The year was 1876. Then, as now, the Sunshine State played an instrumental role in pushing the eventual winner, Republican nominee Rutherford B. Hayes, over the top in a cliffhanger contest that took days to settle. In fact, it wasn’t until Dec. 2 that the official numbers from Dade County finally arrived in the state capital of Tallahassee far to the north and helped seal the fate of Democratic hopeful Samuel Tilden. In the end, Tilden lost to Hayes by a single vote in the Electoral College.
The official recount of the 6 million votes cast in Florida yesterday won’t take nearly as long. State officials say they will complete the laborious process by Thursday afternoon. If George W. Bush’s lead is ratified, he will receive Florida’s 25 electoral votes and become the nation’s 43rd president. But as campaign aides and attorneys representing both Bush and Vice President Al Gore converge on Tallahassee today to supervise the recount, history seemed poised to repeat itself. Barring a breathtaking reversal of fortune, Gore stands to join Tilden and two other presidential nominees of the Democratic Party as a failed candidate who actually outpolled his closest rival nationally but ultimately fell short in the complicated political calculus of the Electoral College.
As Wednesday dawned in the nation’s third-most-populous state, Floridians from Pensacola to Key West struggled to digest the bewildering implications of the disputed presidential vote. “BUSH WINS IT,” blared one edition of the Miami Herald that went to press shortly after the networks projected an Electoral College victory for the Texas governor at around 2:15 this morning. A later edition delivered to home subscribers rectified the premature call and told readers simply, “NOT YET OVER.”
Though that news might have bordered on the self-evident for those political junkies who pulled all-nighters, that message came as a timely reminder for others. A distraught Eleanor Feldstein Garth went to bed this morning convinced that Gore had gone down to defeat. She only realized that her choice for president still had a fighting chance after she was contacted by a reporter earlier today. “There’s still a chance that Gore can win. Thank God,” said Garth, a part-time stage actress and native of New York City who moved to Florida in 1989. “I’m happy to be sweating it out.”
Many Floridians simply marveled at how large their individual ballots now loomed as the nation awaited the state’s final verdict. “People are shocked that it is so close and that Florida would be so pivotal,” said Aubrey Jewitt, a professor of political science at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. “I really cajoled my students to vote, and I told them their vote would really matter. Today they were telling me in class, ‘You were right.’ There’s a real sense of excitement and disbelief.’”
In the Miami neighborhood of Little Havana in the heart of south Florida’s 800,000-strong Cuban-American community, voters who solidly backed the senior George Bush in droves confidently looked forward to his son’s eventual confirmation as president. Early on in the campaign, Gore did his best to distance himself from President Clinton’s decision to reunite Elian Gonzalez with his father in Cuba.
In a rare public break with his boss, the vice president opposed the Clinton Administration’s efforts to remove the boy from the custody of his Miami relatives and said the boy’s fate should be decided in an American family-law courtroom. At the time, critics blasted Gore for deserting the White House in his bid to curry favor within the Cuban-American community. The vice president denied those charges–but whether he was acting out of principle or pandering to anti-communist Cuban exiles–the strategy didn’t work. “We’ve always had hopes that Bush will win,” said Manuel Ortega, a retired 76-year-old construction worker who left Cuba in 1980 with his wife Celida. “We still remember what happened to Elian, and a government that does that to a boy doesn’t deserve our support.” In the end, it may be embittered Cuban immigrants like the Ortegas who enable George W. Bush to squeak by in one of the slimmest electoral margins in history.
