With the Clinton era coming to an end, the nation was enjoying a prosperous economy fueled by the explosive rise of Internet businesses in the late 1990s. The Monica Lewinsky sex scandal, in which President Clinton was accused of inappropriate conduct with a White House intern, had less effect than Republican leaders hoped; it caused them to lose seats in the 1998 midterms, which was an unusual event (the party controlling the White House typically loses seats in midterms).Nonetheless, Republicans were hopeful to regain the White House in 2000. The early front-runner in the race was Texas governor George W. Bush, the son of former President Bush. "Dubya" had been considered presidential timber since a meeting with ex-cabinet member George Schulz in early 1998. Among other GOP hopefuls, Dan Quayle, Elizabeth Dole, Lamar Alexander, and Bob Smith dropped out of the race before the primaries started for lack of funds or support. The pool of candidates who would actually contest the Republican primaries was whittled down to Bush, John McCain, Alan Keyes, Steve Forbes, Gary Bauer, and Orrin Hatch. Bush swept the opening Iowa caucus and looked to be the front runner as Hatch dropped out and endorsed him. By now McCain was the most serious remaining challenger and the other candidates abandoned their efforts. The Arizona Senator enjoyed a surprise victory in the New Hampshire primary but Bush beat him in South Carolina.
McCain attacked Bush for speaking at Bob Jones University, which forbade interracial dating between students and he also attacked evangelists Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson as bigoted. After the next several primaries it was obvious that McCain had lost and he dropped out following Super Tuesday. Bush clinched the nomination and was nominated at the RNC in Philadelphia July 31-August 3. He ended up asking ex-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney to be his running mate. This created a few legal issues because Cheney, a Wyoming native, had resided in Texas since the early '90s and the Constitution prohibits presidential electors from selecting a president and vice president from the same state. Cheney thus changed his voting registration to Wyoming or else Texas electors would not have been allowed to select either him or Bush.On the Democrat side, Vice President Al Gore was the early favorite. Other Democrat possibilities included Bob Kerrey, Dick Gephardt, Paul Wellstone, and actor/director Warren Beatty but none of them aside from Wellstone expressed any interest in running. Gore only faced one serious challenge from ex-New Jersey Senator and ex-NBA player Bill Bradley, who enjoyed the endorsement of Michael Jordan, campaigned on a broad liberal message of social welfare spending which seemed feasible with the booming late '90s economy, campaign finance reform, and gun control. However Gore enjoyed the support of most major Democrat donors and easily beat Bradley in the Iowa caucus after portraying him as indifferent to the plight of farmers (the memory of the 1980s farm mortgage crisis in the Hawkeye State was still fresh). By March Gore's nomination was assured. At the DNC in Los Angeles from August 14-17, Gore was nominated unanimously after Bradley's delegates were forbidden to vote for him.
Gore ended up selecting Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate, the first Jewish person to ever appear on a major party ticket. Other possibilities included Evan Bayh, John Edwards, John Kerry, Dick Gephardt, and Jeanne Shaheen.Two third party tickets emerged in Pat Buchanan's Reform Party and Ralph Nader's Green Party--real estate magnate and future president Donald Trump announced his plan to run on the Reform ticket but had abandoned the effort by March.
With the strong US economy and general domestic tranquility, domestic issues during the campaign were largely garden-variety ones like entitlement reforms, taxes, and health care. Foreign policy aroused stronger overall emotions. The Bush campaign attacked President Clinton for the botched US military intervention in Somalia at the start of his presidency which left 18 servicemen dead, and for Clinton's interventions in the Balkan conflicts, accusing him of wrongfully using American troops for nation-building. Gore meanwhile questioned his opponent's intelligence and qualifications to be president. The Lewinsky scandal continued to be played up by the Republican campaign as Bush promised to restore dignity and morality to the White House. The Gore campaign largely avoided referencing Monica Lewinsky, although Senator Lieberman had been an early critic of President Clinton there. It was speculated that the choice of Lieberman for Gore's running mate was deliberate and to disassociate himself from Clinton. The president himself was largely kept off the campaign trail and out of view.Bush came under fire from anti-death penalty activists for his strong support of capital punishment as Texas governor; the Lone Star State led the nation in executions. The biggest controversy surrounded the governor's refusal to commute the sentence of Betty Lou Beets, who had been convicted of murdering her husband in 1983, as there was considerable opposition to the idea of executing a woman. Bush would not back down and Beets was executed in Texas's electric chair on February 24.
Reminder the networks called Florida for Gore before polls closed in the panhandle region which was a Republican stronghold, suppressing many more Bush votes than any potential recount would have found for Gore. In reality Bush's final margin was smaller than it should have been.
Ralph Nader meanwhile mounted a barnstorm campaign, holding large rallies and enjoying celebrity endorsements. The Gore campaign eventually responded by arguing that the vice president agreed with Nader on most major issues and that it would be unwise to risk splitting the Democrat vote. The RNC also exploited this by running pro-Nader ads in certain states in the hope of siphoning off Gore's votes. Both campaigns deployed their running mates extensively and Cheney and Lieberman actively campaigned.Bush and Gore held three televised debates on October 3, 11, and 17 while Cheney and Lieberman held a debate on October 5. The most notable moment in the debates was when Gore claimed to have "took the initiative in creating the Internet" which was widely turned around into the joking catch phrase "Gore invented the Internet" when he really meant he was on a committee that funded research leading to the development of the World Wide Web.
On November 7, Election Day, Bush easily swept most of the South including President Clinton's home state of Arkansas and also Gore's home state of Tennessee. He also dominated the Midwest outside Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota. Gore carried all of the Northeast outside New Hampshire, which Bush barely managed to win, the West Coast, Hawaii, and New Mexico. Several states had very close returns but by the morning of November 8, the electoral vote total stood at 250 Democrat and 246 Republican, with neither having reached the 270 threshold. Wisconsin and Oregon were still counting votes but Florida would clearly be the lynchpin. The major TV networks had called Florida for Gore in the evening but Bush's lead began growing and the state was soon put back in the too close to call column.In the early morning of the 8th, Bush was ahead in Florida by 100,000 votes and the networks were calling the election over and him the winner. But the remaining votes were mostly in Broward, Miami-Dade, and Palm Beach, all majority Democrat counties, and as they began to come in Bush's lead diminished to barely 2,000 votes. After initially conceding the election, Gore withdrew it. Due to the narrow vote margin, Florida law required a mandatory recount. Once this was done, Bush was ahead by 300 votes. Once overseas votes, mainly from US military personnel stationed overseas, came in, Bush was ahead by 930. The state election board certified Bush as the winner on November 26 by 537 votes which Gore contested. The Florida supreme court ordered a recount of 70,000 ballots rejected by machine counters as undervotes. The US Supreme Court halted that order the next day.
On December 12, the Supreme Court ruled 5-4 that the state supreme court's recount decision violated the 14th Amendment and ordered the latter to go back and modify the case before the deadline. Since only two hours remained, the ruling effectively ended the recount. If the USSC had ruled differently, then the Florida state legislature had been planning to select a slate of electors if the dispute was still going on. If the recount went forward, the electors would have been awarded to Bush based on the state-certified vote and the only thing left for Gore to do at that point was to contest the electors in Congress but they would only be rejected if both the House and Senate assented and since both were Republican controlled, it would have been a lost cause for the vice president.Gore had exceeded Bush's popular vote total by 543,895 votes, making it the first presidential election since 1888 where the winner failed to get the popular vote. He was the first major party candidate to fail to carry his home state since 1972. The Republican candidate had carried all of the Southern states for the third time since that election and Bush also flipped West Virginia, a state that had been mostly Democrat in presidential elections since 1932 but would shift to being a safe Republican state. The possibility of the winner failing to get the popular vote had been contemplated by some pollsters, but most assumed it would be Gore rather than the reverse. Bush was the first son of a president to be elected president himself since John Quincy Adams. With 266 electoral votes, Gore has gotten the highest EV total to date of any losing candidate.
The media was accused of trying to manipulate the election results in favor of Gore by calling several states for him early while delaying similar calls for states that Bush won. It has been speculated that Bush had a chance at carrying Wisconsin, New Mexico, Oregon, and Iowa (he would carry two of those states in the 2004 election) as the vote total was close and the networks called them for Gore early in the evening of November 7, which may have demoralized potential Republican voters and convinced them to stay home. It was also speculated that Ralph Nader's third party ticket could have cost Gore the election exactly as some in the Democrat camp feared it would, and that had Nader not been on the ballot, Gore could have carried New Hampshire and Florida and the election with them.There were calls to install electronic voting machines and complaints that Florida's mechanical voting machines were confusing and hard for many voters to use. Sociologists Christopher Uggen and Jeff Manza believed that Florida could have been carried by Gore but for its stringent policies forbidding convicted felons the vote. One study found that Florida had almost 900,000 persons with felony records who were ineligible to vote and that this law especially had the effect of disenfranchising African-American voters.Demographic breakdowns of the 2000 election show that Gore's voter base had a much higher proportion of minority voters than Bush's, with 90% of blacks, 55% of Asians, and 62% of Hispanics voting Democrat. Broken down by age, Bush performed best with middle aged voters while people under 30 and over 55 favored Gore. Lower income voters also strongly favored Gore while Bush's voter base leaned wealthier.
>>18413913>>18413917>The major TV networks had called Florida for Gore in the eveningBefore polls closed in the Republican-leaning panhandle.>It has been speculated that Bush had a chance at carrying Wisconsin, New Mexico, Oregon, and IowaAnd Florida.
>Martin, we still have a wad of cash, right?>Uh, no actually I seem to have spent our last ten bucks on this Al Gore doll.>"You are hearing me talk."
A LOCK BOX
>elderly Jews who couldn't see very well voting for Pat "Buchenwald" BuchananNot bloody likely.
Reminder that if Jeb had won the 1994 Florida governor election then he, as the favored son of the Bush family, likely would have been the Republican nominee in 2000 as Dubya would have stepped aside for him.Jeb lost in 1994 by 49.23% to Lawton Chiles's 50.75%, but would later win the Florida governorship in 1998 with 55.27% of the vote. But by this point he had already lost all political momentum to his brother.How would Jeb! have fared in 2000 if he had been the Republican nominee facing against Al Gore? And what would Dubya have done in that timeline?
an uncommon election where the party in power lost when there was not an economic recession
>>18413936It was a very marginal effect, yet it was an effect, and since the official results were marginal it was enough to be a potential decider. But in reality it all gets massively offset by >>18413911 which makes the whole "stolen election" meme irrelevant and unsympathetic.
>>18413943Other ones would be 1912, 1952, and 1968.
Compared to Clinton, Gore was just a stiff, boring neoliberal technocrat and somewhat entitled and arrogant. Bush beat him hands down at being folksy and aw, shucks.
>>18413943>the party in power lostExcept they didn't. Gore won the election.
>>18413949Also 1976 and 2016.
Gore tried too hard to distance himself from the still-popular Clinton and putting Lieberman on the ticket was because he had denounced the president during Monicagate.
>>184139631976 itself had no recession but the years leading up to the election were rough economically. 2016 true but Obama's entire Presidency was marked by rather slow recovery. Even in the 2012 exit polls most voters disapproved of the state of the economy.2024 did have a recession but jobs reports were faked to create the impression of a strong jobs market(with later revisions consistently showing this was not at all the case)
>>18413904Facts is no Democrat has ever won a presidential election without at least one Southern state and Gore did not get any of those.
>>18413949there technically wasn't a recession in 1952 but there were cutbacks in consumer goods production from the Korean War
>>18413904after eight years a party switch was inevitable because voters like change for its own sake
An understated factor in Gore's defeat is that Gen X had a beef with his wife.
>>18413906>This created a few legal issues because Cheney, a Wyoming native, had resided in Texas since the early '90s and the Constitution prohibits presidential electors from selecting a president and vice president from the same state. Cheney thus changed his voting registration to Wyoming or else Texas electors would not have been allowed to select either him or Bush.Now I know one(1) Wyoming native. Undisputed proof it exists
>>18413995yeah i was in high school back then and Tipper was well known as the world's most obnoxious Helen Lovejoy wannabe
>>18413993>LBJfag once again whining about every Republican victory being unfair because of the EC
If Gore went with Jeanne Shaheen he probably carries New Hampshire and with it the election. Lieberman was from an already safe Democrat state so he gained nothing from him being on the ticket.
The final election where the Democrat candidate carried any counties in Oklahoma.
>>18414010^This. Lieberman added literally nothing to the ticket.
>>18414012You can really tell where all the niggers live in the deep south kek
FWIW>Florida had begun to swing Republican in presidential elections starting in the 50s but the state government was mostly run by traditional Southern Democrats>the state legislature was controlled by Democrats for 105 consecutive years and the governorship all but eight years of that time>Louisiana's state government was totally Democrat controlled for 109 of the 114 years from 1878 to 1992>in that time one Republican governor was elected and one Democrat governor switched parties for a year>the last Republican Senator from Louisiana was elected in 1882The point is Republican penetration into the South took a long time and for some decades was mostly confined to affluent suburbs that housed people employed in the MIC, which was a key Republican constituency. Rural Southerners remained heavily Democrat into the 90s even if the younger generation were becoming more Republican.
>>18413914They hired a bunch of Haitian poll workers in Florida and they hated Clinton for the '95 intervention in Haiti so they all voted Republican 20x each as a huge fuck you.
right up until the recount this election was almost as boring as the '96 one had been. it was like "who cares about some talking heads discussing Medicare and tax policy? pass the PS1 controller."
>>18413995Next to that Gore openly came out against smoking and that must have also cost him some Southern votes since tobacco was then still an important crop there.
Gore looked like a classic Ivory Tower elitist and it rubbed people the wrong way.
>There were multiple irregularities and the vote tally in Florida, where the GOP candidate's brother was governor, was close enough for a recount.>Then Republican operatives (among them Roger Stone) disrupted the recount with their Brooks Brothers riot and that gave the Republican-dominated Supreme Court an excuse to stop the recount.>That decision by the court was so shoddy that the justices put an asterisk next to it asserting that it should not serve as precedent in future cases.
>>18413914Had the recounts Gore requested been fully completed he would have lost by 225 votes per the NORC study. The only way for him to have won is via a state-wide recount that he never asked for and thus it never occurred.
Nader siphoned off a lot of Gore's votes.
>>18414012what is this one county in South Dakota which voted heavily democratic? these elections were not the only case
>>18414083>what is this one county in South Dakota which voted heavily democratic?Indian reservation.
Gore won the popular vote, the system gave the presidency to Bush. The Electoral College is an outdated institution that needs to go.
>>18414084Ahh ok
>>18413995What happened?
>>18414086And if it went by popular vote tens of millions of people would have changed their voting strategy. tens of millions more votes would have been cast. So you really can't say the popular vote means anything when the rules were the way they were.
>>18414102The EC exists for a reason, so the entire country gets a say at the table.
Gore legitimately won Florida. Also, the GOP did an excellent job of character assassination. To this day, Republicans still don't believe in climate change. Besides winning the election, the Republicans destroyed the planet for human life.
>>18413910Gore's team did the same thing Dole's did four years ago which was to encourage him to act as robotic as possible.
>>18414010there were a lot of people who had a pathological distrust of voting for a ticket with a Jewish guy on it. i'm not going to say if this was a good or bad thing, just that it was true.
>Mister Environment loses West Virginia and the election, and ultimately lost what was once a reliable blue state forever
>>18414115Yeah but wasn't Gore also saying retarded shit like how the entire world was going to be underwater by the year 2010?
>>18414115t. LBJfag
The late night comedy jokes about Gore being robotic were not for nothing. He and Clinton were DINOs who supported most of the same policies as Bush. They set back LGBT rights in America and alienated a lot of the Democrat base. Tipper Gore attacked hip-hop music and tried to get it banned. Also, Gore tried to use the "climate crisis" as a campaign platform, the problem with this is that platform position put him at odds with his corporate globalist overlords (money donors) so, he was destined to lose.And the fact that there was documented voter suppression in the entire state of Florida.
>>18413910First off, Clinton signed Republican bills into law including cutting social services the disadvantaged and minorities depended on and sucked billionaire cock by giving the rich tax breaks. The left were disillusioned with Gore and voted for Nader instead which split the vote. Gore also faced a hostile media that made fun of him every chance they got. And I still haven't figured out exactly why Gore's own home town and state dropped him like a hot potato, unless it has something to do with all the money the Frists were blessing Nashville with making it difficult for anyone of influence to brave the crowd, particularly right-leaning media.
did you ever watch one of Gore's speeches?>>18413929yes that's actually how he talks
>>18413904Gore carried New Mexico by only 366 votes. Bush had initially considered seeking a recount there but decided it wouldn't affect the election outcome once he secured Florida.
the fact that Gore didn't win his own state seems to prove he legit lost the election
>>18414248i don't dispute that the Republicans did a lot of crooked stuff and the fact that Bush's brother was the fucking governor of Florida basically made the recount there a foregone conclusion. still, Gore not winning his home state was embarrassing.
>>18414010Gore did ask Shaheen, and she turned him down. He should’ve gone with Evan Bayh over Lieberman
>The bigger problem was the campaign’s resolve to steer clear of Clinton’s record. “I would have done whatever was necessary to elect Al Gore,” says pollster Stan Greenberg. “I would have had Bill Clinton carry Al Gore around on his back if I thought it would get Al Gore elected president.” But, he insists, “what our research showed ... was that when Al Gore went out running on that record, he performed more weakly.” It made a crude kind of sense, on paper: all the data said that talking about the past—even to brag about the unparalleled prosperity of the 90s—led voters to unwelcome thoughts of Bill Clinton.>The only thing this calculus omits is common sense, for it left Gore without a strong rationale for his run, making him a candidate who seemed less than the sum of his parts. “If Gore were to find in the polling data that having worked with Clinton was a negative, it doesn’t mean that pretending not to have was a positive,” says Bill Curry, a Connecticut politician and former Clinton aide. “He was so connected to Clinton that it was impossible to separate himself from Clinton.... And in his anxiousness to separate himself from Clinton, he separated himself from himself.”>What Gore presented instead, starting with his convention speech, was a sort of diffuse neopopulism. It even worked for a time, producing spikes in the tracking polls. But it wasn’t enough to counteract voters’ larger impression that Al Gore wasn’t a coherent figure whose real substance was available for examination. “With Gore, [voters] see this lurching back and forth, indecision, uncertainty about his relationship with Clinton,” says a longtime Gore ally. “They see a guy who is, bottom line, in some ways unsteady.”
>>18414302>Perhaps Gore would have faced this bedrock problem without the drama of the Clinton factor. But his anxiety over Clinton magnified it, making it the very backdrop of his entire campaign. He ended up wrapping himself in the most dangerous parts of the Clinton legacy—voters’ doubts about values and trustworthiness—while getting no credit for the parts that had sustained Clinton’s approval ratings throughout the impeachment process.>“The psychodrama overpowers everything,” says someone who knows Gore well. “I think the guy just so much wanted for this to be his victory, and not Clinton’s. He didn’t want to wear the older sibling’s jeans.”>This, finally, is the other explanation for why Gore seemed so unnerved by his Clinton problem. As the son of a forceful father who had bragged of raising him for the presidency, Gore had struggled all his life with the assumption that he was wearing borrowed clothes. Even under the best of circumstances, it might have been harder for him than for others to manage with grace the eternal vice-presidential conundrum of how to stop looking like a second fiddle when his turn finally came>“Clinton was going nuts,” says someone who spoke to him in the late stages of the campaign. “He’s going, ‘Don’t use me, O.K. But, God knows, use my presidency. Use my record!’”
>>18414248Even if FL was stolen, there were still other close states such as NH and taking any one of those would have won him the election.
This was the last election where both parties flipped states.
>>18413904how'd Bush get New Hampshire? only presidential election since 1988 where a New England state went Republican.
>>18414502Best guess is Nader stealing Gore's votes; if he wasn't running then Gore easily wins. In 2004 Bush failed to carry NH likely because Kerry was a New Englander and connected better with those voters.
>>18414502Bush had some traction in New England the first time around due to his "compassionate conservative" message and the fact that voters still remembered that the Bush family were originally New Englanders.
>>18414507New Hampshire is a famously libertarian state that didn't go much for the Patriot Act.
>>18414504I will agree that Kerry had regional appeal there, but he also hotly contested the NH primary which must have raised his profile.
Kerry waged a better fight per capita considering he was up against a pretty popular incumbent. Gore's performance was just pathetic considering he wouldn't have had to work as hard to win.
the Gore vote was under-counted in a whole swathe of counties. That's why the FL SoS blocked a full recount.
>>18414507New England is a bit politically eccentric, it has weird combinations of libertarians, hippies, and pro-2A leftists.
>>18414520i graduated high school in Portland, Maine in 06. didn't agree with the opinions of my very lefty schoolteachers. after graduating i enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Oklahoma but i didn't care much for the Southern good ol' boys there either. "conservative" in Maine and "conservative" in Oklahoma or Arkansas are two quite different things.
>>18414504no Democrat has carried New Hampshire by double digits since LBJ and Obama was the first to carry every county since native son Franklin Pierce 156 years earlier
If you're a zoomer you don't remember just how obnoxious Al Gore was, just the sound of his voice. BTW this was before a couple of massage therapists claimed he sexually harrassed them.
>>18413975Gore didn't actually live in TN anymore by 2000 so the locals didn't consider him a native son, much like how Trump is a de-facto Floridian now and didn't get any New York votes.
as someone who saw Gore at a book signing once, i've never been entirely convinced he's not an android. he addressed everyone at the signing with the same two sentences, just changing the inflection as needed
>>18414546Tennesseans said he won his home state of Washington D.C. Also Al Gore circa 1988 was not Al Gore in 2000.
>>18414549the state was already Republican-leaning by then; Clinton carried it in 96 by only three percentage points. the Gore campaign also automatically assumed he'd win TN so they didn't bother campaigning there at al.
>>18414516Kerry had won harder fights before the presidency. He won three purple hearts you know
>>18414559Gore came out in favor of reasonable gun control laws, depending on the Million Mom March to turn out support. They couldn’t. Cost him TN and WV.
>>18414564Tipper's past antics also didn't help her in Music City, I think. It's actually very funny considering that Al Gore Sr. helped defeat the Smathers Bill in the 50s when they wanted the FCC to ban non-Tin Pan Alley music as degenerate.
>>18414566Nashville and Memphis aren't as rock-ribbed conservative as the rest of the state though.
>>18414567so Tipper helped him there because she threw a bitchfit over Van Halen in 1985?
Unsurprisingly, Gore's anti-2A stance was not very well-received in the South, or in New Hampshire.
>>18414572ditto his environmentalist policies that would have killed the TVA (ironic since that was the Democrat god FDR's baby)
>>18414305Clinton was not actually super-popular by the end of his administration. Gore expressly asked him to not campaign on his behalf. Although Tennessee was definitely Republican-leaning, he also did nothing to keep the state in the Democrat column.
>>18414559let's be honest, Bush felt like a lot more of a Southern good ol' boy than Gore. their actual policies were somewhat less important than the fact that Gore looked like a stereotypical D.C. insider.
>>18414532Generally the North is "I don't give a shit what you do, but stay away from me"While the South is "I don't mind getting close to you, but you better don't get fag uppity"
>>18414591First off,>Gore grew up in D.C.>attended Harvard>only pretended to be from TN when it was politically convenient for him>all the personality of a block of wood
as others said, the whole PMRC thing must have put off a lot of Gen Xers from voting for Gore
>>18414090she co-founded the PMRC
If Gore is not on the ticket Tennessee might end up even redder. Lieberman was definitely a poor choice of running mate since he was from an already safe Democrat state Gore was not at risk of losing and there's a lot of /pol/tards who weren't going to vote for a ticket with a Jewish guy on it. Shaheen would have brought him New Hampshire and the election, and perhaps appealed to soccer moms.
>>18414610On the other hand, Cheney was basically a bad VP for the purposes of the election, since neither Texas nor Wyoming were in play and Bush already had the support of the GOP elite
>>18414610>Lieberman was definitely a poor choice of running mate since he was from an already safe Democrat state Gore was not at risk of losing and there's a lot of /pol/tards who weren't going to vote for a ticket with a Jewish guy on it.on the other hand, he might draw out more Jewish voters but they were already a safe Democrat bloc so Gore also gained nothing from that
In addition, Lieberman did nothing to make up for Gore's robotic personality. In the vice presidential debate he talked about his plan for erasing the national debt by 2012 which sounded intelligent enough, but he said it in such a dry, terse way that it put everyone to sleep while Cheney was witty and sarcastic.
>>18414610Alternatively Bob Graham would have gotten Gore Florida. While retired Jews in that state might have turned out more with Lieberman on the ticket, they were a small part of the state's total population and mostly all safe Democrat voters. It's also possible that a lot of Southern evangelicals would not vote for a ticket with a Jew on it.
>>18414624my cousin worked on Gore's campaign and he said the plan was definitely for Lieberman to bring out Jewish voters in FL in enough numbers to tip the state
i should add that Lieberman was up for reelection in the Senate that year and chose to run for his seat again which proves he didn't even believe himself that Gore was going to win
>>18414624mf-er did nothing to really improve Gore's chances. he was a boring career politician from a safe blue state. he was supposed to add some foreign policy experience to the ticket in the same way Cheney did for Bush.
Trying to distance himself from Clinton. One has to remember that a lot of the snob liberal elite never quite warmed to Slick Willy because of his Southern white trash image, although his charisma meant that their resentment got redirected elsewhere especially on Hillary and Al Gore. Nonetheless all the pundits and Democrat strategists were saying Gore needed to break from Clinton, and Lieberman was supposed to help with that.
Gore's other considered running mates were Jeanne Shaheen, Evan Bayh, John Edwards, John Kerry, and Dick Gephardt.
>>18414660Edwards and Shaheen would have been the best picks as far as getting him states he needed to win. Kerry wouldn't be of much use in that regard. Bayh and Gephardt were extremely boring and their states were pretty much safe red ones Gore was unlikely to flip.
>>18414664Gephardt could have had a chance since he was one of the last old-school New Deal Democrats left on the national stage. He was a big proponent of the dying carcass of organized labor.
>>18414651the FL vote was only as close as it was because Lieberman got out Jewish votes
Bob Graham was probably Gore's best bet. Bayh was boring, Gephardt might have appealed to NAFTA opponents, and Shaheen might win NH but her being a woman probably loses votes elsewhere.
>>18414660>EdwardsYoung and charismatic, inexperienced maybe a bit too risky>BayhWas young and would be a great help in the Midwest>GephardtWould probably help in the Midwest/Rust Belt although the Bush campaign would have attacked him for certain flip-flops>KerryHe might bring more liberal and foreign policy-minded voters, but from a geographical POV won't really help Gore win anything he needs>ShaheenWould probably carry NH for Gore, maybe appeal to women voters
Has anyone ever actually had their vote legitimately swayed by whatever powerless cuck was going to be the fucking vice president? I find that idea highly dubious.
>>18414724>vice president>isn't a depraved hedonistfalse advertising 2bh
>>18414724I think it depends on how likely people think the president was going to die or be assassinated while in office
>>18414598>>18414602>The Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC) was a bipartisan United States government committee formed in 1985[1] with the stated goal of increasing parental control over children's access to music deemed to have violent, drug-related, or sexual themes. The committee's work led to the widespread adoption of the Parental Advisory sticker. The PMRC was known for its prejudicial targeting of heavy metal music, which drew opposition and criticism.[2] On political and religious grounds, the committee was supported by American televangelists, Reaganites, and the larger evangelical movement, who accused rock and heavy metal music of harboring Satanic and occult related themes.>The committee was founded by four women known as the "Washington Wives"—a reference to their husbands' connections with government in the Washington, D.C. area. The women who founded the PMRC are Tipper Gore, wife of Senator and later Vice President Al Gore; Susan Baker, wife of Treasury Secretary James Baker; Pam Howar, wife of Washington realtor Raymond Howar; and Sally Nevius, wife of former Washington City Council Chairman John Nevius. The PMRC eventually grew to include 22 participants before shutting down in the mid-to-late 1990s.This is what Karens used to be about
>>18414724VP pick is one of those things that can harm you but not benefit you. In other words just avoid a blunder pick(someone deeply unpopular, a really bad campaigner etc.) and other than that it's irrelevant.
>>18414564>reasonable gun control lawskys
>>18414732as anon said some people might have not liked the idea of a Jewish guy being vice president, though Gore was a perfectly healthy middle aged man (in fact younger than Bush or the two latest occupants of the White House) and unlikely to die in office.
>>18414826i mean, the Gingrich Congress also passed a bunch of dum nanny state laws like trying to ban cartoon porn which the Supreme Court shot down so they had issues with Karens or trying to pander to Karens as well
>>18414071Networks suppressed tens of thousands of Bush votes by calling the state for Gore before polls closed in the panhandle. No one cares about your legalist crap.
i'm not sure geographical play matters so much with candidates anymore and as anon said, 2000 was the last election where both parties managed to flip a state
>>18414673Bob Graham famously did not even make Gore’s shortlist because Graham kept a meticulous record of what he was doing at all times, even the most mundane things like what he ate every day and rewinding rented vhs tapes. Some described Graham as “pathologically OCD” and the Gore campaign were worried about him coming off as weird to voters
>>18415099Wrong, in 2004 both Iowa and New Hampshire flipped on both sides.
btw Joe Lieberman was well known as a DINO, mf-er voted with Republicans about 80% of the time and was a Republican for all practical purposes; he only ran as a Democrat to get elected in Connecticut
>>18415157He voted over 90% of the time with Democrats according to objective trackers, he only broke with them on foreign policy. Also he literally won in Connecticut as a third-party candidate in 2006.
>>18415054It's true. There's no reason that a drug using wife beater should be allowed to have guns when all the data suggests it's a public safety risk. Or that some rando can buy whatever gun he wants whenever he wants no questions asked.
>>18415190Good thing that's not the case, spergo.
There were no gun control laws, at least not at the Federal level, prior to 1933.
Is this another thread where LBJfag rants about abolishing the electoral college when it's an election the Republican guy won?
>>18415225Yes sir >>18414086
>>18413906It's funny seeing a Republican accusing another Republican of being a chud. And in restrospect Bush did not at all end up being some overwhelming conservative he was portrayed to be, it really was just shallow pandering.
After 9/11 Bush pushed the "religion of peace" nonsense and constantly defended "our muslim communities". The retconned narrative that there was 'rampant islamophobia' relies on heavy cherry-picking from anecdotal entertainment media while ignoring the political establishment and the news media closing ranks to make sure Muslims in America are still supported.
>>18413910>pickek, this one kinda got me, some of them boomer strips are alrite
>>18414012Nebraska red as fuck
>>18414108>so the entire country gets a say at the table.Unless you're a Democrat leaning voter in Indiana or a Republican voter in MinnesotaSure, more empty states don't get cajoled by the bigger ones this way, but I don't feel like ignoring so many (possible) votes is the way to do so
>>18413929/thread
>>18413904The 2000 election was the first (but certainly not the last) election where one of the major parties attempted to ignore the clear rules, and instead attempt to divine the intentions of voters they've never met.The whole argument came down to what became known as 'chads'. The rules clearly defined what did and did not constitute a legal vote, but the democrats instead decided to argue over real (or even imagined) dimpled ballots; which they argued signaled some sort of unproven intention by the voters.Meanwhile, in other districts, a whole lot of people weren't smart enough to fill out their ballots; and the democrats argued that all of the people who voted for candidate "C", really wanted to vote for candidate "B", even though the ballot clearly said otherwise.It is the concept of fixed election rules which suffered the most in 2000; and even today we face the consequences of the pandora's box opened that year
>>18415956And here's the ballot which 'confused' the voters. The dems argued that most (if not all) of the votes that Buchanan received should have gone to Gore.Which takes me back full circles: when the election rules clearly say one thing, they wanted to argue that the presidential election should be overturned in their favor because people were too stupid to follow the rules
>>18414580>The only thing this calculus omits is common sense, for it left Gore without a strong rationale for his run, making him a candidate who seemed less than the sum of his parts. “If Gore were to find in the polling data that having worked with Clinton was a negative, it doesn’t mean that pretending not to have was a positive,” says Bill Curry, a Connecticut politician and former Clinton aide. “He was so connected to Clinton that it was impossible to separate himself from Clinton.... And in his anxiousness to separate himself from Clinton, he separated himself from himself.”>What Gore presented instead, starting with his convention speech, was a sort of diffuse neopopulism. It even worked for a time, producing spikes in the tracking polls. But it wasn’t enough to counteract voters’ larger impression that Al Gore wasn’t a coherent figure whose real substance was available for examination. “With Gore, [voters] see this lurching back and forth, indecision, uncertainty about his relationship with Clinton,” says a longtime Gore ally. “They see a guy who is, bottom line, in some ways unsteady.”
>>18415971>the ballot which 'confused' the voters.designed by a woman, so of course the balletwill be complicated for the sake of being complicated.
the guy who looks more personable usually wins the election. this has been true in basically every presidential contest going back to Thomas Jefferson.
>>18416079We talked about this in previous threads. Ford was more charismatic and personable than Carter but still lost.
