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