-Caveat Lector-
May 7, 2001
Networks' early call kept many from polls
By Bill Sammon
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
The Democratic nominee for president wielded more raw power than anyone
else in the nation during the five weeks after Election Day, according to
"At Any Cost: How Al Gore Tried to Steal the Election" (Regnery), the new
book by Bill Sammon, senior White House correspondent of The Washington
Times. Top Stories
. U.S. renews flights off China
. Stiffing the troops serving overseas
. Bush views long term on gas cost
. Cincinnati cop indicted in death of black teen
. U.N. cut U.S. off as drug monitor
. Is Big Brother taking a drive on the GW Parkway?
In the first of three excerpts, he details how the TV networks helped
Mr. Gore exploit the debacle in Florida with a bad call that pre-empted Bush
voters in the western panhandle.
Bob Glass was running late. He hustled his little red Geo past Bubba´s
Bar-B-Q Pit and the 4-H Club and the Lots O´ Snacks on his way toward
Interstate 10 and his polling place.
Mr. Glass was at the westernmost tip of the Florida panhandle and had
to get clear to the other side of Pensacola in less than half an hour.
Traffic would be murder, what with all the military personnel streaming out
of installations to vote for a new commander in chief.
But Mr. Glass, 50, had never failed to cast a ballot in a presidential
election -- and he wasn´t about to now.
Mr. Glass sells, well, glass. Don´t bother with the wisecracks; he´s
heard them all. People ask if he legally changed his name as a promotional
gimmick for his windshield-replacement business, which he runs from the back
room of his brother´s house six miles from the Alabama border."
"No, I´ve had this name since 1950," Mr. Glass says with a weary
chuckle. "For as far back as I can remember."
Mr. Glass swung the 1996 Geo onto the highway entrance ramp. The words
"WINDSHIELD EXPRESS" fan across the tinted top of the windshield in white
vinyl letters, slightly askew. The left and right sides of the car are
adorned with white magnetic signs that say: "Windshield Express: Keep it
local, keep it fast; let us repair your auto glass."
Mr. Glass came up with that slogan himself. To anyone who makes fun of
it, he points out that the traveling billboard generates quite a few cold
calls from fellow motorists who end up as paying customers. Oh, and it
doesn´t hurt that a "Bush-Cheney" sticker is affixed to the back bumper.
Out here in Escambia County, people like to say Florida is the only
state in which north is south and south is north.
What they mean is that in northern Florida, where the Panhandle runs
right along the Georgia and Alabama borders, folks consider themselves
Southerners. It´s the kind of place where waitresses in even the finest
restaurants think nothing of addressing middle-age businessmen they´ve never
met before as "honey," "sugar," "sweetie" and even "baby." This isn´t just
the South; it´s the Deep South.
Supporters of Texas Gov. George W. Bush for president outnumbered
supporters of Vice President Al Gore by more than 2-to-1 in the Panhandle´s
10 westernmost counties, which collectively form the only region of Florida
that falls within the Central Time Zone.
Florida´s remaining 57 counties are in the Eastern Time Zone. As far as
Mr. Glass is concerned, they might as well be in the Twilight Zone. For
starters, fully half the voters of the eastern 57 counties supported Al
Gore.
And every time Mr. Glass crossed the time line, he says, it seemed to
get worse. The farther he traveled east and then south down the peninsula,
the more he ran into liberal Democrats, who continued to invade these warmer
climes from up north, particularly New York and New England.
"I´m a firm believer that everyone from Orlando south is not a native
Floridian," harrumphs Mr. Glass, who once endured a year in Orlando before
retreating to his beloved Panhandle.
Highly motivated
The little red car chugged east along the northern edge of Pensacola.
Mr. Glass still had 20 minutes to make it to his polling place, Scenic
Heights Baptist Church. He knew all he had to do was get into line by 7 p.m.
Central Time (8 p.m. Eastern) and he couldn´t be turned away.
Even if the line stretched outside the church and around the block, he
would be able to vote for president. He might not actually cast his ballot
until 7:15 or 7:30 or even 7:45, but he was determined to stand up and be
counted for George W. Bush.
Mr. Glass is what pollsters call a "highly motivated voter." A
rock-ribbed Republican all his life, he had cast ballots for Richard Nixon
in 1972; Gerald Ford in 1976; Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984; George Bush in
1988 and 1992; and Bob Dole in 1996.
He considers it a travesty that Bill Clinton and Al Gore evicted the
elder Bush from the White House in 1992. For eight years, he watched with
growing frustration as the Clinton-Gore team took the nation down what he
considered the wrong path.
For Mr. Glass, a Southern Baptist, the final straw came when Mr.
Clinton, also a Baptist, had sex with a White House intern young enough to
be his daughter -- and then lied under oath to cover it up. Mr. Glass
believed the only honorable thing for Mr. Clinton to do was resign and spare
the nation the wrenching ordeal of impeachment.
But he says the crowning insult came just hours after Mr. Clinton was
impeached, when Mr. Gore stood on the South Lawn of the White House and
pronounced his boss one of the greatest presidents in history.
Now Mr. Gore himself was running for president. He specifically talked
about his presidency as one that would last eight years, not four. The
colossal presumptuousness sickened Mr. Glass. And if anything, Mr. Gore was
more of a liberal, tax-and-spend Democrat than Mr. Clinton.
"I´d had it up to here with Clinton-Gore," Mr. Glass recalls,
flattening a palm and raising it dead level to his blue eyes.
Although he never had been active in party politics, he began attending
meetings of the Escambia County Republican Party. As the election drew near,
he agreed to help run a phone bank.
Unlike some younger volunteers, who used a script in placing their
calls, the 50-year-old Mr. Glass spoke from his heart. With a soft Southern
affability, he tried to impart to fellow Republicans the importance of voter
turnout. He even offered to drive them to the polls.
The day before the election, Mr. Glass and other volunteers stood on
street corners, clutching Bush-Cheney signs and waving to motorists.
"I was -- ," Mr. Glass grasped for words, " -- on fire. You know, for
the cause. Oh, I was highly motivated."
'Slipping away'
Mr. Glass spent more and more time on the Internet, visiting
conservative chat rooms to share his passion. He sensed a unity not just in
Florida, but in other states.
"It was a feeling Republicans hadn´t felt in a long time," he says.
And yet, in the closing days of the campaign, Mr. Glass began to fret
that Mr. Gore was somehow pulling ahead.
He winced when the media went ballistic over the 11th-hour revelation
that Mr. Bush had been cited for drunken driving 24 years earlier. The
story, leaked by a Gore supporter, dominated TV news coverage the weekend
before the election.
"I could see it falling away from G.W. Bush, I really could. I mean,
those last-minute tactics like the DUI thing. Oh, it was just horrible. I
could just see it slipping away.
"Granted, I think he should have been more upfront with it sooner,"
adds Mr. Glass, a teetotaler. "Then they wouldn´t have made such a big deal
out of it."
Like anyone else who had paid even passing attention to the campaign in
its final hundred hours, Mr. Glass was aware that after months of
speculation about this state or that being a "battleground," the polls and
conventional wisdom coalesced around three as most crucial: Pennsylvania,
Michigan and Florida.
Mr. Gore, the underdog, could win the election only if he swept the
"trifecta," as these states were being called by conservative and liberal
pundits alike. The flip side of this theory was that Mr. Bush had to retain
at least one of the three -- preferably Florida, the largest -- to become
the next president.
Mr. Glass became alarmed by indications that Mr. Gore was firming up
his numbers in Michigan and Pennsylvania. If these warning signs proved
true, the election might well come down to the Sunshine State. His fears
were confirmed when Mr. Gore chose Florida in which to end the campaign he
had begun 18 months earlier. The vice president´s confident optimism
troubled Mr. Glass.
"Tonight, when the vote comes in, we´re going to win Florida and we´re
going to win the White House," Mr. Gore vowed during a televised rally in
Tampa only minutes before polls opened Election Day. "It´s almost 5:30 a.m.,
Texas time, and George W. Bush is still asleep. And I´m still speaking to
people here in Florida."
Mr. Glass couldn´t help but worry that Mr. Gore was right. The rally
was merely the capstone of a furious get-out-the-vote effort by Florida
Democrats. It was the kind of ground war that Democrats usually win.
But Mr. Glass also knew that Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, the Republican
nominee´s younger brother, had spent years cultivating a remarkably
effective, county-by-county Republican machine. As one of the innumerable
cogs in Jeb´s machine, Mr. Glass had done his best to kick things into
overdrive. Yet he now entertained serious doubts.
The bad call
Having driven as far east as he could without actually leaving
Pensacola, Mr. Glass swung onto Scenic Highway and headed south along
Pensacola Bay. Expensive, waterfront homes with spectacular views lined the
left side of the road.
He planned to cut through a subdivision to get to the church on time.
He was less than half a mile from the turnoff and it was only 6:50. Plenty
of time.
On previous election days Mr. Glass had voted early, on his way into
work. But he had felt compelled to attend a breakfast meeting of the
Pensacola Chamber of Commerce; he considered "networking" important for his
fledgling business.
Mr. Glass listened to the radio as he neared the church. He was a big
fan of talk radio, which he considered the only sector of the American news
media not completely overrun by liberal Democrats.
That afternoon he had tuned in a show hosted by local conservative Luke
McCoy, who lived just three town houses away from him on a cul-de-sac off
Scenic Highway. Mr. McCoy got an on-air call from Jeb Bush, who had just
arrived in Austin, Texas, to monitor election returns with his brother.
"Hey, Luke -- Jeb Bush," the Florida governor had said. "I just want to
urge you to do everything you can to get the vote out. It´s going to be very
tight, and we need the people of the Panhandle."
As Mr. Glass neared the turnoff for his polling place, he flitted from
station to station in hopes of catching a little election coverage.
". . . and so Al Gore has won Florida´s 25 electoral votes," a voice
crackled from the radio.
Alone in his Geo, Mr. Glass cursed aloud.
"How can this be?" he remembers thinking. "We´re not through voting
yet."
The fire goes out
Sure, polls had closed nearly an hour ago in the Eastern Time Zone. But
here in the Central Time Zone, where Bush supporters outnumbered Gore
supporters by more than 2-to-1, voters were lined up outside polling places
from Pensacola to Panama City. They could show up for another 10 minutes.
And those in line by the stroke of 7 could vote no matter how long it took.
Voters have been known to stand in line for up to two hours in
presidential elections. Military personnel are notorious for crowding into
polling places on the way home from work. The western Panhandle teemed with
military installations. The Naval Air Station was right there on Pensacola
Bay. This was the very cradle of naval aviation, the storied home of the
legendary Blue Angels.
These were not the kind of voters who were going to support Al Gore.
But would they be willing to continue standing in line now that Mr. Gore
already had won Florida?
Mr. Glass´ mind raced. He understood how the Electoral College
functioned. He knew all too well that the presidential race would be
determined by electoral votes, not popular votes.
Florida´s 25 electoral votes would not be divvied up to reflect each
man´s share of the popular vote. It was winner-take-all and
loser-take-nothing.
And although the presidential election is widely regarded as America´s
only national political race, no person´s vote has the slightest practical
impact whatsoever outside of his or her own state.
Flush with anger and a sense of dread that Mr. Gore´s win in Florida
would put him over the top nationally, Mr. Glass drove straight past the
turnoff for his polling place at the church. Although other Republicans were
on the ballot, including an acquaintance running for sheriff, those
candidates vanished from his radar screen.
Bob Glass suddenly felt the fire in his belly go out. For the first
time in his adult life, he decided not to exercise his sacred right to vote
for president of the United States.
"What´s the use?" he recalls reasoning. "I mean, if Gore´s already won
the state, there´s no use in voting for Bush.
"I was so infuriated. I was distraught. And I just went home."
Bush's net loss
Mr. Glass was among 187,000 registered voters in the Central Time Zone
of Florida who did not cast ballots in the 2000 election. The overwhelming
majority failed to vote because of good old-fashioned, garden-variety
apathy.
But tens of thousands of others were dissuaded by the premature,
erroneous declaration of a Gore victory, according to studies conducted by
Democrats, independents and Republicans. Taken together, these surveys show
the bad call caused Mr. Bush a net loss of about 10,000 votes.
"By prematurely declaring Gore the winner shortly before the polls had
closed in Florida´s conservative western Panhandle, the media ended up
suppressing the Republican vote," concluded John R. Lott Jr., senior
research scholar at Yale University Law School.
Mr. Lott put Mr. Bush´s net loss at a "conservative estimate of 10,000
votes."
John McLaughlin & Associates, a Republican polling firm based in
Washington, D.C., pegged the loss at 11,500 votes. Its poll, conducted Nov.
15 and 16, showed the premature calling of Florida for Mr. Gore dissuaded
28,050 voters from casting ballots. Although 23 percent were Gore
supporters, 64 percent -- or nearly three times as many -- would have voted
for Mr. Bush.
"The premature announcement discouraged many registered voters who,
according to our survey´s results, would have voted like the rest of their
neighbors -- overwhelmingly for George W. Bush," said the survey´s authors,
senior analyst Stuart Polk and data specialist Charlie Banks. "If only a few
thousand of these disenfranchised voters had heard that the polls were still
open, and the race in Florida was still too close to call -- and then
voted -- George W. Bush would have gained a decisive, net positive margin of
votes over Al Gore.
"These votes would have helped Bush carry the popular vote statewide,"
the pollsters concluded, "without uncertainty."
Even a study commissioned by Democratic strategist Bob Beckel concluded
Mr. Bush suffered a net loss of up to 8,000 votes in the western Panhandle
after Florida was called for Mr. Gore.
These surveys, like others conducted after previous elections,
demonstrated that early projections of victory generally dissuade supporters
of the losing candidate more than the winning candidate.
Indeed, Mr. Glass later would learn that many voters standing in line
at Scenic Heights Baptist Church and elsewhere went home after hearing the
news.
Networks' denial
News travels fast in the Information Age. In the 11-minute interval
between NBC News calling Florida for Mr. Gore and the polls "closing," fully
two-thirds of all voters in the western Panhandle heard about it, the
McLaughlin survey found.
It is difficult to overstate the political and historical significance
of the suppressed turnout in the western Panhandle. If the network news had
not jumped the gun, Mr. Bush would have netted roughly 10,000 more votes in
the Florida results, an election that ended up being decided by fewer than
1,000 votes.
Those 10,000 votes would not have been enough to prevent the automatic
recount mandated by Florida law when the statewide margin of victory is less
than one-half of 1 percent. But they certainly would have presented the Gore
team with a much higher mountain to climb.
Indeed, one crucial calculation that convinced Mr. Gore to fight so
tenaciously for 36 days after the election was that he was only a few
hundred votes shy of victory.
His lawyers and spinners constantly laid out scenarios in which they
cobbled together enough votes in this county and that county to overcome Mr.
Bush´s razor-thin margin of victory. A five-digit margin would have been
much more daunting than a three-digit one.
NBC´s premature and erroneous announcement at 6:49 p.m. set off a
stampede among the other networks. Although virtually all the network
executives later admitted they were wrong, they refused to acknowledge
having influenced as much as a single voter in the western Panhandle.
"In the case of Florida, it would be extremely difficult to argue any
impact on turnout," CBS News President Andrew Heyward insisted. "The polls
were closed in all but 5.8 percent of the state´s precincts, with the rest
closing just 10 minutes later."
Mr. Heyward didn´t mention that those precincts contained half a
million registered voters.
ABC News President David Westin was even more dismissive.
"There was no point during the evening when it was likely or even
possible that voters would decide not to vote simply because of the
erroneous projection of the presidential race in Florida," Mr. Westin
declared.
Mr. Glass calls these assertions arrogant.
"When you give out information that directly impacts people´s behavior,
that is just wrong, wrong, wrong," he says. "By anybody´s standards, it´s
wrong.
"You know, a lot of people take the news as gospel," he adds. "Course,
I realize you have to rely on yourself to discern the truth in what the
media says. There´s a fine line between the news and what you get out of the
news.
"But even then, you depend on news almost as gospel. Somebody´s got to
be responsible for this."
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