. Campaign manager Donna Brazile, long since edged out of the immediate circle, sends Gore a page: “Never surrender. It’s not over yet,” it reads.

  Gore takes Daley aside, asks him what he thinks.

  “I think you oughta call them,” Daley says, meaning the Bushies, meaning concession.

  Lieberman, who has a tight race in his political history, tries to talk him out of it. But Gore isn’t buying it.“I just want to thank everybody for everything they did,” Gore says. He doesn’t want a prolonged, protracted, divisive fight. Gore’s kids start to cry.

  Daley hands him a slip of paper.

  “Is this the number?” Gore asks. Daley says yes.

  At around 2:40 A.M., Gore calls Bush to concede. Bush tells Gore that he’s a “good man.” He sends his best to Gore’s wife, Tipper. “I know this is hard for you,” Bush says.

  Soon after, Eskew and Daley come back down to the seventh floor. We’re going to the War Memorial to concede, they say.

  In Austin, word of the concession reaches the networks, and the world waits for Gore to appear on the steps of the War Memorial to announce that it’s all over. Journalists scamper from the press tent into the party area in front of the capital, which has erupted in joyful cheers.

  I run into Mark McKinnon, Bush’s media adviser, one of the only decent guys in the higher echelons of the governor’s staff. He’s smiling, a little drunk, a few tequila shots under his belt. He’s wearing a black Kangol backward.

  “A little drama for you,” he says to me, smiling, as he makes his way into the celebration held on the now-rain-soaked Congress Street. “A little drama.”

  McKinnon doesn’t know the half of it.

  Just as, a week and a half ago, Gore had no idea how prescient he was being, in an aside he makes to me between two local Charleston, West Virginia, TV interviews. Gore joked, “If it’s going to be a close race, it might as well be a historic one.”

  It’s almost 3 A.M., and Gore is in his motorcade, making its way from the Loews Hotel to Nashville’s War Memorial Plaza.

  Bearing Baldick’s words in mind, Whouley frantically tries to reach the team upstairs. He watches the last few numbers from Florida as they come in. Suddenly that last-minute 50,000-vote bubble has popped. The lead is down to 6,000—way too close to concede.

  Whouley wants to confirm these numbers. Baldick says again that it’s too close to call. Within a thousand votes either way.

  “Are you shu-ah?” he asks Baldick, in his thick Boston accent.

  Baldick’s shuah.

  Whouley checks the Florida secretary of state’s Web site. He asks his numbers guy, Ken Strasma, what he thinks. Strasma says the numbers he’s been getting from Florida show that Gore could still win, and that at the very least it is too close.

  “Are you shu-ah?” Whouley asks.

  DNC spokeswoman Jenny Backus starts calling the networks to alert them that Florida is still too close to call. Meanwhile, Whouley calls Monica Dixon, one of the “war room” rapid-response staffers. Her voice mail’s on; she’s already left. In a zone, intensely concentrating on clearing it all up, Whouley and the rest in the boiler room haven’t talked to Gore and his senior staff. They had assumed that Gore, Daley, et al. would call down before making any decisions. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.

  Whouley’s assistant, a young Harvard grad named Jeff Yarborough, has been working so closely with Whouley that he—like Radar from M*A*S*H—often takes actions on his boss’s behalf just minutes before his boss thinks of them himself.

  Yarborough frantically pages Gore’s traveling chief of staff, Mike Feldman.

  “CALL SWITCHBOARD. CALL HOLDING WITH MIKE WHOULEY. ASAP,” reads the page.

  “Wheah the fuck ahh these people?!” Whouley asks.

  “I’m getting Feldman on through White House signal,”Yarborough says, referring to the White House paging system.

  Feldman doesn’t know what to think. Whouley had been at campaign HQ on the speaker phone with the seventh floor, but after the networks called the race for Bush, everyone kind of forgot about him. Feldman wonders if Whouley even knows that Gore conceded. Feldman punches up the switchboard on his cell phone and is immediately connected to Whouley.

  “Wheah ahh you guys?!” Whouley asks.

  “About two blocks away from the memorial,” Feldman says.

  “WHY?!” asks Whouley.

  “Because Gore’s going to give a speech,” Feldman says.

  “Fuh WHAT?!” Whouley asks. “It’s an automatic recount! This thing is only six thousand votes! Ahh you with Daley?”

  “I better get him on the line right now,” Feldman says.

  Daley’s in a different car, so Feldman conferences him in on the cell phone.

  Whouley explains that this thing is still too close to call. Another Gore staffer, Charlie Koch, has called Florida attorney general Bob Butterworth, the Gore campaign’s state chair, to find out the relevant law as it pertains to the Florida recount. If the margin of victory is within one-half of 1 percent, there’s an automatic machine recount, Butterworth explains. Whouley shares this with Daley.

  “It’s too close to call,” Whouley says, giving Daley the details. “We still may win this thing. At a minimum, Billy, it’s an automatic recount. We got TV cameras going to Bob Butterworth’s house right now! It’s an automatic recount!”

  “Oh fuck,” Daley says. “Let�
�s go to hold when we get there. We’ll sort it out there. And we’ll call you back from a land line.”

  Attie’s sitting with Daley and Eskew. He wonders why Daley’s head is down; he’s not exactly the kind of guy to get weepy. Then he realizes Daley’s on the phone. He gets off the phone and turns to Eskew.

  “With-ninety-nine-point-seven-percent-of-the-vote-counted-in-Florida-we’re-only-six-hundred-votes-behind, whadda-we-do?!!” Daley asks.

  Feldman calls David Morehouse, a Gore aide, and tells him to take Gore straight to the holding room when they arrive. Do not let Gore hit the stage, Feldman says. They are only a block or so away from the War Memorial.

  Daley phones Gore.

  “Whatever you do, do not go out on the stage!” Daley bellows.

  “What the fuck are they doing?” Whouley thinks. “You don’t leave to concede without checking with the boiler room first! We’re busy workin’ to get Bush’s face off the TV, and they’re taking the networks’ word for it?! We’re hustling, and they’re conceding?! What a fuck-up.”

  A block later, Gore is down by maybe only 1,300 votes.

  The motorcade stops. Someone tells Attie to get to the holding room in the Memorial, so he begins clawing his way there. When he gets there, he sees Gore.

  “With ninety-nine point seven percent of the vote counted, we’re only six hundred votes behind,” Attie tells him.“We need to change the language in the speech, and Carter and Daley need to talk to you.”

  Gore looks at him, taken aback. Hmm!