he race for the presidency this year was what the experts call a "base" election, a contest determined by which party could get more of its most reliable supporters to the polls.

For Democrats, that means mainly minorities and union members.

Al Gore managed to turn them out in great numbers, thanks to the efforts of campaign aide Donna Brazile, whose job it was to scare blacks to the polls with racially inflammatory appeals, and AFL-CIO head John Sweeney, whose definition of a "holiday" is any day union members can take off to help deep-six Republicans.

Now, it turns out that the "after election" is all about the base as well, in this case the third leg of the Democratic coalition: the trial lawyers. And they too are turning out in droves.

The Gore campaign's first significant action once the election went into overtime was the launch of a kind of Mariel boat-lift of sharks in pinstriped suits to Florida. The intent from the start has been to sue Gore's way to victory.

Every day brings another rush into the courtroom. When Broward County at first voted against doing a full hand recount — the Democrats threatened a lawsuit. When Palm Beach wasn't going to count "dimpled chads" — the Democrats sued. And, of course, when Katherine Harris declined to accept late hand recounts — the Democrats sued, and sued again.

Trial lawyers are important to the Democrats partly as a matter of finances. The attorneys fasten on targets of opportunity — whether tobacco companies or the makers of breast implants — and bleed them of resources, which are then used to fatten their own wallets and are eventually passed on to the Democrats in political contributions.

But trial lawyers are in sympathy with the Democrats on a much deeper level. They are a living, breathing, tassel-loafered representation of the Democrats' 30-year reliance on the courts to effect their social and political agenda.

Whether it is banishing prayer from public schools and high-school football fields, or keeping infanticide legal, or — in the case of the Microsoft antitrust suit — regulating high-tech industry, the Democrats have relied on judges to impose their ideas on the public from on high.

It is no accident that the "hero" of that Microsoft action, David Boies, legal bully par excellence, has now essentially shouldered Warren Christopher aside in Tallahassee.

Christopher — in his sheer dustiness, if nothing else — has a tenuous connection to the Democratic wise men of lore. Boies, slicker and more combative, represents the post-Clinton Democratic Party's soul-deadening imperative to win — to win with every technicality and niggling legalism at its disposal, respectability be damned.

And the way Boies may win is telling: bailed out by the Florida Supreme Court.

All over the country, trial lawyers and activist judges are locked into an embrace cemented by their mutual contempt for democratic self-government and their desire to aggrandize their own power at its expense.

That the Democrats would savage Katherine Harris as a partisan incapable of making a responsible decision is in keeping with this long-standing agenda of slipping decision-making authority away from elected officials, clearly accountable to the public, and toward judges — loses at least partly obscured by their robes, and all the more insidious because they never are democratically accountable in quite the same way as partisan elected officials.

If Katherine Harris were truly a scheming harridan acting unfairly, the Democrats could build a political case against her (heaven knows, they enjoy calling her names).

Then, if her decision to certify Bush's victory seems illegitimate, the Democrats can challenge it in Congress. Again, if Tom DeLay is seen as somehow unfairly delivering the presidency to George W. Bush, congressional Republicans will pay a dear political price for it two years hence.

In that case, the public will have evaluated the Florida controversy and rendered its judgment on the politicians it elects to do its will. This is how a representative democracy is supposed to work.

But David Boies has a better idea. Black voters and union members have done their part; now he's doing his.

This piece appears in today's New York Post.