Election Night 2000: One of Political History’s Longest Nights (2000)

On election night, television news outlets devoted their evening coverage to live tracking of county-by-county vote returns on the east coast and exit poll data for states on the west coast. By 8:00 p.m. Eastern Standard Time, ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox, PBS, and the Associated Press all confidently projected that Al Gore had won the popular vote in the state of Florida. With the fourth largest number of electoral votes, winning Florida was a big momentum swing toward a potential victory for the Gore campaign and such a significant sign for Bush that he abruptly changed his plan from watching the returns from his campaign headquarters with supporters to observing from his private quarters in the Governor’s mansion. But just two hours later, news networks retracted their projection of Gore’s win in Florida, citing delayed vote count returns and “computer and data problems” that made it too close to call. This put the state’s 25 electoral votes back into the undecided column. Live coverage continued into the early hours of the morning with the returns still neck and neck: Bush won Arizona, Colorado, and Alaska; Gore won Wisconsin, Oregon, and Iowa. Then, around 2:00 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, networks began projecting Bush the winner in Florida, prompting NBC to be the first broadcast network to declare George W. Bush the president-elect of the United States. However, as the votes continued to come in from Florida, the margin narrowed even further, prompting the networks to once again retract their projections, putting Florida back in the undecided column. Outcomes in New Mexico and Oregon remained too close to call. By the time the sun rose the next morning, there was no clear winner for America’s next president. This clip from The NewsHour episode on November 8, 2000, offers a succinct replay of the night’s dramatic horse race coverage by the major news networks.

The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer | NewsHour Productions (Television station : Washington, D.C..) | November 8, 2000 This video clip and associated transcript appear from 11:00 - 17:27 in the full record.