ELECTION THE FIRST ’00: TAKE The Rhodes Cook Letter December 2000 The Rhodes Cook Letter DECEMBER 2000 / VOL. 1, NO. 5 Contents The 2000 Election: The Perfect Storm. 3 The 2000 Presidential Election: Too Close to Call. 4 The Bushes, the GOP and the South: The Electoral Vote since 1988 . 7 The 2000 Senate Results: Even-Steven. 8 The 2000 House Elections: Not All They Were Pumped Up to Be. 11 The 2000 Gubernatorial Elections: A Second Glance . 14 The Presidential Vote Count . 16 Subscription Page . 17 CORRECTION In Issue 4 of The Rhodes Cook Letter, pp. 7 and 8 should read that John Quincy Adams was elected by the House of Representatives and not by electoral vote. The Rhodes Cook Letter is published periodically by Rhodes Cook. Web: rhodescook.com. E-mail: An individual subscription for six issues is $99; [email protected]. All contents are copy- for an institution, $249. Make checks payable right ©2000 Rhodes Cook. Use of the material to “The Rhodes Cook Letter” and send them, is welcome with attribution, though the author along with your e-mail address, to P.O. Box 574, retains full copyright over the material con- Annandale, VA, 22003. tained herein. Design by Landslide Design, Rockville, MD. Web: landslidedesign.com. 2 The Rhodes Cook Letter • December 2000 The 2000 Election The Perfect Storm By Rhodes Cook he nationwide vote Nov. 7 may ultimately be remembered as the political equivalent of “the Tperfect storm” – the confluence of powerful forces that has created one of the most evenly divided elections, for both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue, in American history. The presidential race is still unresolved. The Senate has ended up 50-to-50. And the difference between Democratic and Republican membership in the House of Representatives is the closest in nearly a half century. Why has this happened? ELECTION 2000: WHERE THINGS STAND On Capitol Hill, Republican margins were narrow to begin with and tightened further The results below are based on nearly complete but unof- ficial vote totals as of Dec. 1, 2000. An asterisk (*) indi- since most of the vulnerable seats were on cates that as the certified winner in Florida, George W. the GOP side. Bush has been tentatively given the state’s 25 electoral votes, although the result is subject to legal challenge. At the presidential level, Democrats were helped by a sense of national prosperity and President Popular Electoral general approval for policies of the Clinton Vote Vote administration. Al Gore (D) 50,158,094 267 George W. Bush (R) 49,820,518 271* But Republicans were boosted by wide- spread personal antipathy to Clinton and a Popular Vote Leader: Gore by 337,576 sentiment for change that often besets the Electoral Vote Leader: Bush by 4 president’s party at the eight-year mark. And at play were two conflicting presidential Before After Net Change Election Election in Seats eras – a short-term period of Democratic House of dominance in the ’90s, preceded by a longer Representatives term Republican era which saw the GOP take Republicans 222 221 Democrats five of the previous six presidential elections. Democrats 209 212 Gain 2 The last time there was such a confluence Independents 2 2 of disparate eras was in 1960 – when Repub- Vacancies 2 - licans had the short term advantage from a Senate pair of presidential victories in the 1950s, but Republicans 54 50 Democrats Democrats had lingering momentum from Democrats 46 50 Gain 4 winning the White House the previous five times. The outcome in 1960: the closest Governors presidential election of the 20th century. Republicans 30 29 Democrats Democrats 18 19 Gain 1 At least that year, though, there was clarity Independents 2 2 to the outcome as both the popular and electoral vote winners were the same. This Note: Although the Democratic House total increased from 209 year, that cannot be guaranteed and closure to 212 as a result of the Nov. 7 election, the Democrats are credited with a net gain of two because one of the seats they has been more difficult to achieve than any won was a vacancy they had previously held. election in memory. 3 The Rhodes Cook Letter • December 2000 THE 2000 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION: Too Close to Call rom start to finish, this year’s presidential election has writ large the flaws in the American Felectoral system. The nominating process started too early and was over too soon (by mid-March, before half the states had voted). The conventions five months later were little more than giant pep rallies, quite satisfied to be a political equivalent of “Happy Days.” And the general election, amazingly, is still to be decided, with the odds favoring the nation’s first “Electoral College misfire” since 1888. As December began, Al Gore was holding a lead of more than 300,000 in the popular vote, while George W. Bush maintained the inside track at capturing Florida’s 25 electoral votes that would give him the presidency. This election is clearly an instant classic, though it has underscored how fortunate the country has been that few presidential elections have been this close. Since popular voting began on a nationwide scale in 1824, only six of 45 contests for the White House have been decided by less than one percentage point. Three of those were in the 1880s, two were in the 1960s, and the other is this one. In short, elections have rarely been so close that many people cared about the decentralized nature of the way they are administered, the variety of ways that ballots can be cast, and the often partisan environment in which they are counted. Still, in spite of its obvious imperfections, this campaign 1996 vs. 2000 has engaged the elector- ate. When the Repub- lican primaries were States carried by Clinton in 1996 and Gore in 2000 in full force earlier States carried by Clinton in 1996 and Bush in 2000 this year between Bush and John States carried by Dole in 1996 and Bush in 2000 McCain, there were record turnouts in many states. And voter participa- tion in the general election has been initially placed at 50.7%, nearly two percentage points higher than 1996, while the actual number of presi- dential ballots cast should approach the record of 104.4 million in 1992. Ultimately, both parties succeeded at ral- lying their bases. Should his victory in * Florida hold, Bush will have scored an 4 The Rhodes Cook Letter • December 2000 electoral vote shutout in the South, while Gore just missed a clean sweep in the Northeast, where he lost only New Hampshire and West Virginia. Gore swept many of the large urban centers of the Frost Belt and Pacific West by wider margins than Clinton did in his clear-cut victory over Bob Dole in 1996. Gore, for instance, carried Philadelphia by nearly 340,000 votes in unofficial returns, the widest Democratic victory margin in the city in any presidential election since 1964. The vice president won the city of St. Louis by almost 72,000 votes, the second-largest Democratic victory margin there since 1968. And Gore swept San Francisco by nearly 190,000 votes, the biggest victory margin by either party in the “city by the bay” since at least 1920. Meanwhile, Bush dominated in rural and small-town America, winning more than three-quarters of the nation’s counties. And the two tended to split the large suburban vote, with Gore holding the upper hand in the Frost Belt and Bush dominating across the Sun Belt. Bush kept Reform Party candidate Patrick J. Buchanan from nibbling deeply into the conservative Republican base. And Gore did a good job fending off Green Party nominee Ralph Nader in most of the key battleground states. Nader ran best where Bush or Gore won easily, such as Alaska, Vermont, Massachusetts and Montana. Many Gore supporters have blamed Nader for costing their candidate New Hampshire, and of course, Florida, if it remains in the Bush column. But it is also arguable that Buchanan drew enough votes to cost Bush Iowa, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Oregon and Florida, if the latter should fall to Gore. And any snippiness by Democrats towards Nader would be moot if Gore had carried his home state of Tennessee and its 11 electoral votes. Clinton won Tennessee twice in the 1990s but Gore lost it by four percentage points this year, with Nader taking just 1% of the Tennessee vote. While the presidential election of 2000 in many respects was a battle of the bases, the political map is always evolving. Bush’s win in West Virginia stood out like a sore thumb; Republicans had not carried the Mountaineer State in any non-landslide election year for the GOP since New Deal days. Similarly noteworthy was the Gore-Bush dead heat in Florida, a state that Bush’s father won in 1988 by nearly 1 million votes. But Gore’s pick of Sen. Joseph I. Lieberman as his running mate helped rally the large South Florida Jewish vote and recent demographic changes within the state have tended to help the Democrats as well. Gore, for example, was the first Democratic presidential candidate to win fast-growing Orange County (Orlando) since Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1944. Ultimately, this election was expected to show whether the Clinton-Gore administration was an aberration in an otherwise Republican presidential era, or the early stage of a new era where an articulate, centrist Democrat such as Bill Clinton would have the inside track. But like many aspects of this election, that question was difficult to resolve.