Are There Any Lessons For 2020 In Bush v. Gore?

Florida. Great for beach vacations, bad for Al Gore circa 2000.

As we’ve all heard for weeks now, the vote count this Election Day could be slow and the results could be contested — the campaigns each have an army of recount lawyers at the ready. In the fragile political environment of America in 2020, that has lots of people worried.

A few weeks ago, I turned to history to see if there were any lessons we could learn from the contentious recount in Florida in 2000 that pitted Republican candidate George W. Bush against Gore, the Democrat, and eventually found its way to the United States Supreme Court. Mostly what I found was that back then, though many people were angered by the way the election was decided, they mostly kept their faith in democratic institutions and the process.

The same can’t be said of today: In a late September Monmouth University poll, 39 percent of people said they were “not too confident” or “not at all confident” that the 2020 election would be conducted “fairly and accurately.” A FiveThirtyEight/Ipsos poll from about the same time found that while 60 percent of people surveyed said the election would be fair, 39 percent said it wouldn’t be.

For comparison, back in 2000, 60 percent of people in one CBS News poll said there had not been a fair and accurate count of votes. Still, 59 percent of people in an ABC News/Washington Post poll from the same time said their opinion of the Supreme Court remained unchanged. That same poll asked what people would think if there were an unofficial recount and Gore were declared the winner. Would they consider Bush legitimately elected? Eighty-four percent answered, “Yes.”

In other words, most people were willing to move on and trust that the democratic process had worked well, even if their preferred candidate hadn’t won. In today’s highly partisan America we’re discussing all-out civil war if things are too close to call or if people feel the process has been less than fair. What a difference 20 years can make.