David W. Dunlap is a Metro reporter and writes the Building Blocks column. He has worked at The Times for 39 years.
The arc of election night was clear this year before Election Day began.
Fourteen years ago, the arc of election night wasn’t clear when Thanksgiving Day began.
No matter what they may tell you, reporters and editors love a suspenseful election. But the presidential contest of 2000 strained that affection.
Editions of The Times are marked by a declining number of dots between the “Vol.” and “No.” designations at the top of Page 1. Four dots mark the first edition, three dots the next edition
and, back in the day, two dots marked the next.
Rarely was there a one-dot edition. And very rarely, when we ran out of dots, was an em-dash used. Essentially, that meant the sun was coming up while the presses were still running.
In the one-dot edition of Nov. 8, 2000, The Times called the presidential race for Gov. George W. Bush. While the banner headline was equivocal (“Bush Appears to Defeat Gore”), the lead on the article was unqualified:
“George Walker Bush was elected the 43rd president of the United States yesterday by one of the tightest margins in history, crowning a spectacular and exceptionally brisk political rise only eight years after his own father was turned out of the White House.”
A three-column picture spot that had been split all night between photos of Vice President Al Gore and Mr. Bush at their polling places was given over to a portrait-handsome photo of the governor, smiling broadly and looking very much the president-elect.
By 4 a.m. that morning, however, the tectonic plates had shifted.
For the one-dash final, the banner headline “Bush and Gore Vie for an Edge” was restored from an earlier edition, as was the Gore-Bush diptych. In his lead, Richard L. Berke candidly acknowledged the foul-up:
“The outcome of the presidential race between Gov. George W. Bush and Vice President Al Gore balanced early this morning on no more than a few thousand votes in the closely contested state of Florida.
“Shortly after 2 a.m., Mr. Bush appeared to have won Florida, and several news organizations, including The New York Times, declared that he had captured the White House. Aides to Mr. Gore said he was preparing his concession speech, while Mr. Bush expected to announce his victory.
“But later in the morning, as the count in Florida neared an end, the narrow margin that Mr. Bush had achieved unexpectedly evaporated.”
With it went any hope of an early resolution.
“For dozens of us at The New York Times, those 36 days of the Great Post-Election Limbo will live in a special kind of intimate infamy,” Todd S. Purdum wrote in Times Talk, the newspaper’s house organ, about the weeks he and his colleagues spent in Florida while the legal battle played out. “For a generation unacquainted with military service, it all felt a bit like basic training and combat combined, Biloxi Blues meets the Battle of the Bulging Chad.”
Even the moment that history regards as the turning point — a ruling by the Supreme Court on Dec. 12 that there could be no further counting of Florida’s disputed votes — was cloudy enough that
The Times declared, “Bush Prevails,” rather than “Bush Wins.” Nonetheless, a three-column picture spot under the banner headline was given to the same portrait-handsome photo of the governor
that had briefly appeared five weeks earlier.
In it, Mr. Bush was smiling broadly and looking very much the president-elect. Which he finally was.