October 15, 2024 • 50 mins
On election night 2000 an ad hoc network of statisticians, news producers, TV anchors, and political operatives tried to figure out what the hell was going on in Florida–and failed spectacularly.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:16):
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode,
I want to let you know that you can binge
the entire season of Fiasco Bush v goor right now
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcast show page,
(00:36):
or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode.
Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
The Vice President step elbows deep into the La and
Gonzales controversy.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I used to be a Democrat at the time over
the lean Gonzalez.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
He was skilled to by association.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
Suddenly it's a two front war against George Bush and
a new headache consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
Speaker 6 (01:03):
Homestead Air Force Base has become all things to all people.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Gore had a choice to make, and he decided to
avoid the choice. It was Waffle City.
Speaker 7 (01:13):
I asked for your help and your vote because I
want to fight for you. God, bless you, Florida.
Speaker 8 (01:19):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Murray Adelman was just out of college and working a
summer job at the US Census Bureau when he met
an older statistician named Warren Mitofski. It was nineteen sixty six.
The following year, Mitofsky got an exciting new job with
the CBS News elections desk, and he started trying to
convince Aidelman to join him there.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
He knew I was one of the sharper things at
the bureau at the time, and so he kept after
me to come to New York and I didn't want to.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
If Adelman were to follow Mitofsky to CBS News, he
would be entering a TV news tradition dating back to
the fifties, when the three broadcast news networks NBC, ABC
and CBS started using computers to cover elections.
Speaker 9 (02:06):
And the computers shows a candidate victory. Gentlemen, let me
tell you this, if they ever teeth this machine to
talk you and I while we're out of business war in.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Matovski's job at CBS News was to best these machines.
His mission was to build a new statistical model that
could more accurately and more quickly predict election results while
vote totals were still coming in on election night. Despite
his initial reluctance to move to New York City, Murray
Adelman saw the appeal of the work and accepted Matovsky's invitation.
Speaker 9 (02:36):
CBS News coverage of election night, reporting from election headquarters
correspondent Water Crunkuites.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
The last election Adelman watched as a civilian was in
nineteen sixty six, and.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
We were watching the returns and I was saying, that
was a cool job. You know, you get to actually
predict something and you get the result like right away.
You know, I thought it was really cool.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
You'll see figures changing rapidly on these boards and on
these banks behind me, the mistakes, and we hope there
won't be any come from us.
Speaker 9 (03:08):
We are going to have what we call for Adelman.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Worked at CBS News as a consultant while attending graduate
school at the University of Chicago. During this time, he
co founded the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front,
a radical civil rights organization that formed after the Stonewall riots.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I had this button that said Gay Revolutionary. I was
worrying that at CBS, and I remember some producer in
the office sort of looked at it and she said, oh,
as we were getting in the elevator. And so a
lot of those years at CBS and in my professional
life was making space for who I was.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Starting in nineteen sixty eight, Adelman and Metowski spent every
presidential election working side by side keeping track of the
most important races in the map and analyzing the returns
as they rolled in. Their most important task was to
make predictions about who was going to win what race
once every ballot had been counted.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
We do so badly want to be accurate.
Speaker 7 (04:00):
We want you to have.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Accurate returns, fast returns put forward to you in a clear.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Concise way.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Network executives thought of election night as an opportunity to
secure prestige, bragging rights, and most importantly, audience share.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
You mad too to do a little dial twas thing
to see how our competitors are doing. But we hope
and trust fee.
Speaker 10 (04:18):
Will be back.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the three networks invested heavily
in their election night coverage, with CBS News eager to
gain any advantage over its competitors. Mitofsky and Aedelman were
given the resources to create a new analytical method that
would end up transforming election coverage. It was called exit
polling an.
Speaker 9 (04:38):
Exit polls we call it a poll of voters as
they left.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The polling places across the country and randomly selected precincts.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Exit polls were inspired by a marketing technique used in
the film industry, where audiences would be shown movies early
in an interview about what they liked and didn't like.
Vitovsky and Aightlman adapted that approach to voting by sending
an army of temp workers contracted by CBS to sample
precincts around the country. The workers would stand around outside
polling places and approach people who had just voted. Then
(05:09):
they would ask them as series of questions.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
I could tell you like gender, tell you men voted
this way, women voted this way. By race. It describes
the electrode. It gives you a whole snapshot of the electrode.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
As the exit poll survey results came in, analysts working
under Matovsky and Ailmen would mind them for insights and
de voter behavior. Those insights would then be passed on
to CBS News anchors, who would turn them into fine
grained analysis about what the election results were showing.
Speaker 9 (05:35):
The single hotest thing our poll trained up is the
difference between the sections Carter and Reagan are dead even
among women.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
CBS News was initially the only network using exit polls
to enrich their election coverage, but soon enough the others
started doing it too. Then, in nineteen eighty, NBC realized
that they could predict the winner of a race based
exclusively on exit polls, meaning they wouldn't even have to
wait for the real vote totals to come in before
making a projection.
Speaker 7 (06:01):
The decision eighty NBC News reports the results of our
national election.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
That November. NBC accurately called eleven states based solely on
exit polls instead of vote totals. It was a bold
strategy that allowed the network to all but declare the
election for Ronald Reagan in their first minute of coverage.
Speaker 11 (06:20):
Good evening, and welcome to NBC News's coverage of the
nineteen eighty presidential elections. We have been polling around the
country and what we're learning in the key states makes
us believe that Ronald Reagan will win a very substantial
victory tonight, very substantial.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
The general principle of the networks is that they do
not call a state unless they have data in from voters.
That they have some after the polls close, they have
real data in, and so NBC used the exit poll
as their real data, and so races that closed at
(06:59):
eight o'clock they could call on the basis of the
exit poll.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
By incorporating exit poll data into their prediction model so
aggressively NBC was able to trounce both ABC and CBS.
The call came so early in the night that even
Reagan's Vice President elect, George HW Bush was hesitant to
declare victory.
Speaker 8 (07:18):
I did hear the NBC report. I think it's too
early that I must say. It's more encouraging to have
these so called exit polls speaking favorably.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
After NBC's big night in nineteen eighty, all the networks
started using exit polls to do projections. Election night coverage
was an arms race, and no one could afford to
get left behind. The problem was that conducting exit polls
nationwide cost a ton of money, and by the nineteen
ninety mid terms, budget conscious news executives were willing to
try something different and cheaper. Instead of each network spending
(07:53):
millions of dollars running its own separate exit polling operation, NBC,
ABC and CBS, along with newcomers CNN, decided to come
together and create a jointly owned exit polling consortium. The
consortion would come to be known as Voter News Service
or VNS for short. Warren Mitofsky was put in charge
and Murray Adelman became his number two. Together, they oversaw
(08:15):
one stop shop for election night coverage, conducting exit polls,
keeping track of incoming vote tallies, analyzing the data using
the proprietary model, and calling winners and losers. In exchange
for funding VNS, the news networks received a live feed
of Mitofsky and Adelman's conclusions, and the anchors would narrate
the election accordingly.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Warren and I were calling the races. We would enter
it into the system. The networks would all see it,
and they could then do whatever they wanted with it.
Speaker 7 (08:45):
We're going to make another projection. Now we project that
Bill Clinton is going to be the next president of
the United States. We projected Ohio.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
The advent of VNS did not kill off election night
competition between the networks. It just became less expensive. Yes,
the networks were now all working off the same VNS
data and the same VNS projection model, but they could
make their own choices about when it was safe to
call a race. Under the VNS system, each news organization
was free to set its own standards for how likely
(09:14):
someone's victory needed to be before a winner could be declared.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
You have a statistical model. All right, and the model says, well,
you might be wrong one out of two hundred close races. Well,
if you're willing to say I'll be wrong two out
of two hundred, you have an edge. And so there's
real benefits to just being faster and a little riskier,
because the chance of it catching up with you are very,
(09:37):
very small.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
As the nineties wore on, the network started calling races
too early for Adelman's taste. The drive to outpace the
competition seemed to be overpowering the need to be sure
and the need to be right. Adelman feared that at
some point the networks would get overconfident with an important race.
Then on November seventh, two thousand, it happened.
Speaker 12 (10:00):
Good grief, eleven thousand votes. It's less than a half
a point. That would be something if the network's managed
to blow it twice in one night.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Speak for yourself, Adelman told me he would come to
divide his career into two distinct eras before and after.
Two thousand.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
You've asked me to remember the most miserable day of
my life.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
You know we're not there yet.
Speaker 13 (10:23):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prolog Projects and Pushkin industries. This
is fiasco bush v Gore.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Some strange, unusual things happening in flog.
Speaker 12 (10:35):
Well, the networks give us, the networks take it away.
Speaker 14 (10:38):
All the networks and all the pollsters are going to
get lots of egg on their faith.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
I've just never seen anything like this.
Speaker 9 (10:43):
I'm at a loss.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Episode two, Real Numbers. What went on behind the scenes
on Election Night two thousand as statisticians, political operatives, and
TV anchors walked the line between reporting the news, predicting
the future, and shaping reality. There were a lot of
(11:04):
states where the two thousand election was going to be
extremely close. Poles have been tight all over the country
from mid months, and they were only getting tighter as
election day drew near.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The race is as hot and tight as a too
small bathing suit on a too long car ride back from.
Speaker 12 (11:18):
The beach, and all the polls indicate this remains a
race too close to call.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It wasn't just the presidency that hung in the balance.
The House and the Senate were also up for grabs,
and many of those races looked close to.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
This is the first time since nineteen forty eight, when
control of the White House, the Senate and the House
of Representatives all have been legitimately up for grabs on
election day Republic.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
A week before election day, Murray Adelman decided it would
be worth sending out a gentle warning to all the networks,
including Fox News, which had joined Venness after its founding
in nineteen ninety six. Adelman urged the networks to be
careful about calling races when the margin between two candidates
was half a percentage point or less. Adelman reminded the
networks that it was always possible for final vote totals
(12:01):
to shift slightly from where they stood at the end
of the night. It happened with every election. Ballots would
get lost or found, Counting errors would be discovered, and
so on.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
There's a lot of ways you can have errors in
the vote code. The precincts have to count it right.
Then they have to get it to the county. The
county has to count it right. We have people there
getting it as it's being added up. They have to
report it right. The person has to enter it right.
There's a lot of steps for error.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
In his memo, Adelman gave historical examples of races where
the final vote total had shifted by half a percentage
point or more, even after most voting precincts had submitted
their tallies. His point was that with very close races,
it was better to wait and get it right than
to be first and get it wrong.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
So that's what I sent out to everybody. I never
said don't call them. That wasn't my job. That would
have got me grief. I just said, just be very careful.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
It was just a warning submitted for the network's consideration. Remember,
the networks owned vns. They didn't have to follow Aedelman's advice.
Aside from sounding the alarm, there wasn't really anything else
you could do. What happened next after the break.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
Election day, the day to choose a new president for
a new censure as.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
Voting continues literally at this hour, the candidates with the
major parties are right now at their home bases in
Tennessee and in Texas. They are waiting for the election
results to roll in.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
On the afternoon of election day, George W. Bush was
in Austin working out at a gym at the University
of Texas when he got a call from his chief
political advisor, Karl Rove. Rove was calling to brief his
candidate on the campaign's first wave of internal polls. Bush
did not like what he heard, and he confessed to
Rove that he could sense defeat in the air, what
(13:57):
he called the smell. Bush's campaign trajectory up to that
point had been jagged. He had started off with a
comfortable advantage over Gore, then fell behind, then vaulted ahead
again to a small lead going into November. Finally, a
few days before the election, the local Fox affiliate in Portland,
Maine reported that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving
(14:17):
in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
Bush swept across the battleground states.
Speaker 9 (14:21):
Of the Midwest today, competing with front page stories about
his arrest.
Speaker 8 (14:25):
Obviously, there's a report out tonight that twenty four years ago,
I was apprehended in chenny Buckport, Maine for a DUI.
Speaker 7 (14:32):
I'm not proud of that.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I find interesting that four or five days before the
election is coming to the surface.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
On election night, as polls around the country started to close,
Bush surrounded himself with his family to watch the returns
on TV from a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel
in downtown Austin. In addition to his wife Laura, his
mother Barbara, his sisters, and his daughters. Bush was joined
by his father, the former president, and his brother Jeb,
the governor of Florida. George Bush had watched both of
(14:59):
them lose big elections in the past, and as his
campaign wound down to its final hours, the contest looked
so excruciatingly close that he had no idea whether they
were about to see the same. Thing happened to him.
Speaker 7 (15:10):
It's the closest election in a generation that we're going
to see in the course of this evening, whether in
fact it will live up to its billings.
Speaker 14 (15:18):
If you've ever longed for those nights when people waited
late to find out who their leader was, pull up
a chair, this may be it.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
By this point, Bush and his family had migrated to
the Shoreline Grill, a restaurant near the Four Seasons. There,
in a private dining room, Bush watched the news. A
little before seven o'clock Central time, NBC's decision desk made
a deeply disappointing call.
Speaker 12 (15:39):
We're going to now project an important win for Vice
President Al Gore. NBC News projects that he wins the
twenty five electoral votes in the state of Florida. It
turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Bush was once again hit with the smell of defeat.
Without Florida's twenty five electoral votes, his path to victory
was painfully narrow.
Speaker 7 (15:59):
The top advisors are really crunching the numbers.
Speaker 8 (16:01):
Now.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Florida is very important.
Speaker 15 (16:03):
It is very, very dicey for George W. Bush to
win this election without Florida.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
In order to stop Gore from getting to two hundred
and seventy votes in the electoral College, Bush would have
to win Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Michigan, an ambitious and unrealistic trifecta.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Looking tough for Bush.
Speaker 15 (16:19):
If al Gore wins Pennsylvania in New Hampshire, then he
really only has to pick up one more state.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Bush stood stonefaced taking it in. His brother Jeb might
have felt even worse. Jeb Bush was the governor of
Florida for practically the entire campaign. It was assumed that
he would help deliver the state to the Bush Chainey ticket.
When all the networks, including Fox News, confirmed that Florida
was going for Gore, Jeb hugged George and said sorry, brother,
(16:46):
before leaving the restaurant. According to some reports, he had
tears in his eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I think the results in Florida have got to be
a bittersweet for the Bush family. Of course, the brother
of the governor sitting governor in Florida, that can't be
a happy one.
Speaker 7 (17:00):
For the Bush family.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
As the Bushes retreated to the Governor's mansion, the networks
continued delivering unwelcome news. First Michigan and Illinois went blue,
then Pennsylvania.
Speaker 7 (17:10):
We now projected Pennsylvania. In fact, he is going to
go to mister Gore, so that gives him the Big three.
That gives him Florida and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those were
the toughest battleground states of the year, and ABC News
now projects.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
As the news came in, as Jeb Bush called his
cousin John Ellis in New York, this was not merely
a family check in. Ellis ran the decision desk at
Fox News, and he had been in regular communication with
the Bush family throughout the night. As Ellis looked at
the Florida numbers being pumped into Fox's computers by Murray
Adelman and VNS, he told his cousin Jeb that all
he saw was a screen full of Gore. Murray Adelman
(17:47):
and the rest of the VNS team were working out
of temporary office space at the World Trade Center in
Manhattan when NBC called Florida for Gore. Adelman looked at
the numbers to see if he agreed with the projection.
After comparing VNS exit polls and incoming vote totals to
data on passed elections, Adelman concluded that the Florida call
was good. Though only four percent of the state's votes
(18:09):
have encountered, this was not a case of the networks
declaring a winner too quickly out of an unhealthy sense
of competition. The VNS model clearly showed that Gore was
going to win.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
I mean it was it looked really, really solid. It
was beyond a maybe, it was really solid, and so
I called it at seven fifty two PM, which I
called the pinnacle of my career. That was it was
all downhill after that moment.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
On any given election day, the two campaigns battling for
the presidency revolve around two distinct centers of gravity. One
is composed of the candidate and his inner circle. The
other is a rapid response team staffed by political operatives,
polsters and campaign advisors. Their job is to gather information
about the race all through the day and night and
(19:03):
fight for any potential advantage they can find. Bush's rapid
response team was operating out of an office belonging to
Carl Rove. Stuart Stevens, a media consultant to Bush, spent
most of his evening in Rove's orbit worrying about the returns.
Speaker 10 (19:17):
It was really tense, and there are a lot of
highs and lows, you know. The worst point was when
they called Florida for Gore.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
But if the Bush team ever wallowed in despair over Florida,
they moved on quickly to indignation and outrage. For one thing,
they thought the networks were not giving enough weight to
absentee ballots, which the Bush campaign believed would favor them. Also,
NBC had called Florida around ten minutes before poles had
closed and the part of the state known as the Panhandle.
(19:46):
Unlike the rest of Florida, the Panhandle was on Central Time,
and it just so happened to be heavily Republican. Stuart
Stephens thought that by calling Florida for Gore before the
polls and the Panhandle had closed, the media was robbing
Bush of an unknowable number of votes.
Speaker 10 (20:01):
You never can calculate what this means. But if you're
headed to the polls to vote in Florida for your
candidate and you hear on the radio that your canad
it's already lost Florida, it's not. I'm sorry to think
that you might turn around and go home because you're
both not going to matter.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
There was something else bothering the Bush operatives too. According
to their internal polling numbers which they got from campaign
workers on the ground at which the TV news networks
did not have access to, the race in Florida was
way too close for anyone to say with confidence that
Gore was going to win. To Stevens Rove and the
rest of the Bush campaign, it seemed clear that the
(20:38):
networks had jumped the gun, so they went to work.
Speaker 10 (20:44):
All these networks have political producers. You're calling them and saying, look,
we can't prove to you that we're going to win Florida,
but you can't prove to us we're going to lose Florida.
I think everybody was calling anybody you knew.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Soon Karl Rove in a parade of other Bush surrogates
were on live television making the campaign's case to the public.
Speaker 14 (21:04):
Let me tell you, Bertie, you all called Florida before
Florida even closed its poll.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Florida's a state which some two times.
Speaker 14 (21:11):
I've been asking all evening, Uh, how can you have
that many absentee ballots out and assume that Governor Bush
has lost a state?
Speaker 6 (21:18):
And as you know, Karl, what are you suggesting, Mary,
that I'm suggesting when the real count isn't in the
absentee ballots are counted, that they are extensive in there,
and that day's going to flip.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
I really feel that way now.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Having said that, at nine to fifty five Eastern time,
Bush himself came out and addressed the situation in Florida.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
This is mister Bush at home or in a hotel,
to be honest, I've forgotten where I watch.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Usually presidential candidates stay out of public view on the
night of an election until it's time for someone to
concede and someone else to declare victory. Speaking from the
governor's mansion in Austin, Bush hit a note of unequivocal defiance.
Florida was still very much in play, and.
Speaker 9 (21:58):
The network's call this thing awfully early, but the people
are actually counting the votes are coming up with a
little different perspective, and so pretty dawn out beat about things.
Speaker 7 (22:08):
Okay, Governor Bush, pretty darn upbeat about this.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
And as you we heard, he was spin. But it
was spin that Bush and his campaign staff sincerely believed.
Here again is Bush Media consultants, Stuart Stevens.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
And there's a fog of war out there, and you're
trying to figure out past to victory. And I don't
think that we were overstating the case. What we were
saying was accurate. We were saying, you should just pull
it back, it's too close to call, which is a
pretty reasonable, as it turns out, very accurate request.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
While the Bush team mobilized, a young researcher at NBC
News named Michelle Jaconi was also trying to figure out
what was going on in Florida. Jaconi worked on Meet
the Press. It was her first job out of college.
The show is based in DC, but for election night,
Tim Russert and his staff were working out of thirty
Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Speaker 16 (22:57):
Meet the Press at that time was also the politics
and polling unit of NBC News. I was, you know,
a researcher, and it was a very tiny team. In
the res era of Meet the Press. There was five
to six of us, depending on the year.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Jacconi had spent the weeks leading up to election day
putting together a comprehensive guide to every notable race that
might come up during live coverage. As part of her
research on Florida, she discovered that the Florida Secretary of
State's office was going to be posting raw vote totals
on its website in real time as ballots were being counted.
Jacony was delighted by this high tech act of transparency,
(23:32):
but what she saw when she looked at the website
on election night made her very uneasy.
Speaker 16 (23:36):
I just remembered it was so close, and then I
thought they must know something about the outstanding vote that
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
What Jacconi saw in these numbers was that, for the
time being, Bush had a slight lead over Gore in
the raw vote total. At seven forty nine pm, when
NBC projected that Gore was going to win Florida, Bush
was actually up by a few percentage points. The reason
VNS and the networks believed Gore was going to win
was that, according to their models, the as yet uncounted
votes would favor Gore and eventually put him ahead. But
(24:07):
the longer Jaconi looked at the incoming vote totals online,
the more uncertain she was that Gore was actually poised
to overtake Bush's lead. Meanwhile, all the news anchors, including
Jacconi's boss Tim Russert, were still saying Gore was going
to carry the state.
Speaker 15 (24:21):
AEP balanced. But I think the networks have all taken
their time and making this projection. If it's wrong, will
be the first to admit it. And obviously the information
that mister Reill provided will be factored in. There was calculation,
but every network looked at this based on the samplings
we're getting and awarded it to Vice President Gore.
Speaker 16 (24:37):
I just remembered being petrified for my boss being on
air and not knowing if information given to him was.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Accurate or not.
Speaker 16 (24:46):
I thought that they put a story to bed that
should not have been put to bed, and I was
scared that the reputation of my boss was on the line.
And I just was scared.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
But Jacony was also kind of excited. She had studied
Florida election law, and she had learned that when the
margin between two candidates was half a percentage point or less,
it triggered an automatic statewide recount of all ballots.
Speaker 16 (25:08):
I just remember that word trigger triggered an automatic recount
right within point five percent, meaning that nobody would have
to ask for a recount, that it would be automatic
based on how people marked their ballots, and that I
just thought, what a fascinating scenario if that were to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Back at VNS headquarters, Murray Aidelman was focused on just
about everything but Florida. He had called the state hours earlier,
and he had moved on. But then, what was the
first indication that there was something wrong with the numbers?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Well, the first indication was when I got a call
from Warren.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Warren, as you'll recall, was Aidelman's longtime colleague, Warren Ntowski.
He had left Voter News Service after the ninety two
election and was now calling races for CBS and CNN.
After Mitowski's departure, Adelman had been handed the reins to
the VNS projections operation for the first time.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
He wanted to take me with it, but I didn't.
I didn't go because I had been under a shadow
for my whole career pretty much.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Now, Adelman's former mentor was on the phone demanding to
know what VNS was doing about Florida.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
You know. He started off saying, have you been watching Florida?
I said, nowhere, and I've got a thousand other things
to do right now. He said, well, well take a
look at it, because the status has gone down.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
According to the VNS projection model, Gore and Bush were
now neck and neck. But Adelman didn't think the call
needed to be pulled back yet, And when Matoski called
him a second time, Adelman told him so.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And I said, well, I've got people looking into it.
And he said, well, I think we should retract the call.
And I said, I'm not ready to do that yet.
I don't think it's there yet.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But Mitofski felt strongly that the Florida call needed to
be retracted. At nine fifty four PM, he sent his
decision to the producers he was working with at CBS
and CNN. He attached an explanation, we don't entirely trust
all the information we have in from VNS. Dan rather
delivered the news on the air moments later.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
This knockdown, drag out battle drags on into the night
and turned the lights down. The party just got wilder.
Florida comes out of the Gore column, back up in
the air, there's dose.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
ABC and Fox News pulled Florida out of the Gore category.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
Next, we now believe that the state of Florida is
too close to call. We and most other news services
had called it for mister Gore. We now believe it
is too close to call. It's always been the biggest
state for the racist cloth.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Finally, at ten fifteen PM, Adelman concluded that he needed
to pull back Florida two. Typing into his terminal, he
informed the networks that VNS was retracting its call. We
don't have the confidence we did, he wrote.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
I think for me it was partly not wanting to
see it. Yeah, what, Ian, Well do you ever like
saying you're wrong? I mean, it's not fun and you
get this really heavy, failing so real. I don't recommend.
It's a really awful feeling.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Adelman wasn't sad because he wanted Gore to win the election.
It's because his numbers, the projections generated by his VNS model,
had been wrong. Remember, before the election, Adelman was worried
that the networks would be irresponsible and call races before
they were ready. But this this was his data, his
exit polls, his vote tallies, that had led the networks
(28:22):
to incorrectly call one of the most important states in
the country. And maybe worst of all, Aedelman didn't even
know what had caused the error.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
We didn't really know what happened. We just know that
the estimate changed as more information came in. We didn't
know where the problem was.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Adelman told me that you could only compare the feeling
to one thing.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
You must have had the feeling when you found someone died.
It's like you don't quite believe it at first, you know,
like sometimes I've said you're kidding or some stupid thing
like that, but like I didn't don't quite believe it
at first, and then it just starts the reality comes
over your whole body. Oh, it was like that. I
was like, oh, it made a really big mistake and
(29:07):
that was hard. You know, that was hard to deal with.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Candy Crowley joins us from Austin the Candy.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
I think you can hear the crowd reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
They're obviously very energized in this crowd.
Speaker 17 (29:20):
I'm not going to assure you in the Bush campaign,
well we knew.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
While the Bush team celebrated their attracted Florida call in Austin,
al Gore's staff was recovering from shock. The nerve center
of the Gore operation was in a single story building
in Nashville, where a team of data analysts and operatives
worked in a windowless space known internally as the boiler room.
Speaker 17 (29:40):
It's kept very separate from the candidate. You're not going
to ever see the candidate in the boiler room. This
is really the turnout operation, where we're tracking what's coming
in from the states, and we're feeding it in and
we're making decisions.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Jenny Beckis was the communications officer for the Democratic National Committee.
She spent election day giving input on get out the
vote efforts and talking to reporters about how various states
were looking earlier in the day, Long before she turned
her attention to Florida backus's primary concern had been a
snowstorm in New Mexico that had the potential to affect
voter turnout.
Speaker 17 (30:11):
Snow in New Mexico was like a big, big thing
that was in our heads. But I remember, like I
was really confident that we had been smart and strategic
about where we had resources, and I think Gore closed
pretty strong.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
As Gore racked up one battleground state after another, many
of the donors and prominent supporters who had been hanging
out at the campaign headquarters left the building to start celebrating.
Knowing that Gore would be giving his victory speech at
the War Memorial Auditorium in downtown Nashville, they headed there
to wait for his win to become official.
Speaker 17 (30:42):
If you're about to have somebody win the presidency, its
power closest to the throne. So a lot of people
had just wanted to be at the hotel or at
the War Memorial because that's where Gore was, and if
Gore wins, they're close. The rest of us are in
a closet trying to figure out what's happening in the snow.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
In New Mexico, there had been a sense in the
boiler room that the Florida call for Gore might be shaky,
but it still came as a crushing disappointment when the
network's and VNS pulled it back of.
Speaker 17 (31:10):
Stomach fell out. Everyone was like, where can we find
the votes? What's not out? What's still, everyone was starting
to say, Okay, if we don't win Florida, how do
we win this thing?
Speaker 14 (31:21):
If you take twenty five votes away from al Gore
and put it in the underside of column, should they
break for Bush? The entire calculation of the last hour
and a half, it changes dramatically.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Bacchus and her colleague started contacting voting precincts and swing
states around the country. They were looking for updated vote tallies,
desperately trying to figure out if there was a pathway
to victory that did not include Florida.
Speaker 17 (31:42):
New Mexico hadn't closed, and Nevada was still out there,
and so there were little slivers of hope still going on,
and Wisconsin was still really close, so we could still win.
We could win on the other path, and we were
waiting to see if we were going to get there.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
But as the night stretched on, it became increasingly clear
that it was going to be Florida or nothing. Because
of how the other swing states broke. Neither candidate could
get the two hundred and seventy electoral College votes without
winning Florida's twenty five.
Speaker 7 (32:18):
It could still go either way.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
The Bush people think they'll win it on the strength
of absentee ballots. The Gore people think they'll win it
because they ran so strong in Southeast Florida.
Speaker 12 (32:27):
All the chips have been pushed out of the map
down in the southeastern corner of the state of Florida.
There's a big, big stack of chips in that state.
Both candidates are counting on winning it because that could
get them to where they need to get to.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
A little after two am, the VNS projection model was
showing that Bush was going to win Florida by twenty
nine thousand votes, the exact margin that Murray Adelman had
warned about in his memo. By this point, ninety six
percent of Florida's votes have been counted. The head of
the projection of the desk at NBC News called Adelman
to ask if it was time to pull the trigger
for Bush.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
And he said, what do you think we're thinking of
calling it? And I said, did you read my memo?
And before he really got to answer than that, he said, oh,
Fox just called it. I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
It was two sixteen am when Fox News reported that
George W. Bush was the projected winner in Florida.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
Fox is now projects George W.
Speaker 11 (33:23):
Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the
winner of the presidency of the United States.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Fox's call had been ordered by the head of the
network's decision desk, George Bush's cousin John Ellis. Within minutes,
the call was backed up by NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC.
Speaker 12 (33:40):
George Bush is the president of elect of the United States.
He has won the state of Florida. According to our projections.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Florida goes Busch. The presidency is Bush.
Speaker 7 (33:49):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Let's pause for a second. Let that sink in. Bush
wins if our CBS News.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
As the election was over, George W. Bush was going
to be president.
Speaker 12 (33:59):
The scene in Austin, Texas tonight, It's been a long,
suspenseful evening.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Carl Adelman declined to join the networks and projecting Florida
for Bush. The margin was just too narrow, so as
the calls came down, VNS stayed on the sidelines. Dlman
didn't think he had any other options.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
If I put a message out, what am I going
to say? I think this was a bad call. Do
you really want to do that to four out of
the six people that pay your salary? You know, that's
I'm not going to do that, so I didn't do anything.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
At his hotel suite in Nashville, al Gore was lying
on the floor watching television in silence when he saw
the networks flash their pre made banners that said President
elect George W. Bush. Gore turned to his staff and said,
I'm really grateful to you all. I want to concede.
I want to be gracious about this. At around two
(35:04):
thirty in the morning, Gore called Bush on the phone
and congratulated him on his victory. Then he got into
the limo that would drive him to the War Memorial
for what would be his concession speech.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Al Gore called George Bush on the telephone, congratulated him,
said he'd run a good campaign, words to that effect.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Gore's decision to concede was made so quickly that no
one from the candidate's inner circle had checked in with
Jenny Backus or the others still working in the boiler room.
Speaker 17 (35:31):
It was maybe fifteen of us in the room at
that point because everyone was leaving to go down, but
Michael wasn't coming out of that room yet.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Michael was Michael Hooley, a Boston lawyer who was overseeing
the boiler room operation. Hooley's contact in Florida was a
field operative named Nick Baldick, and Nick Baldick had been
watching Bush's lead in the vote total steadily drop. Just
after three am, Bush was up by just forty six
hundred votes, a margin so narrow that, according to Florida law,
the race was headed for an automatic recount.
Speaker 17 (36:02):
Michael said, you know, get in here like so I
went into the room. He put a Nick on speakerphone. Nick'
said Michael, we could win this. We should not be quitting.
You need to stop this.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Hooley, Bacchus and their colleagues rushed to contact anyone they
knew who might be with the vice president. The problem
was that he was already in transit, and they didn't
know exactly where he was or how to reach him.
Speaker 17 (36:26):
We were not really paying attention to Gore. We were
so wrapped up in what they were saying about those
numbers and like it may not be over, and like
trying to do the math a hundred different ways. It
might not have occurred to Michael that he was actually
in the car, but we knew we had to get
to him. Like Gores going down to the motorcade and
their drive. You know, like it's all happening on live television.
Speaker 7 (36:49):
How Gored now on his way to the War Memorial
Auditory of the vice presidential motorcade moving.
Speaker 15 (36:55):
You just can't help but think that looks more like
a funeral procession tonight in a political procession.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Finally, Michael Hooley got word to a Gore aid who
was able to intercept the Vice president before he went
out on stage. Meanwhile, Beckus started calling everyone she knew
at the networks if she wanted to tell them that,
despite their earlier proclamations about Bush being president elect, Gore
was no longer planning to give up the fight. What
happens next after the break the first person Backus reached
(37:28):
with Michelle Jaconi, the young researcher at NBC who had
been obsessively watching Florida all night. She and Beachus had
first encountered each other while Jacony was doing her research
in preparation for election day.
Speaker 16 (37:39):
And she says, Michelle, stop that reporting right now. I
can assuredly say al Gore is not going to concede.
And I said, can I report that on the record?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
And she says yes, Jacconi rushed into the control room
and ran to the producer who was directing coverage future
CNN president Jeff Zucker.
Speaker 16 (37:57):
My heart now is beating so fast and running outside
of the room, screaming into the phone. Now everybody in
the room is looking at me. I ducked down the hallway,
run into the control room, which is pitch black. Everybody
has headsets on except for Jeff Sucker. And Jeff'sucker, who's
running coverage, is standing up pacing, and I look at him,
and I have the phone to my ear, and I said,
al Gore is not going to concede. And he stops,
(38:20):
and he grabs my shirt and says, can I report that.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Jenny Bachus was watching the NBC newscast from the Gore
boiler room. By this point, Tom Brokaw and Tim Russard
had been making note of the razor thin margin between
Gore and Bush and wondering aloud why Bush had not
yet come out to deliver his victory speech.
Speaker 12 (38:41):
I'm curious about why we're not seeing the governor yet.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
They also began to familiarize themselves with the intricacies of
Florida election law, starting with the fact that the state's
top election official was the secretary of state.
Speaker 12 (38:51):
Will someone find out for me whether the Secretary of
State is a Democrat or a Republican? Okay, he's a
Democrat or she is? Is it a man?
Speaker 10 (38:59):
Who?
Speaker 12 (38:59):
Do we know who that secretary of State is? Let's
try to find that out if we can.
Speaker 15 (39:03):
Maybe we could talk to him or her.
Speaker 12 (39:04):
Keep Yeah, we're working on that, We're told in the control.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Room, phone calls were flying between the network and the campaign.
Then an NBC reporter stationed in Nashville delivered the latest.
Gore had placed a second call to George Bush and
he had taken back his concession.
Speaker 12 (39:21):
Claire ship and what do you have for US's.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
How long we're hearing tonight?
Speaker 5 (39:25):
Is it one of the reasons for al Gore's delay?
Speaker 13 (39:27):
This is, according to some of his low level staffers,
as if he is actually.
Speaker 16 (39:32):
Called George W.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Bush and taken back concession bone call, so an extraordinary move.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
It was at around three point thirty in the morning
when al Gore placed that second call to George W.
Bush and retracted his concession. At four am, Gore's campaign
chairman Bill Day addressed the crowd of supporters gathered at
the War Memorial.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I'll let me say I've been in politics a very
long time, but I don't think there's ever been a
night like this one. Just an hour or so ago,
the TV networks called this race for Governor Bush. It
now appears, it now appears that their call was premature.
(40:15):
This is a very significant for most important reason, and
that is for under Florida state law, this triggers in
an automatic recount, and until the results in Florida become official,
our campaign continues.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
On TV news, anchors tried to summon whatever authority they
had left to explain that Florida was once again being
pulled back.
Speaker 10 (40:37):
I thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
I'm always reminded of those West Texas saloons where the
head a sign says, please don't shoot the piano player.
He's doing the best he can. And we do the
best we can on these calls. But we have to
stand up and take.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
At Gore Headquarters, the boiler room that had been nearly
empty just a few minutes earlier slowly began to repopulate
with stunned campaign staffers. Here's Jenny Beckett again.
Speaker 17 (40:58):
So some people start coming back, and they've been drinking,
and like they smelled a little bit like they had
been like, you know, having a bunch of beers moaning
the loss of the campaign, and then all of a sudden,
they're sort of like, oh my god, you sort of
have already mentally processed. I've played this game, I did
my best. All right, fine, I'm gonna drive my sorrows.
And then all of since, oops, I'm not gonna dry
my sorrows. I still have another two innings to play
or overtime. We're in overtime. That's what we were.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
We're in overtime. If the Gore campaign in Nashville was euphoric,
their counterparts at Bush headquarters in Austin felt like they
had been hit by a truck. Everyone was exhausted and deflated,
and now the race wasn't even over here again is
Bush Media Consultants Stuart Stevens.
Speaker 10 (41:38):
It's a weird feeling. I mean, you're prepared to win,
you're prepared to lose. To weird feeling.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
You know.
Speaker 10 (41:42):
I've been doing campaigns for a long time. I'm used
to that end of the world feeling when campaigns in
win or lose. I look forward to that. But this
was purgatory. It's like you know, watching a loved one
like go into the emergency room and wondering if they're
going to come out. It's like nothing you can do.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Over the next thirty six days, both sides would blame
the TV networks for stacking the decks against them with
their coverage of election night. The Bush side blamed NBC
for calling Florida before the polls were closed in the Panhandle.
The Gore side blamed Fox, especially John Ellis, for giving
Bush a temporary victory and setting up the narrative that
Gore was a sore loser trying to overturn the election.
(42:28):
As far apart as they wore on most issues, the
two campaigns agreed on this one thing. What the networks
did on Election Night two thousand had real world consequences.
Speaker 17 (42:37):
The irony was as much as we honestly believe that
you don't want elections, so you have all the numbers.
In some ways, you can win or lose an election
based on what the TVs say.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
I've been trying to think about what Backus might have
meant by that. On the face of it, it shouldn't
be possible for the outcome of an election to be
determined by what people are saying about it on TV.
The cause and effect arrow is supposed to point the
other way. First, the outcome is determined, and then the
people on TV try to explain why it came out
the way it did. The two thousand election and its
agonizing aftermath tested that natural state of affair. Starting with
(43:11):
Election Night, both campaigns had to ask themselves did the
narrative that emerged from media coverage have any bearing on
who got to be president? At the end of the story.
Did it matter what reporters and pundits said about what
was happening. It seems obvious there's a feedback loop between
perception and reality, but how that feedback loop actually works
is not self evident. What were the consequences of the
(43:31):
TV networks showing those graphics at two thirty in the
morning that said George W. Bush was the forty third
president of the United States. Did the fact that Bush
won and then unwon after Gore unconceded shape the way
the next thirty six days played out. I don't have
any definitive answers here, but I do see one way
in which the coverage of Election Knight had an unmistakable
impact on everything that came after. Between the Gore call
(43:54):
that turned out to be wrong and then the Bush
call that also turned out to be wrong, the American
people witnessed mistakes that had never been made on such
a spectacular scale before. And these mistakes were destabilizing, not
because they made everyone feel like they couldn't trust Tom Brokaw,
but because as they expanded the range of what was possible,
they underscored the futility of trying to predict what would
(44:15):
happen next. Murray Aidelman still vividly remembers the aftermath of
that night when the projection model he'd been using since
nineteen sixty seven went wobbly on him. He remembers it
as a turning point in his life.
Speaker 4 (44:30):
I just remember having this really big heaviness over my
body and just so so depressed, and you know, it's
like these things used and counted on and suddenly they
all turned, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
After the election, vns's exit polling operation was widely blamed
for the blown calls in Florida. Adelman knew it wasn't
that simple. His exit poll in Florida had in fact
performed well. The survey results were within the margin of error.
It was just that the error in the exit poll
and the raw vote totals that came in early in
the evening both have and to favor Gore. Separately, the
(45:12):
vn S model had underestimated the number of absentee ballots,
which favored Bush. All that created what Aidelman now calls
a perfect storm. At the time, Aidelman was unable to
respond to the criticism of his exit polls because the
networks that paid his salary had instructed him not to comment.
It was painful for him. Adelman really believed in exit polls,
(45:33):
both as an analytical tool and as a means of
giving voice to demographic groups. During the nineties, Adelman had
pushed for VNS exit polls to include a question about
sexual orientation, a move that helped establish the LGBT community
as a political constituency with quantifiable voting power. In any event,
exit polls only contributed to the first Florida call, the
(45:54):
one for Gore. The later call, the one for Bush,
turned out to have been the result of a crucial
data entry error that inflated Bush's lead by twenty two
thousand votes just before Fox called the race in his favor.
VNS was ended in two thousand and three after its
computers crashed during the previous year's midterms. Warren Thetowski died
(46:16):
in two thousand and six, and Adelman spoke at his funeral.
He still believes in the value of projecting elections. He
doesn't think two thousand proved it's not worth doing, or
that there's something inherently irresponsible about it.
Speaker 4 (46:29):
Your job is to call races. Your job is to
look at data and decide. And it's always safer to wait.
It's always safer to not say anything. But then you're
not doing what you're there for. That's what the job
is is. The job is taking risks. If you didn't
take a risk, who needs a decision person If you're
(46:51):
going to wait till it's one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Just after four am, the Gore campaign was scrambling to
charter a plane from Nashville to Florida. Jill Alper, a
political consultant working with the DNC, was tasked with rounding
up Gor staffers for the flight. Alper had spent election
Day in the boiler room with Jenny Bachus and Michael Hooley.
Now that it was over, or rather now that it
had failed to end, she was in charge of the
(47:20):
logistics of whatever happened next.
Speaker 13 (47:22):
I remember saying, you know, gee, what I need as
a plane, and somebody saying, oh, right, well, we have
the Liberman plane and we had a scheduling and advanced
operation right there, so they could start, you know, renting
cars and finding hotel rooms and putting the logistics into place.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Joe Lieberman's plane had seventy two seats, and Alper wanted
to fill all of them. By four point thirty in
the morning, there were more than one hundred staffers waiting
to get on.
Speaker 13 (47:50):
People ran back to their hotel rooms and their apartments
and got their things, and you know, off we went.
And when we were on the plane, we used the
PA system to train folks. While we were flying.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Down, someone christened the plane Recount one. It left the
cold dark of Nashville just as the sun was rising.
While some staff read up on recount strategy, others tried
to get as much sleep as they could. Many had
been up for twenty four hours.
Speaker 13 (48:16):
People were tired, and it was intense, but the moment
was not lost on all of us that it was unusual.
Who would ever thought, right, you'd be on a plane
heading to Florida to start a recount that could determine
who the president is.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
When the Gore plane landed in Tallahassee, Joe Alper looked
out her window. The Florida sun was shining, and there
on the tarmac was the plane of Governor Jeb Bush.
Speaker 13 (48:44):
At this point, it was like really clear that there
was going to be a showdown in Florida, right. I mean,
we already knew we were into serious stuff, but they
were just right there.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
On the next step. So to Fiasco, how a national
election turned into a local story about Palm Beach County.
The butterfly bell was one way of signifying that something
had gone horribly wrong with this election. Fiasco is a
production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.
(49:30):
The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madelin kaplan Ula Culpa,
and me Leon Nafock. Our script editor was Daniel Riley.
Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer, and we received additional
editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our music and score are
by Nick Sylvester of god Mode, with additional music from
Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our
(49:54):
artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y Audio
mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans
of Final Final V two Special thanks to Luminary for
a list of books, articles, and documentaries that we relied
on in our research. Click the link in the show notes.
Thanks to the NBC News Archive and CNN for the
(50:15):
archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks for listening.
Pushkin. Hey Leon here, Before we get to this episode,
I want to let you know that you can binge
the entire season of Fiasco Bush v goor right now
ad free by becoming a Pushkin Plus subscriber. Sign up
for Pushkin Plus on the Fiasco Apple Podcast show page,
(00:36):
or visit Pushkin dot fm slash Plus. Now onto the episode.
Previously on Fiasco.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
The Vice President step elbows deep into the La and
Gonzales controversy.
Speaker 3 (00:52):
I used to be a Democrat at the time over
the lean Gonzalez.
Speaker 4 (00:55):
He was skilled to by association.
Speaker 5 (00:57):
Suddenly it's a two front war against George Bush and
a new headache consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
Speaker 6 (01:03):
Homestead Air Force Base has become all things to all people.
Speaker 4 (01:06):
Gore had a choice to make, and he decided to
avoid the choice. It was Waffle City.
Speaker 7 (01:13):
I asked for your help and your vote because I
want to fight for you. God, bless you, Florida.
Speaker 8 (01:19):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:27):
Murray Adelman was just out of college and working a
summer job at the US Census Bureau when he met
an older statistician named Warren Mitofski. It was nineteen sixty six.
The following year, Mitofsky got an exciting new job with
the CBS News elections desk, and he started trying to
convince Aidelman to join him there.
Speaker 4 (01:45):
He knew I was one of the sharper things at
the bureau at the time, and so he kept after
me to come to New York and I didn't want to.
Speaker 1 (01:52):
If Adelman were to follow Mitofsky to CBS News, he
would be entering a TV news tradition dating back to
the fifties, when the three broadcast news networks NBC, ABC
and CBS started using computers to cover elections.
Speaker 9 (02:06):
And the computers shows a candidate victory. Gentlemen, let me
tell you this, if they ever teeth this machine to
talk you and I while we're out of business war in.
Speaker 1 (02:17):
Matovski's job at CBS News was to best these machines.
His mission was to build a new statistical model that
could more accurately and more quickly predict election results while
vote totals were still coming in on election night. Despite
his initial reluctance to move to New York City, Murray
Adelman saw the appeal of the work and accepted Matovsky's invitation.
Speaker 9 (02:36):
CBS News coverage of election night, reporting from election headquarters
correspondent Water Crunkuites.
Speaker 1 (02:43):
The last election Adelman watched as a civilian was in
nineteen sixty six, and.
Speaker 4 (02:48):
We were watching the returns and I was saying, that
was a cool job. You know, you get to actually
predict something and you get the result like right away.
You know, I thought it was really cool.
Speaker 2 (03:01):
You'll see figures changing rapidly on these boards and on
these banks behind me, the mistakes, and we hope there
won't be any come from us.
Speaker 9 (03:08):
We are going to have what we call for Adelman.
Speaker 1 (03:11):
Worked at CBS News as a consultant while attending graduate
school at the University of Chicago. During this time, he
co founded the Chicago chapter of the Gay Liberation Front,
a radical civil rights organization that formed after the Stonewall riots.
Speaker 4 (03:24):
I had this button that said Gay Revolutionary. I was
worrying that at CBS, and I remember some producer in
the office sort of looked at it and she said, oh,
as we were getting in the elevator. And so a
lot of those years at CBS and in my professional
life was making space for who I was.
Speaker 1 (03:42):
Starting in nineteen sixty eight, Adelman and Metowski spent every
presidential election working side by side keeping track of the
most important races in the map and analyzing the returns
as they rolled in. Their most important task was to
make predictions about who was going to win what race
once every ballot had been counted.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
We do so badly want to be accurate.
Speaker 7 (04:00):
We want you to have.
Speaker 2 (04:01):
Accurate returns, fast returns put forward to you in a clear.
Speaker 4 (04:05):
Concise way.
Speaker 1 (04:06):
Network executives thought of election night as an opportunity to
secure prestige, bragging rights, and most importantly, audience share.
Speaker 7 (04:12):
You mad too to do a little dial twas thing
to see how our competitors are doing. But we hope
and trust fee.
Speaker 10 (04:18):
Will be back.
Speaker 1 (04:20):
Throughout the seventies and eighties, the three networks invested heavily
in their election night coverage, with CBS News eager to
gain any advantage over its competitors. Mitofsky and Aedelman were
given the resources to create a new analytical method that
would end up transforming election coverage. It was called exit
polling an.
Speaker 9 (04:38):
Exit polls we call it a poll of voters as
they left.
Speaker 2 (04:42):
The polling places across the country and randomly selected precincts.
Speaker 1 (04:47):
Exit polls were inspired by a marketing technique used in
the film industry, where audiences would be shown movies early
in an interview about what they liked and didn't like.
Vitovsky and Aightlman adapted that approach to voting by sending
an army of temp workers contracted by CBS to sample
precincts around the country. The workers would stand around outside
polling places and approach people who had just voted. Then
(05:09):
they would ask them as series of questions.
Speaker 4 (05:11):
I could tell you like gender, tell you men voted
this way, women voted this way. By race. It describes
the electrode. It gives you a whole snapshot of the electrode.
Speaker 1 (05:21):
As the exit poll survey results came in, analysts working
under Matovsky and Ailmen would mind them for insights and
de voter behavior. Those insights would then be passed on
to CBS News anchors, who would turn them into fine
grained analysis about what the election results were showing.
Speaker 9 (05:35):
The single hotest thing our poll trained up is the
difference between the sections Carter and Reagan are dead even
among women.
Speaker 1 (05:42):
CBS News was initially the only network using exit polls
to enrich their election coverage, but soon enough the others
started doing it too. Then, in nineteen eighty, NBC realized
that they could predict the winner of a race based
exclusively on exit polls, meaning they wouldn't even have to
wait for the real vote totals to come in before
making a projection.
Speaker 7 (06:01):
The decision eighty NBC News reports the results of our
national election.
Speaker 1 (06:07):
That November. NBC accurately called eleven states based solely on
exit polls instead of vote totals. It was a bold
strategy that allowed the network to all but declare the
election for Ronald Reagan in their first minute of coverage.
Speaker 11 (06:20):
Good evening, and welcome to NBC News's coverage of the
nineteen eighty presidential elections. We have been polling around the
country and what we're learning in the key states makes
us believe that Ronald Reagan will win a very substantial
victory tonight, very substantial.
Speaker 4 (06:38):
The general principle of the networks is that they do
not call a state unless they have data in from voters.
That they have some after the polls close, they have
real data in, and so NBC used the exit poll
as their real data, and so races that closed at
(06:59):
eight o'clock they could call on the basis of the
exit poll.
Speaker 1 (07:04):
By incorporating exit poll data into their prediction model so
aggressively NBC was able to trounce both ABC and CBS.
The call came so early in the night that even
Reagan's Vice President elect, George HW Bush was hesitant to
declare victory.
Speaker 8 (07:18):
I did hear the NBC report. I think it's too
early that I must say. It's more encouraging to have
these so called exit polls speaking favorably.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
After NBC's big night in nineteen eighty, all the networks
started using exit polls to do projections. Election night coverage
was an arms race, and no one could afford to
get left behind. The problem was that conducting exit polls
nationwide cost a ton of money, and by the nineteen
ninety mid terms, budget conscious news executives were willing to
try something different and cheaper. Instead of each network spending
(07:53):
millions of dollars running its own separate exit polling operation, NBC,
ABC and CBS, along with newcomers CNN, decided to come
together and create a jointly owned exit polling consortium. The
consortion would come to be known as Voter News Service
or VNS for short. Warren Mitofsky was put in charge
and Murray Adelman became his number two. Together, they oversaw
(08:15):
one stop shop for election night coverage, conducting exit polls,
keeping track of incoming vote tallies, analyzing the data using
the proprietary model, and calling winners and losers. In exchange
for funding VNS, the news networks received a live feed
of Mitofsky and Adelman's conclusions, and the anchors would narrate
the election accordingly.
Speaker 4 (08:35):
Warren and I were calling the races. We would enter
it into the system. The networks would all see it,
and they could then do whatever they wanted with it.
Speaker 7 (08:45):
We're going to make another projection. Now we project that
Bill Clinton is going to be the next president of
the United States. We projected Ohio.
Speaker 1 (08:52):
The advent of VNS did not kill off election night
competition between the networks. It just became less expensive. Yes,
the networks were now all working off the same VNS
data and the same VNS projection model, but they could
make their own choices about when it was safe to
call a race. Under the VNS system, each news organization
was free to set its own standards for how likely
(09:14):
someone's victory needed to be before a winner could be declared.
Speaker 4 (09:17):
You have a statistical model. All right, and the model says, well,
you might be wrong one out of two hundred close races. Well,
if you're willing to say I'll be wrong two out
of two hundred, you have an edge. And so there's
real benefits to just being faster and a little riskier,
because the chance of it catching up with you are very,
(09:37):
very small.
Speaker 1 (09:39):
As the nineties wore on, the network started calling races
too early for Adelman's taste. The drive to outpace the
competition seemed to be overpowering the need to be sure
and the need to be right. Adelman feared that at
some point the networks would get overconfident with an important race.
Then on November seventh, two thousand, it happened.
Speaker 12 (10:00):
Good grief, eleven thousand votes. It's less than a half
a point. That would be something if the network's managed
to blow it twice in one night.
Speaker 1 (10:10):
Speak for yourself, Adelman told me he would come to
divide his career into two distinct eras before and after.
Two thousand.
Speaker 4 (10:18):
You've asked me to remember the most miserable day of
my life.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
You know we're not there yet.
Speaker 13 (10:23):
I don't.
Speaker 1 (10:24):
I'm Leon Nafok from Prolog Projects and Pushkin industries. This
is fiasco bush v Gore.
Speaker 2 (10:32):
Some strange, unusual things happening in flog.
Speaker 12 (10:35):
Well, the networks give us, the networks take it away.
Speaker 14 (10:38):
All the networks and all the pollsters are going to
get lots of egg on their faith.
Speaker 6 (10:41):
I've just never seen anything like this.
Speaker 9 (10:43):
I'm at a loss.
Speaker 1 (10:44):
Episode two, Real Numbers. What went on behind the scenes
on Election Night two thousand as statisticians, political operatives, and
TV anchors walked the line between reporting the news, predicting
the future, and shaping reality. There were a lot of
(11:04):
states where the two thousand election was going to be
extremely close. Poles have been tight all over the country
from mid months, and they were only getting tighter as
election day drew near.
Speaker 2 (11:13):
The race is as hot and tight as a too
small bathing suit on a too long car ride back from.
Speaker 12 (11:18):
The beach, and all the polls indicate this remains a
race too close to call.
Speaker 1 (11:22):
It wasn't just the presidency that hung in the balance.
The House and the Senate were also up for grabs,
and many of those races looked close to.
Speaker 4 (11:30):
This is the first time since nineteen forty eight, when
control of the White House, the Senate and the House
of Representatives all have been legitimately up for grabs on
election day Republic.
Speaker 1 (11:40):
A week before election day, Murray Adelman decided it would
be worth sending out a gentle warning to all the networks,
including Fox News, which had joined Venness after its founding
in nineteen ninety six. Adelman urged the networks to be
careful about calling races when the margin between two candidates
was half a percentage point or less. Adelman reminded the
networks that it was always possible for final vote totals
(12:01):
to shift slightly from where they stood at the end
of the night. It happened with every election. Ballots would
get lost or found, Counting errors would be discovered, and
so on.
Speaker 4 (12:10):
There's a lot of ways you can have errors in
the vote code. The precincts have to count it right.
Then they have to get it to the county. The
county has to count it right. We have people there
getting it as it's being added up. They have to
report it right. The person has to enter it right.
There's a lot of steps for error.
Speaker 1 (12:27):
In his memo, Adelman gave historical examples of races where
the final vote total had shifted by half a percentage
point or more, even after most voting precincts had submitted
their tallies. His point was that with very close races,
it was better to wait and get it right than
to be first and get it wrong.
Speaker 4 (12:44):
So that's what I sent out to everybody. I never
said don't call them. That wasn't my job. That would
have got me grief. I just said, just be very careful.
Speaker 1 (12:53):
It was just a warning submitted for the network's consideration. Remember,
the networks owned vns. They didn't have to follow Aedelman's advice.
Aside from sounding the alarm, there wasn't really anything else
you could do. What happened next after the break.
Speaker 7 (13:18):
Election day, the day to choose a new president for
a new censure as.
Speaker 5 (13:25):
Voting continues literally at this hour, the candidates with the
major parties are right now at their home bases in
Tennessee and in Texas. They are waiting for the election
results to roll in.
Speaker 1 (13:37):
On the afternoon of election day, George W. Bush was
in Austin working out at a gym at the University
of Texas when he got a call from his chief
political advisor, Karl Rove. Rove was calling to brief his
candidate on the campaign's first wave of internal polls. Bush
did not like what he heard, and he confessed to
Rove that he could sense defeat in the air, what
(13:57):
he called the smell. Bush's campaign trajectory up to that
point had been jagged. He had started off with a
comfortable advantage over Gore, then fell behind, then vaulted ahead
again to a small lead going into November. Finally, a
few days before the election, the local Fox affiliate in Portland,
Maine reported that Bush had been arrested for drunk driving
(14:17):
in nineteen seventy six.
Speaker 7 (14:19):
Bush swept across the battleground states.
Speaker 9 (14:21):
Of the Midwest today, competing with front page stories about
his arrest.
Speaker 8 (14:25):
Obviously, there's a report out tonight that twenty four years ago,
I was apprehended in chenny Buckport, Maine for a DUI.
Speaker 7 (14:32):
I'm not proud of that.
Speaker 2 (14:34):
I find interesting that four or five days before the
election is coming to the surface.
Speaker 1 (14:38):
On election night, as polls around the country started to close,
Bush surrounded himself with his family to watch the returns
on TV from a suite in the Four Seasons Hotel
in downtown Austin. In addition to his wife Laura, his
mother Barbara, his sisters, and his daughters. Bush was joined
by his father, the former president, and his brother Jeb,
the governor of Florida. George Bush had watched both of
(14:59):
them lose big elections in the past, and as his
campaign wound down to its final hours, the contest looked
so excruciatingly close that he had no idea whether they
were about to see the same. Thing happened to him.
Speaker 7 (15:10):
It's the closest election in a generation that we're going
to see in the course of this evening, whether in
fact it will live up to its billings.
Speaker 14 (15:18):
If you've ever longed for those nights when people waited
late to find out who their leader was, pull up
a chair, this may be it.
Speaker 1 (15:24):
By this point, Bush and his family had migrated to
the Shoreline Grill, a restaurant near the Four Seasons. There,
in a private dining room, Bush watched the news. A
little before seven o'clock Central time, NBC's decision desk made
a deeply disappointing call.
Speaker 12 (15:39):
We're going to now project an important win for Vice
President Al Gore. NBC News projects that he wins the
twenty five electoral votes in the state of Florida. It
turns out that Governor Jeb Bush was not his brother's keeper.
Speaker 1 (15:51):
Bush was once again hit with the smell of defeat.
Without Florida's twenty five electoral votes, his path to victory
was painfully narrow.
Speaker 7 (15:59):
The top advisors are really crunching the numbers.
Speaker 8 (16:01):
Now.
Speaker 4 (16:02):
Florida is very important.
Speaker 15 (16:03):
It is very, very dicey for George W. Bush to
win this election without Florida.
Speaker 1 (16:09):
In order to stop Gore from getting to two hundred
and seventy votes in the electoral College, Bush would have
to win Pennsylvania, Missouri, and Michigan, an ambitious and unrealistic trifecta.
Speaker 2 (16:18):
Looking tough for Bush.
Speaker 15 (16:19):
If al Gore wins Pennsylvania in New Hampshire, then he
really only has to pick up one more state.
Speaker 1 (16:24):
Bush stood stonefaced taking it in. His brother Jeb might
have felt even worse. Jeb Bush was the governor of
Florida for practically the entire campaign. It was assumed that
he would help deliver the state to the Bush Chainey ticket.
When all the networks, including Fox News, confirmed that Florida
was going for Gore, Jeb hugged George and said sorry, brother,
(16:46):
before leaving the restaurant. According to some reports, he had
tears in his eyes.
Speaker 4 (16:51):
I think the results in Florida have got to be
a bittersweet for the Bush family. Of course, the brother
of the governor sitting governor in Florida, that can't be
a happy one.
Speaker 7 (17:00):
For the Bush family.
Speaker 1 (17:01):
As the Bushes retreated to the Governor's mansion, the networks
continued delivering unwelcome news. First Michigan and Illinois went blue,
then Pennsylvania.
Speaker 7 (17:10):
We now projected Pennsylvania. In fact, he is going to
go to mister Gore, so that gives him the Big three.
That gives him Florida and Michigan and Pennsylvania. Those were
the toughest battleground states of the year, and ABC News
now projects.
Speaker 1 (17:21):
As the news came in, as Jeb Bush called his
cousin John Ellis in New York, this was not merely
a family check in. Ellis ran the decision desk at
Fox News, and he had been in regular communication with
the Bush family throughout the night. As Ellis looked at
the Florida numbers being pumped into Fox's computers by Murray
Adelman and VNS, he told his cousin Jeb that all
he saw was a screen full of Gore. Murray Adelman
(17:47):
and the rest of the VNS team were working out
of temporary office space at the World Trade Center in
Manhattan when NBC called Florida for Gore. Adelman looked at
the numbers to see if he agreed with the projection.
After comparing VNS exit polls and incoming vote totals to
data on passed elections, Adelman concluded that the Florida call
was good. Though only four percent of the state's votes
(18:09):
have encountered, this was not a case of the networks
declaring a winner too quickly out of an unhealthy sense
of competition. The VNS model clearly showed that Gore was
going to win.
Speaker 4 (18:20):
I mean it was it looked really, really solid. It
was beyond a maybe, it was really solid, and so
I called it at seven fifty two PM, which I
called the pinnacle of my career. That was it was
all downhill after that moment.
Speaker 1 (18:43):
On any given election day, the two campaigns battling for
the presidency revolve around two distinct centers of gravity. One
is composed of the candidate and his inner circle. The
other is a rapid response team staffed by political operatives,
polsters and campaign advisors. Their job is to gather information
about the race all through the day and night and
(19:03):
fight for any potential advantage they can find. Bush's rapid
response team was operating out of an office belonging to
Carl Rove. Stuart Stevens, a media consultant to Bush, spent
most of his evening in Rove's orbit worrying about the returns.
Speaker 10 (19:17):
It was really tense, and there are a lot of
highs and lows, you know. The worst point was when
they called Florida for Gore.
Speaker 1 (19:26):
But if the Bush team ever wallowed in despair over Florida,
they moved on quickly to indignation and outrage. For one thing,
they thought the networks were not giving enough weight to
absentee ballots, which the Bush campaign believed would favor them. Also,
NBC had called Florida around ten minutes before poles had
closed and the part of the state known as the Panhandle.
(19:46):
Unlike the rest of Florida, the Panhandle was on Central Time,
and it just so happened to be heavily Republican. Stuart
Stephens thought that by calling Florida for Gore before the
polls and the Panhandle had closed, the media was robbing
Bush of an unknowable number of votes.
Speaker 10 (20:01):
You never can calculate what this means. But if you're
headed to the polls to vote in Florida for your
candidate and you hear on the radio that your canad
it's already lost Florida, it's not. I'm sorry to think
that you might turn around and go home because you're
both not going to matter.
Speaker 1 (20:18):
There was something else bothering the Bush operatives too. According
to their internal polling numbers which they got from campaign
workers on the ground at which the TV news networks
did not have access to, the race in Florida was
way too close for anyone to say with confidence that
Gore was going to win. To Stevens Rove and the
rest of the Bush campaign, it seemed clear that the
(20:38):
networks had jumped the gun, so they went to work.
Speaker 10 (20:44):
All these networks have political producers. You're calling them and saying, look,
we can't prove to you that we're going to win Florida,
but you can't prove to us we're going to lose Florida.
I think everybody was calling anybody you knew.
Speaker 1 (20:58):
Soon Karl Rove in a parade of other Bush surrogates
were on live television making the campaign's case to the public.
Speaker 14 (21:04):
Let me tell you, Bertie, you all called Florida before
Florida even closed its poll.
Speaker 1 (21:08):
Florida's a state which some two times.
Speaker 14 (21:11):
I've been asking all evening, Uh, how can you have
that many absentee ballots out and assume that Governor Bush
has lost a state?
Speaker 6 (21:18):
And as you know, Karl, what are you suggesting, Mary,
that I'm suggesting when the real count isn't in the
absentee ballots are counted, that they are extensive in there,
and that day's going to flip.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
I really feel that way now.
Speaker 1 (21:30):
Having said that, at nine to fifty five Eastern time,
Bush himself came out and addressed the situation in Florida.
Speaker 7 (21:36):
This is mister Bush at home or in a hotel,
to be honest, I've forgotten where I watch.
Speaker 1 (21:42):
Usually presidential candidates stay out of public view on the
night of an election until it's time for someone to
concede and someone else to declare victory. Speaking from the
governor's mansion in Austin, Bush hit a note of unequivocal defiance.
Florida was still very much in play, and.
Speaker 9 (21:58):
The network's call this thing awfully early, but the people
are actually counting the votes are coming up with a
little different perspective, and so pretty dawn out beat about things.
Speaker 7 (22:08):
Okay, Governor Bush, pretty darn upbeat about this.
Speaker 1 (22:11):
And as you we heard, he was spin. But it
was spin that Bush and his campaign staff sincerely believed.
Here again is Bush Media consultants, Stuart Stevens.
Speaker 10 (22:20):
And there's a fog of war out there, and you're
trying to figure out past to victory. And I don't
think that we were overstating the case. What we were
saying was accurate. We were saying, you should just pull
it back, it's too close to call, which is a
pretty reasonable, as it turns out, very accurate request.
Speaker 1 (22:38):
While the Bush team mobilized, a young researcher at NBC
News named Michelle Jaconi was also trying to figure out
what was going on in Florida. Jaconi worked on Meet
the Press. It was her first job out of college.
The show is based in DC, but for election night,
Tim Russert and his staff were working out of thirty
Rockefeller Plaza in New York.
Speaker 16 (22:57):
Meet the Press at that time was also the politics
and polling unit of NBC News. I was, you know,
a researcher, and it was a very tiny team. In
the res era of Meet the Press. There was five
to six of us, depending on the year.
Speaker 1 (23:12):
Jacconi had spent the weeks leading up to election day
putting together a comprehensive guide to every notable race that
might come up during live coverage. As part of her
research on Florida, she discovered that the Florida Secretary of
State's office was going to be posting raw vote totals
on its website in real time as ballots were being counted.
Jacony was delighted by this high tech act of transparency,
(23:32):
but what she saw when she looked at the website
on election night made her very uneasy.
Speaker 16 (23:36):
I just remembered it was so close, and then I
thought they must know something about the outstanding vote that
I don't know.
Speaker 1 (23:43):
What Jacconi saw in these numbers was that, for the
time being, Bush had a slight lead over Gore in
the raw vote total. At seven forty nine pm, when
NBC projected that Gore was going to win Florida, Bush
was actually up by a few percentage points. The reason
VNS and the networks believed Gore was going to win
was that, according to their models, the as yet uncounted
votes would favor Gore and eventually put him ahead. But
(24:07):
the longer Jaconi looked at the incoming vote totals online,
the more uncertain she was that Gore was actually poised
to overtake Bush's lead. Meanwhile, all the news anchors, including
Jacconi's boss Tim Russert, were still saying Gore was going
to carry the state.
Speaker 15 (24:21):
AEP balanced. But I think the networks have all taken
their time and making this projection. If it's wrong, will
be the first to admit it. And obviously the information
that mister Reill provided will be factored in. There was calculation,
but every network looked at this based on the samplings
we're getting and awarded it to Vice President Gore.
Speaker 16 (24:37):
I just remembered being petrified for my boss being on
air and not knowing if information given to him was.
Speaker 1 (24:45):
Accurate or not.
Speaker 16 (24:46):
I thought that they put a story to bed that
should not have been put to bed, and I was
scared that the reputation of my boss was on the line.
And I just was scared.
Speaker 1 (24:55):
But Jacony was also kind of excited. She had studied
Florida election law, and she had learned that when the
margin between two candidates was half a percentage point or less,
it triggered an automatic statewide recount of all ballots.
Speaker 16 (25:08):
I just remember that word trigger triggered an automatic recount
right within point five percent, meaning that nobody would have
to ask for a recount, that it would be automatic
based on how people marked their ballots, and that I
just thought, what a fascinating scenario if that were to happen.
Speaker 1 (25:30):
Back at VNS headquarters, Murray Aidelman was focused on just
about everything but Florida. He had called the state hours earlier,
and he had moved on. But then, what was the
first indication that there was something wrong with the numbers?
Speaker 4 (25:43):
Well, the first indication was when I got a call
from Warren.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Warren, as you'll recall, was Aidelman's longtime colleague, Warren Ntowski.
He had left Voter News Service after the ninety two
election and was now calling races for CBS and CNN.
After Mitowski's departure, Adelman had been handed the reins to
the VNS projections operation for the first time.
Speaker 4 (26:02):
He wanted to take me with it, but I didn't.
I didn't go because I had been under a shadow
for my whole career pretty much.
Speaker 1 (26:10):
Now, Adelman's former mentor was on the phone demanding to
know what VNS was doing about Florida.
Speaker 4 (26:16):
You know. He started off saying, have you been watching Florida?
I said, nowhere, and I've got a thousand other things
to do right now. He said, well, well take a
look at it, because the status has gone down.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
According to the VNS projection model, Gore and Bush were
now neck and neck. But Adelman didn't think the call
needed to be pulled back yet, And when Matoski called
him a second time, Adelman told him so.
Speaker 4 (26:36):
And I said, well, I've got people looking into it.
And he said, well, I think we should retract the call.
And I said, I'm not ready to do that yet.
I don't think it's there yet.
Speaker 1 (26:45):
But Mitofski felt strongly that the Florida call needed to
be retracted. At nine fifty four PM, he sent his
decision to the producers he was working with at CBS
and CNN. He attached an explanation, we don't entirely trust
all the information we have in from VNS. Dan rather
delivered the news on the air moments later.
Speaker 2 (27:04):
This knockdown, drag out battle drags on into the night
and turned the lights down. The party just got wilder.
Florida comes out of the Gore column, back up in
the air, there's dose.
Speaker 1 (27:14):
ABC and Fox News pulled Florida out of the Gore category.
Speaker 7 (27:17):
Next, we now believe that the state of Florida is
too close to call. We and most other news services
had called it for mister Gore. We now believe it
is too close to call. It's always been the biggest
state for the racist cloth.
Speaker 1 (27:29):
Finally, at ten fifteen PM, Adelman concluded that he needed
to pull back Florida two. Typing into his terminal, he
informed the networks that VNS was retracting its call. We
don't have the confidence we did, he wrote.
Speaker 4 (27:43):
I think for me it was partly not wanting to
see it. Yeah, what, Ian, Well do you ever like
saying you're wrong? I mean, it's not fun and you
get this really heavy, failing so real. I don't recommend.
It's a really awful feeling.
Speaker 1 (27:59):
Adelman wasn't sad because he wanted Gore to win the election.
It's because his numbers, the projections generated by his VNS model,
had been wrong. Remember, before the election, Adelman was worried
that the networks would be irresponsible and call races before
they were ready. But this this was his data, his
exit polls, his vote tallies, that had led the networks
(28:22):
to incorrectly call one of the most important states in
the country. And maybe worst of all, Aedelman didn't even
know what had caused the error.
Speaker 4 (28:30):
We didn't really know what happened. We just know that
the estimate changed as more information came in. We didn't
know where the problem was.
Speaker 1 (28:39):
Adelman told me that you could only compare the feeling
to one thing.
Speaker 4 (28:43):
You must have had the feeling when you found someone died.
It's like you don't quite believe it at first, you know,
like sometimes I've said you're kidding or some stupid thing
like that, but like I didn't don't quite believe it
at first, and then it just starts the reality comes
over your whole body. Oh, it was like that. I
was like, oh, it made a really big mistake and
(29:07):
that was hard. You know, that was hard to deal with.
Speaker 5 (29:12):
Candy Crowley joins us from Austin the Candy.
Speaker 7 (29:15):
I think you can hear the crowd reaction.
Speaker 3 (29:18):
They're obviously very energized in this crowd.
Speaker 17 (29:20):
I'm not going to assure you in the Bush campaign,
well we knew.
Speaker 1 (29:23):
While the Bush team celebrated their attracted Florida call in Austin,
al Gore's staff was recovering from shock. The nerve center
of the Gore operation was in a single story building
in Nashville, where a team of data analysts and operatives
worked in a windowless space known internally as the boiler room.
Speaker 17 (29:40):
It's kept very separate from the candidate. You're not going
to ever see the candidate in the boiler room. This
is really the turnout operation, where we're tracking what's coming
in from the states, and we're feeding it in and
we're making decisions.
Speaker 1 (29:51):
Jenny Beckis was the communications officer for the Democratic National Committee.
She spent election day giving input on get out the
vote efforts and talking to reporters about how various states
were looking earlier in the day, Long before she turned
her attention to Florida backus's primary concern had been a
snowstorm in New Mexico that had the potential to affect
voter turnout.
Speaker 17 (30:11):
Snow in New Mexico was like a big, big thing
that was in our heads. But I remember, like I
was really confident that we had been smart and strategic
about where we had resources, and I think Gore closed
pretty strong.
Speaker 1 (30:24):
As Gore racked up one battleground state after another, many
of the donors and prominent supporters who had been hanging
out at the campaign headquarters left the building to start celebrating.
Knowing that Gore would be giving his victory speech at
the War Memorial Auditorium in downtown Nashville, they headed there
to wait for his win to become official.
Speaker 17 (30:42):
If you're about to have somebody win the presidency, its
power closest to the throne. So a lot of people
had just wanted to be at the hotel or at
the War Memorial because that's where Gore was, and if
Gore wins, they're close. The rest of us are in
a closet trying to figure out what's happening in the snow.
Speaker 1 (30:59):
In New Mexico, there had been a sense in the
boiler room that the Florida call for Gore might be shaky,
but it still came as a crushing disappointment when the
network's and VNS pulled it back of.
Speaker 17 (31:10):
Stomach fell out. Everyone was like, where can we find
the votes? What's not out? What's still, everyone was starting
to say, Okay, if we don't win Florida, how do
we win this thing?
Speaker 14 (31:21):
If you take twenty five votes away from al Gore
and put it in the underside of column, should they
break for Bush? The entire calculation of the last hour
and a half, it changes dramatically.
Speaker 1 (31:31):
Bacchus and her colleague started contacting voting precincts and swing
states around the country. They were looking for updated vote tallies,
desperately trying to figure out if there was a pathway
to victory that did not include Florida.
Speaker 17 (31:42):
New Mexico hadn't closed, and Nevada was still out there,
and so there were little slivers of hope still going on,
and Wisconsin was still really close, so we could still win.
We could win on the other path, and we were
waiting to see if we were going to get there.
Speaker 1 (32:05):
But as the night stretched on, it became increasingly clear
that it was going to be Florida or nothing. Because
of how the other swing states broke. Neither candidate could
get the two hundred and seventy electoral College votes without
winning Florida's twenty five.
Speaker 7 (32:18):
It could still go either way.
Speaker 2 (32:20):
The Bush people think they'll win it on the strength
of absentee ballots. The Gore people think they'll win it
because they ran so strong in Southeast Florida.
Speaker 12 (32:27):
All the chips have been pushed out of the map
down in the southeastern corner of the state of Florida.
There's a big, big stack of chips in that state.
Both candidates are counting on winning it because that could
get them to where they need to get to.
Speaker 1 (32:40):
A little after two am, the VNS projection model was
showing that Bush was going to win Florida by twenty
nine thousand votes, the exact margin that Murray Adelman had
warned about in his memo. By this point, ninety six
percent of Florida's votes have been counted. The head of
the projection of the desk at NBC News called Adelman
to ask if it was time to pull the trigger
for Bush.
Speaker 4 (33:00):
And he said, what do you think we're thinking of
calling it? And I said, did you read my memo?
And before he really got to answer than that, he said, oh,
Fox just called it. I gotta go.
Speaker 1 (33:15):
It was two sixteen am when Fox News reported that
George W. Bush was the projected winner in Florida.
Speaker 7 (33:20):
Fox is now projects George W.
Speaker 11 (33:23):
Bush the winner in Florida, and thus it appears the
winner of the presidency of the United States.
Speaker 1 (33:29):
Fox's call had been ordered by the head of the
network's decision desk, George Bush's cousin John Ellis. Within minutes,
the call was backed up by NBC, CBS, CNN, and ABC.
Speaker 12 (33:40):
George Bush is the president of elect of the United States.
He has won the state of Florida. According to our projections.
Speaker 2 (33:45):
Florida goes Busch. The presidency is Bush.
Speaker 7 (33:49):
That's it.
Speaker 2 (33:49):
Let's pause for a second. Let that sink in. Bush
wins if our CBS News.
Speaker 1 (33:55):
As the election was over, George W. Bush was going
to be president.
Speaker 12 (33:59):
The scene in Austin, Texas tonight, It's been a long,
suspenseful evening.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
Carl Adelman declined to join the networks and projecting Florida
for Bush. The margin was just too narrow, so as
the calls came down, VNS stayed on the sidelines. Dlman
didn't think he had any other options.
Speaker 4 (34:19):
If I put a message out, what am I going
to say? I think this was a bad call. Do
you really want to do that to four out of
the six people that pay your salary? You know, that's
I'm not going to do that, so I didn't do anything.
Speaker 1 (34:41):
At his hotel suite in Nashville, al Gore was lying
on the floor watching television in silence when he saw
the networks flash their pre made banners that said President
elect George W. Bush. Gore turned to his staff and said,
I'm really grateful to you all. I want to concede.
I want to be gracious about this. At around two
(35:04):
thirty in the morning, Gore called Bush on the phone
and congratulated him on his victory. Then he got into
the limo that would drive him to the War Memorial
for what would be his concession speech.
Speaker 5 (35:15):
Al Gore called George Bush on the telephone, congratulated him,
said he'd run a good campaign, words to that effect.
Speaker 1 (35:24):
Gore's decision to concede was made so quickly that no
one from the candidate's inner circle had checked in with
Jenny Backus or the others still working in the boiler room.
Speaker 17 (35:31):
It was maybe fifteen of us in the room at
that point because everyone was leaving to go down, but
Michael wasn't coming out of that room yet.
Speaker 1 (35:40):
Michael was Michael Hooley, a Boston lawyer who was overseeing
the boiler room operation. Hooley's contact in Florida was a
field operative named Nick Baldick, and Nick Baldick had been
watching Bush's lead in the vote total steadily drop. Just
after three am, Bush was up by just forty six
hundred votes, a margin so narrow that, according to Florida law,
the race was headed for an automatic recount.
Speaker 17 (36:02):
Michael said, you know, get in here like so I
went into the room. He put a Nick on speakerphone. Nick'
said Michael, we could win this. We should not be quitting.
You need to stop this.
Speaker 1 (36:16):
Hooley, Bacchus and their colleagues rushed to contact anyone they
knew who might be with the vice president. The problem
was that he was already in transit, and they didn't
know exactly where he was or how to reach him.
Speaker 17 (36:26):
We were not really paying attention to Gore. We were
so wrapped up in what they were saying about those
numbers and like it may not be over, and like
trying to do the math a hundred different ways. It
might not have occurred to Michael that he was actually
in the car, but we knew we had to get
to him. Like Gores going down to the motorcade and
their drive. You know, like it's all happening on live television.
Speaker 7 (36:49):
How Gored now on his way to the War Memorial
Auditory of the vice presidential motorcade moving.
Speaker 15 (36:55):
You just can't help but think that looks more like
a funeral procession tonight in a political procession.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
Finally, Michael Hooley got word to a Gore aid who
was able to intercept the Vice president before he went
out on stage. Meanwhile, Beckus started calling everyone she knew
at the networks if she wanted to tell them that,
despite their earlier proclamations about Bush being president elect, Gore
was no longer planning to give up the fight. What
happens next after the break the first person Backus reached
(37:28):
with Michelle Jaconi, the young researcher at NBC who had
been obsessively watching Florida all night. She and Beachus had
first encountered each other while Jacony was doing her research
in preparation for election day.
Speaker 16 (37:39):
And she says, Michelle, stop that reporting right now. I
can assuredly say al Gore is not going to concede.
And I said, can I report that on the record?
Speaker 1 (37:48):
And she says yes, Jacconi rushed into the control room
and ran to the producer who was directing coverage future
CNN president Jeff Zucker.
Speaker 16 (37:57):
My heart now is beating so fast and running outside
of the room, screaming into the phone. Now everybody in
the room is looking at me. I ducked down the hallway,
run into the control room, which is pitch black. Everybody
has headsets on except for Jeff Sucker. And Jeff'sucker, who's
running coverage, is standing up pacing, and I look at him,
and I have the phone to my ear, and I said,
al Gore is not going to concede. And he stops,
(38:20):
and he grabs my shirt and says, can I report that.
Speaker 1 (38:27):
Jenny Bachus was watching the NBC newscast from the Gore
boiler room. By this point, Tom Brokaw and Tim Russard
had been making note of the razor thin margin between
Gore and Bush and wondering aloud why Bush had not
yet come out to deliver his victory speech.
Speaker 12 (38:41):
I'm curious about why we're not seeing the governor yet.
Speaker 1 (38:43):
They also began to familiarize themselves with the intricacies of
Florida election law, starting with the fact that the state's
top election official was the secretary of state.
Speaker 12 (38:51):
Will someone find out for me whether the Secretary of
State is a Democrat or a Republican? Okay, he's a
Democrat or she is? Is it a man?
Speaker 10 (38:59):
Who?
Speaker 12 (38:59):
Do we know who that secretary of State is? Let's
try to find that out if we can.
Speaker 15 (39:03):
Maybe we could talk to him or her.
Speaker 12 (39:04):
Keep Yeah, we're working on that, We're told in the control.
Speaker 1 (39:08):
Room, phone calls were flying between the network and the campaign.
Then an NBC reporter stationed in Nashville delivered the latest.
Gore had placed a second call to George Bush and
he had taken back his concession.
Speaker 12 (39:21):
Claire ship and what do you have for US's.
Speaker 4 (39:24):
How long we're hearing tonight?
Speaker 5 (39:25):
Is it one of the reasons for al Gore's delay?
Speaker 13 (39:27):
This is, according to some of his low level staffers,
as if he is actually.
Speaker 16 (39:32):
Called George W.
Speaker 4 (39:33):
Bush and taken back concession bone call, so an extraordinary move.
Speaker 1 (39:41):
It was at around three point thirty in the morning
when al Gore placed that second call to George W.
Bush and retracted his concession. At four am, Gore's campaign
chairman Bill Day addressed the crowd of supporters gathered at
the War Memorial.
Speaker 3 (39:53):
I'll let me say I've been in politics a very
long time, but I don't think there's ever been a
night like this one. Just an hour or so ago,
the TV networks called this race for Governor Bush. It
now appears, it now appears that their call was premature.
(40:15):
This is a very significant for most important reason, and
that is for under Florida state law, this triggers in
an automatic recount, and until the results in Florida become official,
our campaign continues.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
On TV news, anchors tried to summon whatever authority they
had left to explain that Florida was once again being
pulled back.
Speaker 10 (40:37):
I thank you.
Speaker 2 (40:38):
I'm always reminded of those West Texas saloons where the
head a sign says, please don't shoot the piano player.
He's doing the best he can. And we do the
best we can on these calls. But we have to
stand up and take.
Speaker 1 (40:49):
At Gore Headquarters, the boiler room that had been nearly
empty just a few minutes earlier slowly began to repopulate
with stunned campaign staffers. Here's Jenny Beckett again.
Speaker 17 (40:58):
So some people start coming back, and they've been drinking,
and like they smelled a little bit like they had
been like, you know, having a bunch of beers moaning
the loss of the campaign, and then all of a sudden,
they're sort of like, oh my god, you sort of
have already mentally processed. I've played this game, I did
my best. All right, fine, I'm gonna drive my sorrows.
And then all of since, oops, I'm not gonna dry
my sorrows. I still have another two innings to play
or overtime. We're in overtime. That's what we were.
Speaker 1 (41:21):
We're in overtime. If the Gore campaign in Nashville was euphoric,
their counterparts at Bush headquarters in Austin felt like they
had been hit by a truck. Everyone was exhausted and deflated,
and now the race wasn't even over here again is
Bush Media Consultants Stuart Stevens.
Speaker 10 (41:38):
It's a weird feeling. I mean, you're prepared to win,
you're prepared to lose. To weird feeling.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
You know.
Speaker 10 (41:42):
I've been doing campaigns for a long time. I'm used
to that end of the world feeling when campaigns in
win or lose. I look forward to that. But this
was purgatory. It's like you know, watching a loved one
like go into the emergency room and wondering if they're
going to come out. It's like nothing you can do.
Speaker 1 (42:07):
Over the next thirty six days, both sides would blame
the TV networks for stacking the decks against them with
their coverage of election night. The Bush side blamed NBC
for calling Florida before the polls were closed in the Panhandle.
The Gore side blamed Fox, especially John Ellis, for giving
Bush a temporary victory and setting up the narrative that
Gore was a sore loser trying to overturn the election.
(42:28):
As far apart as they wore on most issues, the
two campaigns agreed on this one thing. What the networks
did on Election Night two thousand had real world consequences.
Speaker 17 (42:37):
The irony was as much as we honestly believe that
you don't want elections, so you have all the numbers.
In some ways, you can win or lose an election
based on what the TVs say.
Speaker 1 (42:48):
I've been trying to think about what Backus might have
meant by that. On the face of it, it shouldn't
be possible for the outcome of an election to be
determined by what people are saying about it on TV.
The cause and effect arrow is supposed to point the
other way. First, the outcome is determined, and then the
people on TV try to explain why it came out
the way it did. The two thousand election and its
agonizing aftermath tested that natural state of affair. Starting with
(43:11):
Election Night, both campaigns had to ask themselves did the
narrative that emerged from media coverage have any bearing on
who got to be president? At the end of the story.
Did it matter what reporters and pundits said about what
was happening. It seems obvious there's a feedback loop between
perception and reality, but how that feedback loop actually works
is not self evident. What were the consequences of the
(43:31):
TV networks showing those graphics at two thirty in the
morning that said George W. Bush was the forty third
president of the United States. Did the fact that Bush
won and then unwon after Gore unconceded shape the way
the next thirty six days played out. I don't have
any definitive answers here, but I do see one way
in which the coverage of Election Knight had an unmistakable
impact on everything that came after. Between the Gore call
(43:54):
that turned out to be wrong and then the Bush
call that also turned out to be wrong, the American
people witnessed mistakes that had never been made on such
a spectacular scale before. And these mistakes were destabilizing, not
because they made everyone feel like they couldn't trust Tom Brokaw,
but because as they expanded the range of what was possible,
they underscored the futility of trying to predict what would
(44:15):
happen next. Murray Aidelman still vividly remembers the aftermath of
that night when the projection model he'd been using since
nineteen sixty seven went wobbly on him. He remembers it
as a turning point in his life.
Speaker 4 (44:30):
I just remember having this really big heaviness over my
body and just so so depressed, and you know, it's
like these things used and counted on and suddenly they
all turned, you know.
Speaker 1 (44:48):
After the election, vns's exit polling operation was widely blamed
for the blown calls in Florida. Adelman knew it wasn't
that simple. His exit poll in Florida had in fact
performed well. The survey results were within the margin of error.
It was just that the error in the exit poll
and the raw vote totals that came in early in
the evening both have and to favor Gore. Separately, the
(45:12):
vn S model had underestimated the number of absentee ballots,
which favored Bush. All that created what Aidelman now calls
a perfect storm. At the time, Aidelman was unable to
respond to the criticism of his exit polls because the
networks that paid his salary had instructed him not to comment.
It was painful for him. Adelman really believed in exit polls,
(45:33):
both as an analytical tool and as a means of
giving voice to demographic groups. During the nineties, Adelman had
pushed for VNS exit polls to include a question about
sexual orientation, a move that helped establish the LGBT community
as a political constituency with quantifiable voting power. In any event,
exit polls only contributed to the first Florida call, the
(45:54):
one for Gore. The later call, the one for Bush,
turned out to have been the result of a crucial
data entry error that inflated Bush's lead by twenty two
thousand votes just before Fox called the race in his favor.
VNS was ended in two thousand and three after its
computers crashed during the previous year's midterms. Warren Thetowski died
(46:16):
in two thousand and six, and Adelman spoke at his funeral.
He still believes in the value of projecting elections. He
doesn't think two thousand proved it's not worth doing, or
that there's something inherently irresponsible about it.
Speaker 4 (46:29):
Your job is to call races. Your job is to
look at data and decide. And it's always safer to wait.
It's always safer to not say anything. But then you're
not doing what you're there for. That's what the job
is is. The job is taking risks. If you didn't
take a risk, who needs a decision person If you're
(46:51):
going to wait till it's one hundred percent.
Speaker 1 (46:59):
Just after four am, the Gore campaign was scrambling to
charter a plane from Nashville to Florida. Jill Alper, a
political consultant working with the DNC, was tasked with rounding
up Gor staffers for the flight. Alper had spent election
Day in the boiler room with Jenny Bachus and Michael Hooley.
Now that it was over, or rather now that it
had failed to end, she was in charge of the
(47:20):
logistics of whatever happened next.
Speaker 13 (47:22):
I remember saying, you know, gee, what I need as
a plane, and somebody saying, oh, right, well, we have
the Liberman plane and we had a scheduling and advanced
operation right there, so they could start, you know, renting
cars and finding hotel rooms and putting the logistics into place.
Speaker 1 (47:41):
Joe Lieberman's plane had seventy two seats, and Alper wanted
to fill all of them. By four point thirty in
the morning, there were more than one hundred staffers waiting
to get on.
Speaker 13 (47:50):
People ran back to their hotel rooms and their apartments
and got their things, and you know, off we went.
And when we were on the plane, we used the
PA system to train folks. While we were flying.
Speaker 1 (48:02):
Down, someone christened the plane Recount one. It left the
cold dark of Nashville just as the sun was rising.
While some staff read up on recount strategy, others tried
to get as much sleep as they could. Many had
been up for twenty four hours.
Speaker 13 (48:16):
People were tired, and it was intense, but the moment
was not lost on all of us that it was unusual.
Who would ever thought, right, you'd be on a plane
heading to Florida to start a recount that could determine
who the president is.
Speaker 1 (48:34):
When the Gore plane landed in Tallahassee, Joe Alper looked
out her window. The Florida sun was shining, and there
on the tarmac was the plane of Governor Jeb Bush.
Speaker 13 (48:44):
At this point, it was like really clear that there
was going to be a showdown in Florida, right. I mean,
we already knew we were into serious stuff, but they
were just right there.
Speaker 1 (49:09):
On the next step. So to Fiasco, how a national
election turned into a local story about Palm Beach County.
The butterfly bell was one way of signifying that something
had gone horribly wrong with this election. Fiasco is a
production of Prolog Projects, and it's distributed by Pushkin Industries.
(49:30):
The show is produced by Andrew Parsons, Madelin kaplan Ula Culpa,
and me Leon Nafock. Our script editor was Daniel Riley.
Our editorial consultant was Camilla Hammer, and we received additional
editorial support from Lisa Chase. Our music and score are
by Nick Sylvester of god Mode, with additional music from
Alexis Quadrado. Our theme song is by Spatial Relations. Our
(49:54):
artwork is by Teddy Blanks at Chips and Y Audio
mixed by Rob Buyers, Michael Raphael and Johnny Vince Evans
of Final Final V two Special thanks to Luminary for
a list of books, articles, and documentaries that we relied
on in our research. Click the link in the show notes.
Thanks to the NBC News Archive and CNN for the
(50:15):
archival material you heard in today's show. Thanks for listening.
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