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On the night of the 2000 presidential election, as the counting began in a tight race between Texas Gov. George W. Bush and incumbent Vice President Al Gore, it all came down to Florida. And then, all hell broke loose.
Director Jay Roach and writer Danny Strong captured the stakes and the personalities that drove that strange moment in “Recount,” the Emmy-winning 2008 HBO movie starring Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey, Bob Balaban and Laura Dern. Instead of “Stop the Steal,” the rally cry in 2000 for Bush supporters was “Stop the Recount.”
“The events in ‘Recount’ were in some way a rehearsal for January 6,” Roach says. “It proved that there was potential to physically disrupt an election.”
As the nation braces for what will surely be a long night of waiting for election returns, it’s eye-opening to revisit the chaos that ensued for five weeks while Bush and Gore went to war over how the votes were counted (and recounted and not recounted) in Florida.
“Electile Dysfunction,” Daily Variety declared in its Nov. 9, 2000, edition.
A quarter-century ago, the onset of the Bush v. Gore legal fight felt as unprecedented and unsettling as the events of the 2024 presidential campaign have been for so many this year. “There have been so many efforts to undermine our faith in elections since then,” Roach says. “It’s depressing.”
After the major TV networks called Florida for Bush shortly before 8 p.m. on Election Day, Nov. 7, 2000, Gore made the traditional congratulatory phone call to his Republican opponent. But as the night went on, CNN, CBS and others did an about face and briefly called Florida for Gore. By 3 a.m., most outlets put Florida back in the too-close-to-call column. In the interim, Gore made another call to an incredulous Bush to retract his concession. Bewildered voters who went to bed that night thinking Bush had won decisively were shocked to see the bleary-eyed faces of Dan Rather, Tom Brokaw, Peter Jennings and Bernard Shaw the next day acknowledging that the early exit polling data had been misleading.
From Nov. 8 through Dec.12, two small armies of lawyers and political strategists went to work, fighting over every tiny detail of the recount process in three key Florida counties. James Baker, who served as Secretary of State during the first Bush administration, led the charge for the Bush. Warren Christopher, who had been Secretary of State during the Clinton administration, was the public face of Gore’s battle.
“If you want to explore the roots of our political moment now, [the 2000 election] has endless riches to mine,” says R.J. Cutler, the veteran filmmaker who was behind the landmark documentary feature on Bill Clinton’s quixotic 1992 presidential campaign, “The War Room.”
“Gore was saying let the process play out. Democrats were being overly dignified and playing by the old rules. Republicans were rewriting the rules and masterfully manipulating them in the way we now see magnified 100 times,” Cutler observes.
There was a daily stream of news conferences, with each side trying to pack as many American flags into the frame as possible – as parodied in the moment by “Saturday Night Live.”
There was the “Brooks Brothers riot” in a Miami government office that played out live on cable news. There was Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris (played with verve by Dern in “Recount”) with her brass button suits and big “Designing Women” energy. And there was Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor getting cranky during oral arguments about the lack of uniform standards for ballots and how they are handled. “Why isn’t the standard the one that voters are instructed to follow, for goodness sakes? I mean, it couldn’t be clearer,” a frustrated O’Connor observed.
One of the key questions came down to determining voter intent on tens of thousands of Florida ballots that had “hanging chads” — not fully detached from the ballot — or had “dimpled chads,” aka ballots that were barely indented on a selection. Until November 2000, nobody in America knew those tiny pieces of paper had a name.
During those five weeks of uncertainty, the mainstream news networks were bloodied and bruised after the premature call and flip-flopping on Florida. Meanwhile, the political pressure around the legal rulings in the case was so strong, the nation’s high court broke with its tradition of barring electronic recordings.
The Supreme Court released the full audio recording of the Dec. 1 oral arguments barely 15 minutes after the 90-minute hearing concluded. The recording aired in its entirety across major TV and radio news outlets, with photo enhancements from the news networks to help viewers follow who was speaking when.
Social media platforms would not take root in the U.S. for another decade, and the introduction of the iPhone was still seven years away, but the quick turnaround of the audio from the hearing made Americans feel the rush of momentous events happening in real time. It was an early glimpse of the dizzying pace of breaking news to come.
“With the 2000 election, what you saw was the power of political theater playing out every day on TV,” says Cutler. “The thing I remember most was that the Bush folks basically started acting like he had won.”
In the context of present-day fears about political violence, a milestone in the 2000 election imbroglio came on Nov. 22, when hundreds of mostly male protesters barreled into Miami’s Stephen P. Clark Government Center to protest Miami-Dade’s ongoing recount of votes. There was shouting and general mayhem, punches were thrown and some local Democratic and election officials were chased around the building. The riot did interrupt the recount process — which would eventually be put on ice by the Supreme Court ruling. It became known as “the Brooks Brothers riot” because many of the attendees were conservative young men in khakis and button-collar shirts. Over time, it would be revealed that the gathering was not an impromptu protest but an organized effort by local officials that had the fingerprints of veteran GOP operative Roger Stone.
The legal jousting over the recounts went on for what seemed an eternity — with key decisions bouncing around between Florida state and federal courts. Finally, on Dec. 9, the U.S. Supreme Court issued a stay mandating that all recounts stop. Bush would be certified as the winner of Florida by a margin of 537 votes — razor-thin but enough to secure the prize of 25 electoral college votes needed to claim ultimate victory.
Three days later, the high court outlined its rationale with its 61-page ruling in Bush v. Gore. “The counting of votes that are of questionable legality does in my view threaten irreparable harm to petitioner, and to the country, by casting a cloud upon what he claims to be the legitimacy of his election. Count first, and rule upon legality afterwards, is not a recipe for producing election results that have the public acceptance democratic stability requires,” Justice Antonin Scalia wrote in concurring with the majority opinion penned by Chief Justice William Rehnquist.
In his dissent, Justice John Paul Stevens sounded the alarm of the high court doubting the capacity of state judges to make the right calls on how to handle recounts. “Time will one day heal the wound to that confidence that will be inflicted by today’s decision,” Stevens wrote. “One thing, however, is certain. Although we may never know with complete certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.”
Roach and Strong let a few years pass before they started to work on “Recount.” The passage of time gave them appropriate perspective. “The stakes were so high, and the real story was so suspenseful,” Roach says.
As storytellers and citizens, Roach and Strong knew the gut punch of the film would come at the end with Gore’s concession speech. The nation’s fin de siècle election nightmare ended for good on Dec.13, 2000, when Gore spoke to the nation in a televised address. He acknowledged that he disagreed with the Supreme Court’s decision but would accept it given the nation’s need for closure.
“I say to President-elect Bush that what remains of partisan rancor must now be put aside, and may God bless his stewardship of this country,” Gore said. “Neither he nor I anticipated this long and difficult road. Certainly, neither of us wanted it to happen. Yet it came, and now it has ended, resolved, as it must be resolved, through the honored institutions of our democracy. While there will be time enough to debate our continuing differences, now is the time to recognize that that which unites us is greater than that which divides us. While we yet hold and do not yield our opposing beliefs, there is a higher duty than the one we owe to political party. This is America and we put country before party; we will stand together behind our new president.”
Bush also gave a brief address of his own that night and struck a conciliatory tone that would be hard to imagine coming from the more pugnacious wing of the GOP these days. “Our nation must rise above a house divided,” Bush said. “Americans share hopes and goals and values far more important than any political disagreements. Republicans want the best for our nation, and so do Democrats. Our votes may differ, but not our hopes.”
In Roach’s view, the lesson from the extraordinary events captured in “Recount” is clear. “Democracy needs losers,” he says. “When losers don’t concede, the result very often is violence.”
(Pictured top: Pro-Bush protestors outside the Miami-Dade election office on Nov. 22, 2000)
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