Andrew E. Busch - The Perfect Tie: The True Story of the 2000 Presidential Election

The 2000 election was unusual, even unprecedented, in that all three of the elected national institutionsthe presidency, the House, and the Senatewere considered to be in play for both parties during the campaign. No other general campaign in modern American history has offered this range of choice. Any one of the eight logical partisan combinations for organizing the governing institutions was a genuine option. (For those who have never before bothered to consider these combinations, they are a Republican President with a Republican House and a Republican Senate or RRR; RRD; RDR; RDD; DDD; DRD; DDR; and DRR.)

The election results only confirmed that any of these combinations was possible. The outcome for each contest could just as easily have gone to the other party. The presidency was decided by a chad, the Senate ended with a tie, and the House left the two parties only a few seats apart. If there was any deviation from the most commonly expected results, it was in a reversal of the expectations for the Democrats performance in the elections for the two houses of Congress. The results in the House of Representatives were a bit of a disappointment for Democrats. The 2000 election was the third contest since the Republican revolution of 1994, and in each one the Democrats chipped away at the Republican majority. The Democrats gained nine seats in 1996, five seats in 1998, but only two in 2000, falling short of their strong hopes of winning a majority. The Senate outcome moved in the other direction, with Democrats doing very well, picking up a net of four seats. This result overcame part of the huge Republican surge of 1994, when the Republicans gained eleven seats. Three Republican incumbents from that classSpencer Abraham of Michigan, Rod Grams of Minnesota, and John Ashcroft of Missouriwent down in defeat.

There was also something almost uncanny in the way the Senate result paralleled what was happening in the presidential election. On election night two of the networks called the race in the state of Washington for the Democrat, Maria Cantwell, which meant a 50-50 division in the Senate. But by morning, they withdrew the call, and in the actual counting of ballots, the Republican incumbent, Slade Gorton, was in the lead, and remained so for nearly two weeks. Finally, as the post-presidential contest in Florida was entering its third week, Maria Cantwell took the lead for good and, following a mandatory recount, was awarded the seat by a 2,229-vote margina veritable landslide in comparison to the presidential contest in Florida.

Although a single partisan majority was attainable for all three institutions, voters showed little sign during the campaign that they were ready to give, in one fell swoop, one party a single national majority. Political professionals, of course, were intensely aware of the stakes involved. The national parties and various special interest groups and labor unions waged huge and impressive efforts to either hold on to or win majorities in both houses. Large sums of money were raised and organizational support created by the parties and by supporting partisan groups, and poured into competitive House and Senate races. But the professionals obsession with national majorities was never quite matched by the public. Individual voters both denationalized and separated congressional races from the presidential contest. There was no galvanizing theme running across all competitive districts like there was in 1994 and 1998. The presidential and congressional contests took place in remarkable isolation from each other. In the press in 2000, the term coattails turned up more often in occasional references to outmoded fashions in formal clothing than it did in reference to political contests.

This separation of the presidential and congressional races resulted in part from a strategic choice by both candidates. Neither one, especially George W. Bush who was running from outside of Washington and who offered himself as a pragmatic candidate from the gubernatorial wing of his party, wanted to tie himself too closely to the congressional wing of his party. The separation was strikingly illustrated in the candidates convention speeches, in which neither man asked for a party majority in Congress or used his party label to rally a national majority.

Political conditions in 2000 made it difficult to connect the presidential and congressional races, for the simple reason that no one could know for certain which party would win the majority in any of the contests. The striking point here is that foreknowledge of what party would control which of the institutions has become a major factor influencing voter behavior. This fact really only became apparent in the light of an extraordinary change in voter attitude that began (or was first noticed) during the 1996 election, when a large part of the electorate, it seemed, wished to prevent entrusting all the branches of government to the same political party. Instead of voters beginning with a natural bias of voting for all candidates for national office from the same party, which was the premise of the party government or mandate democracy theory made so popular by Woodrow Wilson, it now appears that a known majority in one institution might have the widespread effect of repulse votingdenying that party power in another institution. Voters, or a significant portion of them, have recently expressed a positive desire for divided rather than for unitary government. One of the few to take a stab at connecting the presidential and congressional voting in this way in 2000 was Bill Clinton, the master of repulsion politics. In one of his few forays onto the stump for A1 Gore, he declared: I think were going to win the House and the Senate. But if we dont, someone needs to be doing what Ive done for the last six years, which is to stop extremism in Washington, D.C., and you certainly only have one choiceAl Gore. But any such result was nearly impossible for voters to execute in 2000, for with the presidential race in constant doubt, no judgment about congressional control could correspondingly be made.