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The state began squarely in the Bush column, but changing strategies forced both campaigns to reassess.
By KEVIN SACK, New York Times
© St. Petersburg Times, published November 19, 2000
WEST PALM BEACH -- A half-moon hung low over Miami at 1 a.m. on Election Day, and the air was thick with possibility. Vice President Al Gore had drawn a large crowd to the sands of South Beach for the final rally of his two-year campaign. Embraced by celebrities from Stevie Wonder to Robert De Niro, he was clearly moved, and encouraged. "We're going to carry Florida!" he vowed. "We're going to win the White House!"
Eight months earlier, when Gore and Gov. George W. Bush of Texas had secured their parties' nominations, such an assertion would have been audacious. Florida, many assumed, was unassailable Republican territory, won by Democrats only three times in 40 years. Two-thirds of its congressional delegation was Republican, as were both houses of its state Legislature. And its popular governor happened to be the younger brother of the Republican nominee.
But a confluence of demographic changes and strategic choices transformed Florida into the crucible of the 2000 campaign, a state that both candidates ultimately decided they had to win.
That was always the case for Bush, who could never devise an Electoral College strategy without Florida's 25 votes. Then, late in the campaign, when the Democrats realized they were in trouble in Tennessee, Arkansas, West Virginia and New Hampshire, Gore concluded that he might have to win here, too.
A scrappy battle ensued, with tens of millions of dollars spent on advertising and organizing, and with both candidates visiting the state week after week. With California, New York and Texas off the table, Florida was the largest state in play. The outcome, as the world well knows, befit the campaign.
After nearly 6-million votes were tallied, Gore trailed Bush by a margin so slender that it has led to nearly two weeks of paralysis. The state and the country have no winner. And that will not change until the recounts end and the last judges rule in a state that was never supposed to be close.
No single factor allowed Gore to overcome Bush's institutional advantages in Florida. Rather, a number of intriguing trends merged.
High turnout typically helps Democrats, and at 70 percent the turnout in Florida was nearly 4 percentage points higher than in 1996.
Turnout was immense among black voters, who made up 15 percent of the state's electorate on Nov. 7, a 50 percent increase in their share from 1996, according to surveys of voters.
Ninety-three percent of black Florida voters supported Gore, more than backed President Clinton in 1992 or 1996. Democrats and Republicans alike theorize that black voters flooded to the polls to demonstrate their antipathy toward Gov. Jeb Bush, who ended the state's affirmative action programs by executive order.
Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, a black Broward County Democrat, said that Gore was not regarded by blacks with the same affection they held for Clinton. But in his district, he said, that did not matter.
"Folk kind of came out of the woodwork," he said. "There was a backlash vote, that you did this without vetting it with us and we're not going to give your brother the same opportunity."
With help from his running mate, Sen. Joseph Lieberman, the vice president piled up a 60 percent majority in the three southeast Florida counties that Republicans call the killing fields -- Broward, Miami-Dade and Palm Beach, the locus of the recount.
He stayed essentially even with Bush in the swing-voting corridor along Interstate 4 from Tampa to Daytona Beach.
He even won in Orange County, which includes Orlando and which last went Democratic in 1944. Brimming with newcomers, including young families and Puerto Ricans, it was ripe for the picking.
Those factors alone might have given Gore a convincing victory. But in a development that many analysts cannot fathom, he lost the group he courted most assiduously: the elderly.
Despite Gore's relentless focus on Social Security, Medicare and prescription drug costs, surveys show that he won the support of only 47 percent of Floridians 60 or older, compared to 51 percent for Bush. President Clinton, by contrast, won the support of Florida's elderly by 8 percentage points in 1996 and by 12 in 1992.
"That is the strangest result I've seen in this state in 30 years," said Jim Kane, director of the Florida Voter Poll. "All the issues favored Gore with the seniors."
Kane and others speculated that the state's latest wave of retirees, many of them Reagan Democrats from the Midwest who settled on the Gulf Coast, brought more conservative politics than their Roosevelt Democrat predecessors on the Atlantic. And they were courted by effective Republican advertisements that cast Gore as a big spender and characterized his Medicare plan as "a government HMO."
As it happened, one saving grace for Gore might have been that elderly voters constituted a smaller portion of the electorate than usual: 27 percent this year, compared to 31 percent in 1996.
Clinton did not contest Florida aggressively in 1992 and narrowly lost it. He fought hard here in 1996 and won. And so more than a year ago, Clinton told Tony Coelho, Gore's campaign chairman at the time, that the Gore campaign must not repeat his 1992 mistake.
"He felt very strongly," Coelho said, "that this is a state that should be ours."
Coelho and other strategists believed that Gore would be helped by black voters agitated with Jeb Bush, by a continuing influx of non-Cuban Hispanics, by the strong campaign being mounted by the Democratic Senate candidate Bill Nelson and by Gore's stands on health coverage, Social Security and environmental issues.
Coelho, who left the campaign in June, said that Florida was a Gore target from the beginning, though not one that could not be lost. As early as January, he said, Gore advisers began talking about Sen. Bob Graham of Florida as a potential running mate. And on Super Tuesday, when Gore claimed victory over Bill Bradley in the primaries, he made a point of watching returns in Tallahassee.
That was the first of several symbolic nods. At the Democratic National Convention, Gore strategists arranged for Florida to put the vice president over the top. And when it came time to prepare for his debates with Bush, Gore set up camp near Sarasota, not once, but twice.
Gore continued to make forays into the state -- two days in April, one in May, one in June. And the Democratic National Committee bought advertising in three markets in the spring.
The Republicans dismissed the modest investment of time and money as a head fake. And Coelho said the strategy was intended to force Bush to devote resources in Florida, while also keeping Gore's options open.
Polls earlier in the year had shown Bush with a lead of as much as 20 percentage points. And Gore had seemed to hurt himself, in Florida and elsewhere, by taking a stand in the Elian Gonzalez case that was widely perceived as pandering to Miami's Republican-leaning Cubans.
Many leading Florida Republicans, therefore, continued to take a Bush victory for granted, though Bush strategists maintain they never did.
"I never thought Al Gore had a chance at taking Florida," said Rep. Joe Scarborough, a Pensacola Republican. "We had all neatly compartmentalized Bill Clinton's 1996 victory by blaming it on Bob Dole as a weak Republican candidate."
Moving into the party's convention, state Republican leaders boldly predicted that Gore would be chased from the state by Labor Day. Like Scarborough, Rep. Mark Foley, a Republican from West Palm Beach, said he did not sense trouble in Florida, or perceive nervousness from Austin, until six weeks before the election.
"It was in effect a submarine," he said. "You don't realize it's there until it rises above the surface. We were sitting on our derrieres."
In retrospect, Foley said, the Republicans were "a bit tone deaf" about issues like Social Security and prescription drugs. Gore pounded Bush in Florida throughout the fall in speeches and advertisements for being slow to offer a drug plan. And to the end, he used questions about the financing of Bush's Social Security plan to plant doubts about the governor's competence.
The race in Florida, as in the rest of the country, really began to shift for Gore after he selected Lieberman. Some Florida Democrats initially assumed he had abandoned the state because he bypassed Graham. But the polling gap tightened quickly after the Lieberman announcement and the Democratic convention.
Lieberman clearly enthralled the Jewish Democratic stalwarts in South Florida. On his first Florida trip with Gore, the Connecticut senator was mobbed as if he were a rock star after he tossed off Yiddish phrases at a community center in Broward County. The campaign sent him back to the area time after time.
By September, the Bush campaign recognized its mounting problems and began competing for the elderly with a heavy investment in advertising. The Republicans outspent the Democrats throughout the month, but their polling numbers simply would not move. Tad Devine and Michael Whouley, two top Gore strategists, began seeing Florida as an irresistible opportunity.
Jeb Bush, meanwhile, was handcuffed by concerns that the Democrats would pounce if he used the governor's office to manage his brother's campaign. And so he largely delegated the organizing effort. "There's no question," Scarborough said, "that some of his people let him down."
The Bush stasis allowed the Democrats to conserve resources until the final three weeks of the campaign, when they matched the Republicans dollar for dollar. By the end, Gore and affiliated Democratic committees had spent about $8-million, while Bush and the Republicans might have spent $6-million more, according to campaign estimates and news reports.
Gore also stepped up his travel to the state, spending 14 days there after the convention, compared to nine for Bush.
Any notion that Gore was not competing seriously dissolved when he chose Longboat Key for his debate camp in early October.
That decision was somewhat accidental. The first choice was New Hampshire, close to the Boston debate site, but the campaign could not secure enough hotel rooms because it was leaf-peeping season.
Now, of course, both campaigns find themselves second-guessing their Florida strategies. Gore's camp wonders what would have happened if resources had been diverted from Florida to Tennessee or other states.
And the Republicans wonder whether they could have finished Gore off in Florida by taking him more seriously.
"If we had nailed down Florida earlier on," Scarborough said, "we would have won with well over 300 electoral votes."