‘Bush v. Gore’ Propaganda at 25

Over at SCOTUSBlog, Erwin Chemerinsky looked at the legacy of Bush v. Gore on its 25th anniversary. His explanation of what happened in the case, geared for the law student reader too young to remember the facts, leaves out a number of key factors.

First, in referencing the TV networks that had called Florida early for Al Gore and then reversed, he omits the trigger for the whole mess: Fox News and other networks declared that Gore had won Florida while the polls were still open in the reddest part of the state, the panhandle, which is in a different time zone from the rest of Florida. It was the biggest election-affecting media failure in American history. We will never know quite how many people got off the line and went home, but there were many reports at the time that this happened. The whole landscape of the recount would have been different, and perhaps the litigation would have been avoided entirely, had Bush’s lead in the original count been 1,500 votes instead of 537. It does not require much imagination to picture how left-leaning commentators would have reacted had this happened in a predominantly black area.

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Dan McLaughlin

Dan McLaughlin is a senior writer at National Review Online and a fellow at National Review Institute.

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Over at SCOTUSBlog, Erwin Chemerinsky looked at the legacy of Bush v. Gore on its 25th anniversary. His explanation of what happened in the case, geared for the law student reader too young to remember the facts, leaves out a number of key factors.

First, in referencing the TV networks that had called Florida early for Al Gore and then reversed, he omits the trigger for the whole mess: Fox News and other networks declared that Gore had won Florida while the polls were still open in the reddest part of the state, the panhandle, which is in a different time zone from the rest of Florida. It was the biggest election-affecting media failure in American history. We will never know quite how many people got off the line and went home, but there were many reports at the time that this happened. The whole landscape of the recount would have been different, and perhaps the litigation would have been avoided entirely, had Bush’s lead in the original count been 1,500 votes instead of 537. It does not require much imagination to picture how left-leaning commentators would have reacted had this happened in a predominantly black area.