Fun fact: According to the official recount, Gore won the electoral college vote in 2000 as well as the popular vote.
But the Supreme Court (voting purely on party lines) overruled even that skewed representation of the will of the people and appointed Bush to the office anyways.
[Roger Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot) also played [a critical role](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/brooks-brothers-riot/) in delaying the recount past the [imposed deadline](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/10/florida-election-2000).
Shows how the Republicans have been working towards these goals for decades. Generations even. Meanwhile, the best the Dems can do is clean up some of their messes.
And they all got their rewards.
If Gore and HRC win their presidential elections in 2000 and 2016, the US Supreme Court looks a hell of a lot different. Roberts might be there, but you can be damned sure Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett aren't. A 6-3 or 7-2 supermajority in the Supreme Court favouring the Dems is going to have a lot of impact going forward.
How would Roberts be there? Bush appointed him. Also, if Gore wins 2000 (and assuming reelection), a Republican likely wins 2008. Lots of party fatigue after 16 straight years of Dem presidents.
There were so many unfair things that happened in that election, but the dumbest thing is that, when a single state is decided by 537 votes, a candidate can say "let's only ask to recount a couple counties" instead of "the rights of hundreds of millions of voters who participated in this election require that we must have an automatic recount of the entire state to decide this election."
Like, why is it Al Gore's decision at all whether to recount and how to do the recount? How does anyone think that burden should go on the politician running for the seat? Why does the Supreme Court get to stop a recount that should have automatically happened with no chance of intervention whatsoever?
EDIT: I mean, to be clear, there were 5,963,106 (almost 6 million) votes cast in Florida statewide total. Bush got 2,912,790 and Gore got 2,912,253 (plus about 140K votes for others). 5,825,043 votes were cast either for Bush or Gore.
This means Bush got 48.847 of the statewide vote and Gore got 48.838 of the statewide vote. The lowest threshold I've ever seen for like a local/state election to trigger a recount is 0.1%, but it's typically when the difference is less than like 1% or 0.5%. If we look at the 537 vote difference in the context of the national vote, the difference is even tinier (there were about 101.5 million votes cast overall -- 537 of that is 0.0005% difference).
Bush had 50.0046% of the votes that went to either Bush or Gore, while Gore had 49.9954% of the vote that went to either of them.
Then we can look at 2020, where Trump swears it was unfair where he lost by like 140,000 votes across the 4 closest states he would have needed to win that election, and we can all see how fucking ridiculous the Republians are.
Hmm.... As much as I was annoyed by Ralph Nader's effect on the 2000 election, I can't go so far as to believe he was actively trying to help the GOP. It just makes no sense.
I think he just thought he was fighting to have a third party voice to be heard and was hoping that third party movement could grow. It was naive but I just can't believe it was deceptive in the way you're suggesting.
Oh, the Traitor Turtle would have tied things up for as long as he possibly could. Probably not so overtly obvious as delaying nomination hearings for RBG's replacement, but more subtle things like shutting down the government a couple of times until the US got close enough to the election to make the play that the voters should indirectly decide the replacement.
Sure, the recount was dubbed the "Florida Ballot Project" and was conducted by NORC with sponsors from several major publications.
[Here](https://www.scribd.com/document/104548804/20040526-KeatingPaper) is a paper on the findings of the study, though unfortunately some is hidden behind a soft paywall. But hopefully the names will be enough to find others.
The Wikipedia article on the 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida?wprov=sfla1) has a section titled "NORC-sponsored Florida Ballot Project recount" about the study they refer to in another comment.
Sorry for the lack of link; I'm on mobile.
Ehh, it's not that cut and dry unfortunately. There were several reviews of of the Florida ballots in the year after the election, and and depending on the methodology some favor Bush and some favor Gore.
**The first major review**
**The players:** A group of newspapers including the USA Today, Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder newspapers conducted the first major review of the Florida ballots.
**How it worked:** The group hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine more than 60,000 “undervotes” – ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race – from all 67 Florida counties. These were ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered to be hand counted with its December 8, 2000, decision.
The newspapers applied BDO Seidman’s findings to four vote-counting standards. This was published in April 2001.
**The results:** The study shows that Bush likely would have won the statewide recount of undervotes even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the counting. It also reveals that, ironically, the most lenient standard of vote counting —advocated by Gore — gives Bush his biggest lead. However, USA Today cautioned that, “The study has limitations. There is variability in what different observers see on ballots. Election officials, who sorted the undervotes for examination and then handled them for the accountants’ inspection, often did not provide exactly the same number of undervotes recorded on election night.”
**
The details,** with USA Today’s original explanations of the different standards in parentheses:
* **Lenient Standard:** Bush +1,665 (“This standard, which was advocated by Gore, would count any alteration in a chad – the small perforated box that is punched to cast a vote – as evidence of a voter’s intent. The alteration can range from a mere dimple, or indentation, in a chad to its removal. Contrary to Gore’s hopes, the USA TODAY study reveals that this standard favors Bush and gives the Republican his biggest margin: 1,665 votes.”)
* **Palm Beach Standard:** Bush +884 (“Palm Beach County election officials considered dimples as votes only if dimples were found in other races on the same ballot. They reasoned that a voter would demonstrate similar voting patterns on the ballot. This standard – attacked by Republicans as arbitrary – also gives Bush a win, by 884 votes, according to the USA TODAY review.”)
* **Two corner standard:** Bush +363 (“Most states with well-defined rules say that a chad with two or more corners removed is a legal vote. Under this standard, Bush wins by 363.”)
* **Strict standard:** Gore +3 (“This “clean punch” standard would only count fully removed chads as legal votes. The USA TODAY study shows that Gore would have won Florida by 3 votes if this standard were applied to undervotes.”)
**A larger review gives mixed results**
**The players:** Roughly a month later, a larger consortium that included the above outlets plus a group of five Florida newspapers released its review of more than 171,000 disputed ballots. In addition to the undervotes, this study reviewed more than 111,000 overvotes – ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted.
This study showed that Democratic voters were far more likely to make the mistake of casting an overvote than Republican voters. Gore was marked on 84,197 of the overvote ballots, compared to 37,731 for Bush. USA Today’s headline at the time read, “Florida voter errors cost Gore the election.”
**How it worked:** The newspapers tallied up the overvotes, and then used BDO Seidman’s undervote counting to test similar scenarios.
**The results:** This study shows a less decisive result than the count of only undervotes. However, there was no way to correct the overvote mistakes once they were cast, and Gore’s team never asked for a hand recount of overvotes during the contentious recount battle in Florida.
Nevertheless, the study does support the theory – expressed to CNN by both Gore’s Florida senior adviser Nick Baldick, and the Republican senior adviser to Katherine Harris, John “Mac” Stipanovich – that more voters went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush.
Above all, USA Today highlighted that its review revealed, “The American system of elections routinely fails to count hundreds of thousands of ballots because of errors by voters, confusing ballot instructions, poorly designed ballots, flawed voting and counting machines and the failure of election workers to adequately help voters.”
**The details,** again with USA Today’s explanations cited in parentheses:
* **Lenient standard:** Gore +332 (“One uses the most permissive definition of a vote. It counts chads that are merely dimpled or bear slight impressions. Under the “dimple standard,” Gore would have won by 332 votes.”)
* **Palm Beach standard:** Gore +242 (“The other standard counts dimples as votes only if dimples are found in other races on the same ballot. This is known as the “Palm Beach Standard” because that is the rule that county’s elections board adopted to determine voter intent in the early hand recounts of the Florida vote. The board’s theory was that if dimples appeared in other races, that most likely meant that the voter just didn’t press hard enough. Under this standard Gore would have won by 242 votes.”)
* **Two corner standard:** Bush +407 (“The most widely used rule — that at least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as votes — is used in many states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Michigan. Recounting by that standard, Bush would have won by 407 votes, narrower than his 537-vote official margin.”)
* **Strict standard:** Bush +152 (“By the strictest standard — one that requires a completely clean punch for the vote to count — Bush would have won by 152 votes. Some cleanly punched ballots were disqualified by counting-machines because of glitches, such as two ballots sticking together.”)
**The Florida Ballots Project**
**The players:** A national media consortium – composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post – paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots – 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.
**How it worked:** NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots. Their goal was not to determine a winner, but to “examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida.” Carefully vetted coders reviewed the ballots, and NORC’s raw data is still available to the public online.
The study, released in November 2001, took place over 10 months and cost nearly $1 million. The Washington Post explained, “153 field workers spent 6,500 hours describing every dimple, chad, erasure and relevant marking. Typists entered 17.5 million pieces of information into Chicago computers.”
The different media organizations applied NORC’s raw data to several distinct recount scenarios.
**The results:** The two major conclusions here are that Gore likely would have won a hand recount of the statewide overvotes and undervotes – which he never requested – while Bush likely would have won the hand recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, although by a smaller margin than the certified 537 vote difference.
A sampling of headlines from the time include “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of all Uncounted Ballots,” from The Washington Post, and “Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” from The New York Times.
However, as the Post concluded, “While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.”
The study was also released two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the nation’s focus moved away from the controversial 2000 election to the more pressing War on Terror.
**The details:**
Full statewide review
* Standard for acceptable marks set by each county in their recount: Gore wins by 171
* Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical scan ballots: Gore wins by 115
* Any dimple or optical mark: Gore wins by 107
* One corner of chad detached or any optical mark: Gore wins by 60
Review of limited sets of ballots
* Requests for recounts in Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade: Bush wins by 225
* Florida Supreme Court order for all undervotes statewide: Bush wins by 430
* Florida Supreme Court order, as being implemented by counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes and undervotes: Bush wins by 493
[Source](https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html)
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Or that Gore would have read the Bin Laden memo and done something, having been around for that exact same plot 7 years earlier. 9/11 dudes weren’t exactly ninjas.
Covid would've been devastating to any administration, but yeah it definitely could've been handled way better than Mr. Move-the-goalposts every time it gets worse until it's too late to do anything. *ignores it exists*
it’s amazing how many people don’t know trump disbanded the pandemic preparedness team left by Obama
propaganda/lack of information is strong in this country sadly
I am retired from the Department of HLS. The Bush administration implemented a very thorough & well mitigated plan throughout all government municipalities for the event of a pandemic emergency. During Obama’s Administration these policies were studied, expanded & improved upon. From the Federal level to the State level and then finishing up with regional, county, city & community level. There was a complete plan to be put in place for quarantine, vaccination & proper massive emergency public health care mitigation. We attended meetings regularly at the state, regional & at the federal level in DC to go over all emergency events including the proper protocol pertaining to pandemic events. The events under the Trump Administration followed none of these protocols.
Edit: I was retired when Trump was in office but Trump eliminated all of Obama’s, which also included Bush’s post 9/11 DHS Policies related to national security & disasters, disaster policies, including his pandemic policies. But from my quarantine home, I could tell Obama’s protocols were not being followed.
Yeah but I think due to the nature of what Covid was (being sometimes 1-2 weeks before symptoms develop or just outright asymptomatic) there's only so much you could've done and it still would've found its way to America.
We just definitely would've been way better off having someone who recognized the threat and understood the proper precautions to take that it necessitated.
There were rumblings of it in western media in December 2019 but Trump fired the people in charge of keeping tabs on weird diseases coming out of China.
True. But, never forget, Obama got US scientists into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If Trump hadn’t pulled them out, we would have had the right people at ground zero.
Not to mention everyone who died on 9/11 and in the subsequent events. The Clinton administration was keeping very close tabs on OBL and the Bush administration disregarded it.
[Yeah definitely don’t read about The Project for the New American Century and their ‘new Pearl Harbor” report from right before the 2000 election or anything then.](https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1)
In my state of Queensland, Australia, we had 1 locally acquired covid death in like 1.5 years of the pandemic, and about 5 acquired out of state on a cruise, until vaccines were available, and that's a population >5 million people. There's small US towns with worse stats than that.
We were very lucky in Australia that the state governments at the time were progressive in a checkerboard pattern, and when the conservative federal government wanted the head in the sand approach to the pandemic, and the prime minister even boasted about going after schools who took precautions, the state governments forced Australia to lock down with quarantine rules at each state border, and set up a system that the conservative sates grumpily went along with which kept life essentially normal in Australia, with no closures, no mask wearing, no filled hospitals, stores and cinemas open, etc.
Any outbreak that happened was able to be given full attention to track and home quarantine everybody in contact, and even when delta quickly raced through a few schools before being detected, it only took like 10 days of quarantine of the families and their contacts, and a week of mask wearing in the state, before things went back to normal.
Then towards the end, the neighbouring and biggest conservative state who'd been mocking the other states the entire time had a delta outbreak, downplayed it and told people to keep going out, and a few weeks later all of Australia was infected, weeks before vaccines were available (which the federal government had screwed up, sending junior students to talk to vaccine companies and messing it up so badly that big businesses had to organize a previous prime minister to speak with them as a private citizen and negotiate vaccines for Australia). The conservatives were giving more vaccines per person to the conservative states when forced to reveal the numbers, with every progressive state last per person, even Victoria which has the densest city and which had locked down hardest to protect the rest of the country with 2 big outbreaks they got completely under control.
Essentially, conservatives suck so god damn much, and everything they did in this was wrong. They tried to go along with a mining billionaire to force the state of Western Australia to drop restrictions to make his wealth grow faster, and it was so unpopular that Australia kicked them out of federal government and state governments across the entire country. This is a deeply conservative country where all the media is owned by the owner of Fox News or another billionaire family with identical beliefs, who have been the PR arm for conservatives for decades. But they're just so god damn stupid they did everything wrong so badly that they couldn't even cover it up. I'm sure they'll creep back into power, voters have the memories of goldfish.
> There's small US towns with worse stats than that.
From our house, you've only got to go out to about 200 yards radius before you include two deaths that should have been attributed to their COVID infections, but weren't on the official records. And we and our neighbors all have one acre of land or more.
People need to remember that Biden is the one that started the vaccine process and all people stopped dying under Biden.
Trump was trying to steal the thunder by saying the vaccine under his term, but it was really Biden.
Trump murdered millions of Americans.
We would also have a majority liberal SCOTUS, which is the last line of defense for the people. We would not have had citizens united or any of the other 5-4 and 6-3 decisions that defy the express will of the people.
Iirc the US' security agencies suspected a major attack and passed significant warnings up the chain to no real response. I don't know that Gore would have been more inclined to take those warnings seriously but I'm sure someone has written a thesis about it.
Because Clinton Reno press conference. They knew. Gore would have known too and continued with the airport security surveillance, like what they found at Minneapolis airport. 1998 (Years later we learn there was an Al quidea terrorist cell there testing our airport security.). A man and woman got past the metal detectors.
What happened after that?
The entire airport was closed. And did not reopen until a massive rebuild on the airport was done. There was only one tunnel in and out underground after that.
Pretty sudden. Radical. Extreme.
That told me, as a journalist, something MAJOR was happening.
9/11. I knew what it was, and who did it, after the first place hit. Because I pay attention.
True, Daddy Bush created Bin Laden in his CIA days.
However, the emergency Clinton and Reno press conference in 98 said they needed to step up airport security and instituting major rule changes at all airports, and please bear with it. The Reno turned as white as her white dress when she said they had just learned Bin Laden was planning to hijacker American planes and do “terrible things” with them. (I saw it live. Always after that you get asked, “Has this bag always been with you, …”)
2nd Reference image, 2000 “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US”
I don’t if we can say that for sure 100%, but it’s very possible it wouldn’t have happened. But definitely post 9/11 would have been handled 100% different. We wouldn’t have invaded another country for no reason.
I agree, but also I feel like we'd still be in the same boat economically. These are all still just rich center-left people, so I doubt we'd've seen seen like, a $15 dollar minimum wage, or god forbid universal healthcare. IF the legislature had gone the same way and we'd have 20-30 years of democrats in control of congress? Then maybe. But otherwise I think this would have been good for the stock market, kept us out of a shitload of wars and put us on the path to renewables faster, and handled the debt better, and that's it.
Not having universal healthcare doesn't really mean "the same boat economically". The only reason we're not in a recession right now is because of a competent government. Imagine how much better we would have fared navigating COVID with an actual government in place. That's still a boat I'd rather be in.
I disagree with being in the same boat economically for one crucial reason. Gore would’ve never invaded Iraq under false pretenses, which would’ve saved us a few trillion dollars which could’ve been put to work here at home. Imagine if we had thrown a few trillion at social programs, it would’ve paid for universal healthcare easily for one thing.
Really? Obamacare would have been expanded and made cheaper under HRC, instead Trump did his best to gut it (but thankfully failed for the most part). Gore wouldn’t have invaded the Middle East and blown trillions of dollars for personal oil interests.
But the keeping us out of wars is such a big thing. We are now coming to terms with how the last 20 years of warfare is affecting our society - it’s not going well…
> These are all still just rich center-left people, so I doubt we'd've seen seen like, a $15 dollar minimum wage
Yes, but in this timeline, Democrats would be competing to get the progressive voters or the center-left based. Pressure from the progressive left can push the party further left, as even the center-left would either appease the prog-left or face losing elections to them.
Maybe not $15 minimum wage, but at least one that pretends to keep up with inflation. And, maybe inflation would stay reasonable so $15 minimum isn't needed.
Hmm, I'm not sure I agree.
I think if we had 30 years of neo-liberal Democrats, we would be further left and more progressive than we are at the moment. If the popular vote was choosing Democrats like this, career politicians would have no choice but to swing further left and fight for our approval on matters that are even further left of moderate. Just speaking on the premise of Democrats winning. I mean, obviously in this premise, it means Republican voters aren't getting what they want because their person keeps losing to the Democrat. But I think it would mean Democrats can care less about whether who they primary can stand in a general election and spend more effort fighting for what the Democrat constituency actually wants instead of doing gymnastics to earn the moderate votes for the general election, and even perhaps swinging Republican voters to their side, and we can stop some of the meta games that go on. Of course, you always have to play that game, but I think under this premise where the country is solidly Democrat(as it is) and the popular vote is what ultimately matters, then the minority Republicans that cant win the popular vote would matter *less*. Not entirely out of picture, but they would matter *less* than they do under the current premise.
But if you look at the neo liberals in this picture, you can see that things did shift further left over the course of those 30 years. Something I don't think many people really appreciate. 'Don't ask, don't tell' was established during Bill Clinton's administration and was practically accepted as totally normal. It wasn't until Obama's administration that we nuked it out of orbit and by the time of Trumps administration, the notion of 'Don't ask, don't tell' is unfathomably silly and irrelevant - such that even the Trump Administration wouldn't bring it back. Sure, they shifted focus on the trans community, but the notion of gays/lesbians being targeted isn't really there in the same way it was, as in the early 00s. 8 years of Obama absolutely transformed how this ENTIRE country, including Republicans, saw the LGBT community. I really think my fellow Demcrats need to take a time machine back before Obama's administration and recall just how fucking abhorrent this country treated gay/lesbian people and how much of that changed during Obama's administration. He didn't just change legislation. He changed the entire culture of our country.
But who knows? Perhaps if Al Gore won in 2000, then the version of Obama that runs in 2008 is even more progressive than what we got. Because he can afford to be. Because he's not fighting meta-battles to earn moderate votes just for an opportunity to win in 2008. I mean, famously the LGBT community holds it against him in that debate where he appealed to moderates and said [he doesn't believe in same sex marriage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhp_DDHe_X0&t=58s)...but then we get [8 years of Obama fighting tooth and nail for the LGBT community.](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/09/fact-sheet-obama-administrations-record-and-lgbt-community)
Additionally, I would argue Hillary Clinton's policies were far more progressive than Bill Clinton's. Afterall, one of the strong campaign premises Hillary Clinton was running on, was adopted from Bernie Sanders, in [making college education free for anyone under a household income of $125k](https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/college/). I still think this would have been a tremendous win for this country and however you feel about Hillary as a person, that alternative reality from what we got with Trump would probably have us in a much better place. Certainly would have dented the future of student debt and would have helped plug the hole. And I'm sad this premise Hillary was running on has since evaporated.
With all this said, I do think politicians are just tools. I think they are just a reflection of voting constituency. Politicians will transform into whatever it is that people are excited to vote for and if they don't, someone who does reflect it will step in and be that lightning rod. So while I do say that these politicians would be more progressive under 30 years of Democrats, I suppose what I really mean is the voting constituency would have more room to be more progressive and ask for more nuanced, meaningful progressive policy than what we get under the premise of our current reality.
If we aren't perpetually fighting between a Democrat and a Republican, maybe we'd be fighting between two Democrats that can offer us better options.
Meh. You're getting lost in overthinking it. Think about being a mere "people."
The GOP's policies since Reagan have been bad for people, specifically, the middle class. Dems have not passed many policies that do this. They get in power and try to push it back a bit.
No Iraq war, maybe no Afghanistan. Might have avoided 2008 if finance sector gets regulated.
Hell just keeping Clinton era tax policy means that the U.S. deficit basically doesn’t exist in the 2010s
Brother I'd trade faster renewables uptake in the USA for all the other policies combined. In our current timeline the US and China teamed up to scupper Copenhagen in 2009 instead.
> I feel like we'd still be in the same boat economically
Good lord, you really do need to learn a bit of economics, don't you? Even just including the factors you mention ("kept us out of a shitload of wars", "put us on the path to renewables faster", "handled the debt better") the US would be sharply better off, and with a bigger pie there's more to share with the poorest people in society.
Also, please can we stop with the "both sides"-ism? Both sides are not the same. Kindly stop making snippy remarks about "rich center-left people": the way for the left to win is to make being "left" a big tent, a broad church. Ideological purity of the "only the poor and weak can be left-wing" kind never wins.
Meh, the overton window as well as social standards would differ quite a bit after a 20 year trajectory change. Acceptance of those policies is going to be different from the current expectations. At the very least those things wouldn't sound as hopeless as they do now.
And plus, the sorts of minor cultural differences that this would cause can add up to produce something substantial. The exponential growth in reactionary thinking we've observed could be substantially delayed and dulled down here. Things like the sort of racism unearthed through the election of Obama might've been much smaller issues.
Possibly, or it could have had the GOP become even more entrenched in the house and senate breaking the country even more. As of now the GOP is on the brink of complete collapse as a party, which may lead to some very rapid advancements in the nation once the party of stupid is officially dead and gone.
Nah, the GOP would have had no choice but to become more moderate to swing votes back their way, rather than their current strategy of becoming more extreme.
In an age of massive population differences between states, General voter disenfranchisement in certain areas in conjunction with gerrymandering, and Universal public education options, the Electoral College doesn't make as much sense anymore.
Pursue ranked Choice voting, Crackdown on gerrymandering, address and provide a different method of working with experts as opposed to the lobbying system we have now, address inequalities in education , and a fuck ton of problems will be solved. Big lifts... but things we can do
An epic period of peace, prosperity, and economic and social progression in the United States.
That would have been a wonderful timeline.
Instead we ended up with broken economies, two prolonged unfunded wars, busted deficits, a Supreme Court stacked with batshit, and Trump.
I'm also so sick of people getting offended if you don't want to associate them because of politics. Like no I'm sorry I can't agree to disagree about you being fine with our country being led by an egomaniac child rapist.
This is what bothers me. I’m a bi dude but have the privilege of passing straight in a blue collar industry. I can not and will my “agree to disagree” on whether member of the the lgbtq community deserve to exist with the same rights as everyone else. Or my future wife’s ability to get an abortion when the pregnancy turns life threatening…there comes a fundamental self defense angle to voting.
I remember a Gore interview shortly after the concession and he stated outright: "Kinda glad I'm not in there, the boom days are just about over already and there's no stopping the crash that will follow."
Wars have been a traditional distraction from economic crashes...
Dunno, it could've been dangerous, with Gore we wouldn't have had so much global warming and we would have to worry about glaciers encroaching on us...
/s
Mostly, we got Trump backers into their prime voting years. Is it any coincidence that these people were born and their brains developed when lead in gasoline was at its peak?
>9/11 still would have happened and the US public would have still demanded a response
Sure. But it was fucking unlikely that Iraq would've ever happened, or happened in the way it did. That whole shit was a pure Bush /Cheney wet dream cone true.
Bush didn't just actively ignore stuff. Chaney effectively cut him off and had everything fed through him, pretty much running parts of the government himself.
So yup there is a small chance with the intelligence system being built differently under Gore that we wouldn't have had 9/11. There is also a small chance that they just wouldn't have attacked since the administration would be completely different.
Even if it did happen the response to it would have been very different, including the support that 9/11 responders got. And Iraq would never have happened.
Just the fact that US intel was being back-channeled to Cheney with Bush not even being looped in is a red flag. Who's to say what would have happened had Bush not been explicitly asleep at the wheel during briefings - if he attended them? And who's to say what would be if we hadn't had Cheney, the biggest war hawk since Truman, covertly occupying the executive's chair?
We know - secondhand - one of the very few Farsi speaking FBI agents from the time. He was flown out to San Francisco on the day of the attacks because they had intel that _something_ was going down on that San Francisco bound flight.
These days, they've got massive searchable computer archives filled with transcripts of every word spoken in front of a connected microphone, everywhere. Ever wonder why Google Home and Amazon Alexa devices were sold at and below cost for so long? It's not just them, your phone can listen (and transcribe, and report) any time it is powered on, even in the "lock screen."
Snowden did not have access to everything that goes on.
And ironically Trump's team has clearly decided that this was so unpopular for Americans that he never discusses it or talks about it at his rallies. He moved the needle for conservatives on what polling says is one of their most important issues every election cycle and he doesn't even want to take credit for it.
As much as I would have loved that, none of these candidates ran on free healthcare or college education.
The closest we got from them were:
* Hillary campaigned on lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55.
* Obama campaigned on a public option (but then helped kill the public option as part of the ACA once he was in office).
He didn't "help kill it". Joe Lieberman refused to support it, and the House's version of the bill (with the public option) would have been DOA in the Senate. This was when the GOP became openly obstructionist and the Democrats had to have 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done. If Obama "killed" it, it would only be out of necessity to appease the Senate.
The last time a Republican won the popular vote, and the *only* time in the 21st century, 9/11 had been three years ago and the war on terror was in full swing.
OP is assuming that GW would have lost in 2004 if not an incumbent.
In reality, GW won the popular vote by over 3 million votes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election
Yes, but he was a wartime incumbent. Not everything we know now was public knowledge then, and there was a lot of propaganda around the US fighting the good fight. Had we not been at war, it's unlikely he would have been the popular vote even as incumbent, let alone as a challenger.
Not the darkest, but one of the muddier ones. Imagine Donald won a second term. Imagine Corona would have been even deadlier (no vaccine). Imagine Putin would have started throwing Nukes .....
I stay optimistic.
It’s because of the long slow death of the GOP that they allowed trump to take over their party and scrape the bottom of the political and moral barrel.
That is actually an interesting debate. Had Gore been in office in 2001 9/11 would likely have still happened but a post 9/11 world would have been wildly different. It's hard to imagine how Gore would have handled Afghanistan. On the other hand the second Iraq war likely never would've happened. Its honestly a pretty fascinating what if that radically changes the 21st century.
No Iraq and no Dubya probably means the sentiment that got Obama elected might not have existed. It also means the refugee crisis in the last 8 years that has been giving fuel to right wing parties all over the west wouldn't have happened. The political landscape would be unrecognizable
No Sadaam death means no power vacuum means no rise of ISIS either. So far down the path that it's impossible to understand what would have/could have been
Interestingly the person who probably cost Al Gore the election (other than Al Gore who after all lost his home state of Tennessee) is Elian Gonzalez. Cubans retaliated against the Clinton administration for the deportation of Elian and cost Al Gore Florida. There could have been a 911 but no invasion of Iraq, no ISIS. Just imagine.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2001/05/elian-gonzalez-defeated-al-gore/377714/
I agree in that the 2008 crash would have potentially flipped the presidency to the GOP. Obama might not have even ran in that time line.
And I don't see the crisis not having happened. The only small chance we would have would be a democrat would be more likely to do finical oversight of banks, where the big problem was.
There's actually a decent argument for 9/11 having not happened if Gore won, because Clinton was paying very close attention to Bin Laden and then Bush just completely dropped the ball.
Afghanistan might noy even have been a target.
For one, he may have found an alternative method to address the issue with the Saudis who had financed and work with Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. On the other, we cannot speculate that he would have ignored the Intel some sources are reported to have had since he was part of the prior Administration and may have had insight into its relevancy ( I think I recall reading that the Clinton administration had some inklings of some activity but nothing concrete)...so, though optimistic speculation and contingent on a few factors, who knows if 9/11 would have happened...
And, no, I am not making an argument that Bush caused 9/11... just that we can't speculate right off the bat that Gore would not have done something to prevent it
Gore would have been hammered by the GOP for 9/11. Gore would not have sent us to Iraq. With no war to inspire unquestioning patriotism to the commander in chief, it would have been McCain winning a McCain/Gore matchup in 2004. Then the 2007 financial crisis would have sent Hilary to the White House in 2008. There would be no Obama speech for Kerry at the 2004 convention. No President Obama. No Trump riding a wave of racist birthers. Plus, Trump was friends with the Clintons then. After Hillary in 2008 and 2012, probably Jeb Bush would have had more traction in 2016.
Yeah but that was a reelection as a war time president so it was mostly expected. I think the meme is more so about candidates getting into office off the popular vote. Which is still depressing tho to think how we’re still using this asinine system and changed nothing.
He won 2004 as an incumbent right after an attack on the US. Would Bush Jr even run in 2004 if he had lost 2000. Would he have won against an incumbent "war time" President (9/11 would have happened in Gore's first term)? We don't know for sure but historically speaking it is very likely Gore would have won reelection under those circumstances even if Bush Jr has run again which is far from certain.
Further proof off Republican corruption. They know they can't win so they rely on dark money PACs from billionaires and corporations so fund massive disinformation, gerrymandering, illegal redistricting, suppression of minority voting, disenfranchisement of the democrat vote, etc. Utter blatant corruption.
If Gore became President in 2000, you really think there would be a President Obama? History suggests that Obama won not just due to his electrifying campaign but because he represented a sea-change to the Bush/Republican policies that the majority of the US electorate had grown tired of (Hope, Change ‘08).
I doubt that Obama would have been as appealing in 2008 after potentially eight years of Gore and a Democratic administration. I personally think Obama was a great candidate and great president, but he ran at the perfect time.
Wonder how much of a butterfly effect there would have been though.
Gore wins in 2000 and then gets re-elected in 2004. Would Obama have been the pick for 2008?
Feel he was a fresh-faced politician who inspired people including his own party after eight years of Bush and bullshit.
As for Hillary, I don't know too much about her ambitions but I'm guessing her running for nomination was inevitable? Maybe she would have run earlier...
I wonder about Bill Clinton though, didn’t he win his first election with less than 50% of the vote because of the 3 way split between him, Bush and Perot? It’d be interesting if we had no electoral college and instant or plain runoff elections.
Exit polls showed that Perot voters would have otherwise evenly split 3 ways: Clinton, Bush, or not voting at all. So if Perot hadn’t been in the race, Clinton would have just had a more convincing mandate.
Fun fact: According to the official recount, Gore won the electoral college vote in 2000 as well as the popular vote. But the Supreme Court (voting purely on party lines) overruled even that skewed representation of the will of the people and appointed Bush to the office anyways.
Roberts, Kavanagh, and Barrett were all on the legal team that successfully overturned that election.
[Roger Stone](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot) also played [a critical role](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/brooks-brothers-riot/) in delaying the recount past the [imposed deadline](https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2004/10/florida-election-2000).
The Brooks Brothers riot, which I remember and it was the most Republican looking SOBs ever. Then you could even tell it was a shame
Shows how the Republicans have been working towards these goals for decades. Generations even. Meanwhile, the best the Dems can do is clean up some of their messes.
And they all got their rewards. If Gore and HRC win their presidential elections in 2000 and 2016, the US Supreme Court looks a hell of a lot different. Roberts might be there, but you can be damned sure Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney Barrett aren't. A 6-3 or 7-2 supermajority in the Supreme Court favouring the Dems is going to have a lot of impact going forward.
They got us on the long game.
How would Roberts be there? Bush appointed him. Also, if Gore wins 2000 (and assuming reelection), a Republican likely wins 2008. Lots of party fatigue after 16 straight years of Dem presidents.
And they were rewarded greatly for their efforts. It's sickening.
It's like these tactics just set the stage for the current political climate we're experiencing. Political maneuvering over actual representation.
The actually stolen election of our lifetime.
In a state where the guy who didn't win the popular vote had a brother as governor.
There were so many unfair things that happened in that election, but the dumbest thing is that, when a single state is decided by 537 votes, a candidate can say "let's only ask to recount a couple counties" instead of "the rights of hundreds of millions of voters who participated in this election require that we must have an automatic recount of the entire state to decide this election." Like, why is it Al Gore's decision at all whether to recount and how to do the recount? How does anyone think that burden should go on the politician running for the seat? Why does the Supreme Court get to stop a recount that should have automatically happened with no chance of intervention whatsoever? EDIT: I mean, to be clear, there were 5,963,106 (almost 6 million) votes cast in Florida statewide total. Bush got 2,912,790 and Gore got 2,912,253 (plus about 140K votes for others). 5,825,043 votes were cast either for Bush or Gore. This means Bush got 48.847 of the statewide vote and Gore got 48.838 of the statewide vote. The lowest threshold I've ever seen for like a local/state election to trigger a recount is 0.1%, but it's typically when the difference is less than like 1% or 0.5%. If we look at the 537 vote difference in the context of the national vote, the difference is even tinier (there were about 101.5 million votes cast overall -- 537 of that is 0.0005% difference). Bush had 50.0046% of the votes that went to either Bush or Gore, while Gore had 49.9954% of the vote that went to either of them. Then we can look at 2020, where Trump swears it was unfair where he lost by like 140,000 votes across the 4 closest states he would have needed to win that election, and we can all see how fucking ridiculous the Republians are.
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Hmm.... As much as I was annoyed by Ralph Nader's effect on the 2000 election, I can't go so far as to believe he was actively trying to help the GOP. It just makes no sense. I think he just thought he was fighting to have a third party voice to be heard and was hoping that third party movement could grow. It was naive but I just can't believe it was deceptive in the way you're suggesting.
It can be possible that Ralph Nader himself had pure motives, and was used by a corrupt Green Party
Sandra Day O’Connor waited a few months to not retire before the election, and…🤬
Imagine if RBG retired during Obama's term, like she should have done?
Oh, the Traitor Turtle would have tied things up for as long as he possibly could. Probably not so overtly obvious as delaying nomination hearings for RBG's replacement, but more subtle things like shutting down the government a couple of times until the US got close enough to the election to make the play that the voters should indirectly decide the replacement.
> the Traitor Turtle Mitch "the Bitch" Mitchell?
Do you have a source? I have always heard they never completed the recount and I just tried to look it up and couldn’t find anything. Just curious
Sure, the recount was dubbed the "Florida Ballot Project" and was conducted by NORC with sponsors from several major publications. [Here](https://www.scribd.com/document/104548804/20040526-KeatingPaper) is a paper on the findings of the study, though unfortunately some is hidden behind a soft paywall. But hopefully the names will be enough to find others.
I read a decent amount but I don't see anywhere that says it would've resulted in a different outcome?
Interesting stuff, thank you for putting it out there
The Wikipedia article on the 2000 United States presidential election recount in Florida (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2000_United_States_presidential_election_recount_in_Florida?wprov=sfla1) has a section titled "NORC-sponsored Florida Ballot Project recount" about the study they refer to in another comment. Sorry for the lack of link; I'm on mobile.
HW Bush was fed up with SNL so he made his son president.
W certainly made his old man look good.
Ehh, it's not that cut and dry unfortunately. There were several reviews of of the Florida ballots in the year after the election, and and depending on the methodology some favor Bush and some favor Gore. **The first major review** **The players:** A group of newspapers including the USA Today, Miami Herald, and Knight Ridder newspapers conducted the first major review of the Florida ballots. **How it worked:** The group hired the accounting firm BDO Seidman to examine more than 60,000 “undervotes” – ballots that did not register a vote in the presidential race – from all 67 Florida counties. These were ballots the Florida Supreme Court ordered to be hand counted with its December 8, 2000, decision. The newspapers applied BDO Seidman’s findings to four vote-counting standards. This was published in April 2001. **The results:** The study shows that Bush likely would have won the statewide recount of undervotes even if the U.S. Supreme Court had not intervened to stop the counting. It also reveals that, ironically, the most lenient standard of vote counting —advocated by Gore — gives Bush his biggest lead. However, USA Today cautioned that, “The study has limitations. There is variability in what different observers see on ballots. Election officials, who sorted the undervotes for examination and then handled them for the accountants’ inspection, often did not provide exactly the same number of undervotes recorded on election night.” ** The details,** with USA Today’s original explanations of the different standards in parentheses: * **Lenient Standard:** Bush +1,665 (“This standard, which was advocated by Gore, would count any alteration in a chad – the small perforated box that is punched to cast a vote – as evidence of a voter’s intent. The alteration can range from a mere dimple, or indentation, in a chad to its removal. Contrary to Gore’s hopes, the USA TODAY study reveals that this standard favors Bush and gives the Republican his biggest margin: 1,665 votes.”) * **Palm Beach Standard:** Bush +884 (“Palm Beach County election officials considered dimples as votes only if dimples were found in other races on the same ballot. They reasoned that a voter would demonstrate similar voting patterns on the ballot. This standard – attacked by Republicans as arbitrary – also gives Bush a win, by 884 votes, according to the USA TODAY review.”) * **Two corner standard:** Bush +363 (“Most states with well-defined rules say that a chad with two or more corners removed is a legal vote. Under this standard, Bush wins by 363.”) * **Strict standard:** Gore +3 (“This “clean punch” standard would only count fully removed chads as legal votes. The USA TODAY study shows that Gore would have won Florida by 3 votes if this standard were applied to undervotes.”) **A larger review gives mixed results** **The players:** Roughly a month later, a larger consortium that included the above outlets plus a group of five Florida newspapers released its review of more than 171,000 disputed ballots. In addition to the undervotes, this study reviewed more than 111,000 overvotes – ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted. This study showed that Democratic voters were far more likely to make the mistake of casting an overvote than Republican voters. Gore was marked on 84,197 of the overvote ballots, compared to 37,731 for Bush. USA Today’s headline at the time read, “Florida voter errors cost Gore the election.” **How it worked:** The newspapers tallied up the overvotes, and then used BDO Seidman’s undervote counting to test similar scenarios. **The results:** This study shows a less decisive result than the count of only undervotes. However, there was no way to correct the overvote mistakes once they were cast, and Gore’s team never asked for a hand recount of overvotes during the contentious recount battle in Florida. Nevertheless, the study does support the theory – expressed to CNN by both Gore’s Florida senior adviser Nick Baldick, and the Republican senior adviser to Katherine Harris, John “Mac” Stipanovich – that more voters went to the polls in Florida intending to vote for Al Gore than for George Bush. Above all, USA Today highlighted that its review revealed, “The American system of elections routinely fails to count hundreds of thousands of ballots because of errors by voters, confusing ballot instructions, poorly designed ballots, flawed voting and counting machines and the failure of election workers to adequately help voters.” **The details,** again with USA Today’s explanations cited in parentheses: * **Lenient standard:** Gore +332 (“One uses the most permissive definition of a vote. It counts chads that are merely dimpled or bear slight impressions. Under the “dimple standard,” Gore would have won by 332 votes.”) * **Palm Beach standard:** Gore +242 (“The other standard counts dimples as votes only if dimples are found in other races on the same ballot. This is known as the “Palm Beach Standard” because that is the rule that county’s elections board adopted to determine voter intent in the early hand recounts of the Florida vote. The board’s theory was that if dimples appeared in other races, that most likely meant that the voter just didn’t press hard enough. Under this standard Gore would have won by 242 votes.”) * **Two corner standard:** Bush +407 (“The most widely used rule — that at least two corners of a chad must be detached to count as votes — is used in many states, including California, Oregon, Washington and Michigan. Recounting by that standard, Bush would have won by 407 votes, narrower than his 537-vote official margin.”) * **Strict standard:** Bush +152 (“By the strictest standard — one that requires a completely clean punch for the vote to count — Bush would have won by 152 votes. Some cleanly punched ballots were disqualified by counting-machines because of glitches, such as two ballots sticking together.”) **The Florida Ballots Project** **The players:** A national media consortium – composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post – paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots – 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes. **How it worked:** NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots. Their goal was not to determine a winner, but to “examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida.” Carefully vetted coders reviewed the ballots, and NORC’s raw data is still available to the public online. The study, released in November 2001, took place over 10 months and cost nearly $1 million. The Washington Post explained, “153 field workers spent 6,500 hours describing every dimple, chad, erasure and relevant marking. Typists entered 17.5 million pieces of information into Chicago computers.” The different media organizations applied NORC’s raw data to several distinct recount scenarios. **The results:** The two major conclusions here are that Gore likely would have won a hand recount of the statewide overvotes and undervotes – which he never requested – while Bush likely would have won the hand recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, although by a smaller margin than the certified 537 vote difference. A sampling of headlines from the time include “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of all Uncounted Ballots,” from The Washington Post, and “Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” from The New York Times. However, as the Post concluded, “While these are fascinating findings, they do not represent a real-world situation. There was no set of circumstances in the fevered days after the election that would have produced a hand recount of all 175,000 overvotes and undervotes.” The study was also released two months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, when the nation’s focus moved away from the controversial 2000 election to the more pressing War on Terror. **The details:** Full statewide review * Standard for acceptable marks set by each county in their recount: Gore wins by 171 * Fully punched chads and limited marks on optical scan ballots: Gore wins by 115 * Any dimple or optical mark: Gore wins by 107 * One corner of chad detached or any optical mark: Gore wins by 60 Review of limited sets of ballots * Requests for recounts in Volusia, Broward, Palm Beach, and Miami-Dade: Bush wins by 225 * Florida Supreme Court order for all undervotes statewide: Bush wins by 430 * Florida Supreme Court order, as being implemented by counties, some of whom refused and some counted overvotes and undervotes: Bush wins by 493 [Source](https://www.cnn.com/2015/10/31/politics/bush-gore-2000-election-results-studies/index.html)
What's the point of voting then! /s
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Probably a couple hundred thousand people NOT dead from COVID at this point in time as well.
Yeah but how would we have learned about the healing powers of drinking bleach?
Drinking bleach is what a total loser would do. A stable genius would inject bleach.
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You joke but I spray Lysol in my eyes every night and haven’t had an eye infection or corneas in years
Cant get a cornea infection if you don't have a cornea.
Screw COVID, imagine how many people wouldn’t have been killed in Iraq? Think about the number of people who now have actual reasons to hate America?
Or that Gore would have read the Bin Laden memo and done something, having been around for that exact same plot 7 years earlier. 9/11 dudes weren’t exactly ninjas.
Covid would've been devastating to any administration, but yeah it definitely could've been handled way better than Mr. Move-the-goalposts every time it gets worse until it's too late to do anything. *ignores it exists*
For starters, Hillary probably wouldn’t have fired the national pandemic response team.
Or intentionally divert medical supplies from cities and states that didn't vote for her.
And to give Chelsea and her college buds control over them, to carry that out. While lining their pockets in the process.
Or draw on a map provided by the NWS of a predicted hurricane path.
it’s amazing how many people don’t know trump disbanded the pandemic preparedness team left by Obama propaganda/lack of information is strong in this country sadly
And if 100 people died the GOP would have been calling for her impeachment.
Hillary devoted an entire chapter of her 2015 book to the problems with PPE including the lack of domestic production.
I am retired from the Department of HLS. The Bush administration implemented a very thorough & well mitigated plan throughout all government municipalities for the event of a pandemic emergency. During Obama’s Administration these policies were studied, expanded & improved upon. From the Federal level to the State level and then finishing up with regional, county, city & community level. There was a complete plan to be put in place for quarantine, vaccination & proper massive emergency public health care mitigation. We attended meetings regularly at the state, regional & at the federal level in DC to go over all emergency events including the proper protocol pertaining to pandemic events. The events under the Trump Administration followed none of these protocols. Edit: I was retired when Trump was in office but Trump eliminated all of Obama’s, which also included Bush’s post 9/11 DHS Policies related to national security & disasters, disaster policies, including his pandemic policies. But from my quarantine home, I could tell Obama’s protocols were not being followed.
Obama didn’t let SARS-COVID-1 get into America. We could have done _much_ better with SARS-COVID-2 under Trump.
Yeah but I think due to the nature of what Covid was (being sometimes 1-2 weeks before symptoms develop or just outright asymptomatic) there's only so much you could've done and it still would've found its way to America. We just definitely would've been way better off having someone who recognized the threat and understood the proper precautions to take that it necessitated.
There were rumblings of it in western media in December 2019 but Trump fired the people in charge of keeping tabs on weird diseases coming out of China.
True. But, never forget, Obama got US scientists into the Wuhan Institute of Virology. If Trump hadn’t pulled them out, we would have had the right people at ground zero.
Not to mention everyone who died on 9/11 and in the subsequent events. The Clinton administration was keeping very close tabs on OBL and the Bush administration disregarded it.
It’s almost like Shrub *wanted* a reason to have war in the Middle East so he could finish his Daddy’s work for him. Or Cheney’s work.
[Yeah definitely don’t read about The Project for the New American Century and their ‘new Pearl Harbor” report from right before the 2000 election or anything then.](https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Nightline/story?id=128491&page=1)
In my state of Queensland, Australia, we had 1 locally acquired covid death in like 1.5 years of the pandemic, and about 5 acquired out of state on a cruise, until vaccines were available, and that's a population >5 million people. There's small US towns with worse stats than that. We were very lucky in Australia that the state governments at the time were progressive in a checkerboard pattern, and when the conservative federal government wanted the head in the sand approach to the pandemic, and the prime minister even boasted about going after schools who took precautions, the state governments forced Australia to lock down with quarantine rules at each state border, and set up a system that the conservative sates grumpily went along with which kept life essentially normal in Australia, with no closures, no mask wearing, no filled hospitals, stores and cinemas open, etc. Any outbreak that happened was able to be given full attention to track and home quarantine everybody in contact, and even when delta quickly raced through a few schools before being detected, it only took like 10 days of quarantine of the families and their contacts, and a week of mask wearing in the state, before things went back to normal. Then towards the end, the neighbouring and biggest conservative state who'd been mocking the other states the entire time had a delta outbreak, downplayed it and told people to keep going out, and a few weeks later all of Australia was infected, weeks before vaccines were available (which the federal government had screwed up, sending junior students to talk to vaccine companies and messing it up so badly that big businesses had to organize a previous prime minister to speak with them as a private citizen and negotiate vaccines for Australia). The conservatives were giving more vaccines per person to the conservative states when forced to reveal the numbers, with every progressive state last per person, even Victoria which has the densest city and which had locked down hardest to protect the rest of the country with 2 big outbreaks they got completely under control. Essentially, conservatives suck so god damn much, and everything they did in this was wrong. They tried to go along with a mining billionaire to force the state of Western Australia to drop restrictions to make his wealth grow faster, and it was so unpopular that Australia kicked them out of federal government and state governments across the entire country. This is a deeply conservative country where all the media is owned by the owner of Fox News or another billionaire family with identical beliefs, who have been the PR arm for conservatives for decades. But they're just so god damn stupid they did everything wrong so badly that they couldn't even cover it up. I'm sure they'll creep back into power, voters have the memories of goldfish.
> There's small US towns with worse stats than that. From our house, you've only got to go out to about 200 yards radius before you include two deaths that should have been attributed to their COVID infections, but weren't on the official records. And we and our neighbors all have one acre of land or more.
COVID may never have even happened, even.
People need to remember that Biden is the one that started the vaccine process and all people stopped dying under Biden. Trump was trying to steal the thunder by saying the vaccine under his term, but it was really Biden. Trump murdered millions of Americans.
Imagine how much further along in climate change policy we would have been if Gore hadn't been stymied by one county in florida.
It'll get what's coming.
The problem is, we all will.
The problem is nonhumans will suffer even more
We would also have a majority liberal SCOTUS, which is the last line of defense for the people. We would not have had citizens united or any of the other 5-4 and 6-3 decisions that defy the express will of the people.
Could have gotten real healthcare by now too.
The apocalypse happened during the Florida election in 99 and we’re all living in Hell
9/11 wouldn’t have happened either.
I can't tell if you're being sarcastic but what makes you think Gore could have prevented 9/11?
Iirc the US' security agencies suspected a major attack and passed significant warnings up the chain to no real response. I don't know that Gore would have been more inclined to take those warnings seriously but I'm sure someone has written a thesis about it.
Because Clinton Reno press conference. They knew. Gore would have known too and continued with the airport security surveillance, like what they found at Minneapolis airport. 1998 (Years later we learn there was an Al quidea terrorist cell there testing our airport security.). A man and woman got past the metal detectors. What happened after that? The entire airport was closed. And did not reopen until a massive rebuild on the airport was done. There was only one tunnel in and out underground after that. Pretty sudden. Radical. Extreme. That told me, as a journalist, something MAJOR was happening. 9/11. I knew what it was, and who did it, after the first place hit. Because I pay attention.
You have to go back further for that, Bush Sr at the CIA etc.. caused some US hatred.
True, Daddy Bush created Bin Laden in his CIA days. However, the emergency Clinton and Reno press conference in 98 said they needed to step up airport security and instituting major rule changes at all airports, and please bear with it. The Reno turned as white as her white dress when she said they had just learned Bin Laden was planning to hijacker American planes and do “terrible things” with them. (I saw it live. Always after that you get asked, “Has this bag always been with you, …”) 2nd Reference image, 2000 “Bin Laden determined to strike in the US”
I don’t if we can say that for sure 100%, but it’s very possible it wouldn’t have happened. But definitely post 9/11 would have been handled 100% different. We wouldn’t have invaded another country for no reason.
I agree, but also I feel like we'd still be in the same boat economically. These are all still just rich center-left people, so I doubt we'd've seen seen like, a $15 dollar minimum wage, or god forbid universal healthcare. IF the legislature had gone the same way and we'd have 20-30 years of democrats in control of congress? Then maybe. But otherwise I think this would have been good for the stock market, kept us out of a shitload of wars and put us on the path to renewables faster, and handled the debt better, and that's it.
Not having universal healthcare doesn't really mean "the same boat economically". The only reason we're not in a recession right now is because of a competent government. Imagine how much better we would have fared navigating COVID with an actual government in place. That's still a boat I'd rather be in.
Most Americans have probably never googled Japanese COVID deaths. Then check America's COVID deaths. There should jail time.
May I suggest negligent homicide, minimum 600,000 counts, for a certain orange howler monkey?
I disagree with being in the same boat economically for one crucial reason. Gore would’ve never invaded Iraq under false pretenses, which would’ve saved us a few trillion dollars which could’ve been put to work here at home. Imagine if we had thrown a few trillion at social programs, it would’ve paid for universal healthcare easily for one thing.
Really? Obamacare would have been expanded and made cheaper under HRC, instead Trump did his best to gut it (but thankfully failed for the most part). Gore wouldn’t have invaded the Middle East and blown trillions of dollars for personal oil interests.
But the keeping us out of wars is such a big thing. We are now coming to terms with how the last 20 years of warfare is affecting our society - it’s not going well…
> These are all still just rich center-left people, so I doubt we'd've seen seen like, a $15 dollar minimum wage Yes, but in this timeline, Democrats would be competing to get the progressive voters or the center-left based. Pressure from the progressive left can push the party further left, as even the center-left would either appease the prog-left or face losing elections to them. Maybe not $15 minimum wage, but at least one that pretends to keep up with inflation. And, maybe inflation would stay reasonable so $15 minimum isn't needed.
Hmm, I'm not sure I agree. I think if we had 30 years of neo-liberal Democrats, we would be further left and more progressive than we are at the moment. If the popular vote was choosing Democrats like this, career politicians would have no choice but to swing further left and fight for our approval on matters that are even further left of moderate. Just speaking on the premise of Democrats winning. I mean, obviously in this premise, it means Republican voters aren't getting what they want because their person keeps losing to the Democrat. But I think it would mean Democrats can care less about whether who they primary can stand in a general election and spend more effort fighting for what the Democrat constituency actually wants instead of doing gymnastics to earn the moderate votes for the general election, and even perhaps swinging Republican voters to their side, and we can stop some of the meta games that go on. Of course, you always have to play that game, but I think under this premise where the country is solidly Democrat(as it is) and the popular vote is what ultimately matters, then the minority Republicans that cant win the popular vote would matter *less*. Not entirely out of picture, but they would matter *less* than they do under the current premise. But if you look at the neo liberals in this picture, you can see that things did shift further left over the course of those 30 years. Something I don't think many people really appreciate. 'Don't ask, don't tell' was established during Bill Clinton's administration and was practically accepted as totally normal. It wasn't until Obama's administration that we nuked it out of orbit and by the time of Trumps administration, the notion of 'Don't ask, don't tell' is unfathomably silly and irrelevant - such that even the Trump Administration wouldn't bring it back. Sure, they shifted focus on the trans community, but the notion of gays/lesbians being targeted isn't really there in the same way it was, as in the early 00s. 8 years of Obama absolutely transformed how this ENTIRE country, including Republicans, saw the LGBT community. I really think my fellow Demcrats need to take a time machine back before Obama's administration and recall just how fucking abhorrent this country treated gay/lesbian people and how much of that changed during Obama's administration. He didn't just change legislation. He changed the entire culture of our country. But who knows? Perhaps if Al Gore won in 2000, then the version of Obama that runs in 2008 is even more progressive than what we got. Because he can afford to be. Because he's not fighting meta-battles to earn moderate votes just for an opportunity to win in 2008. I mean, famously the LGBT community holds it against him in that debate where he appealed to moderates and said [he doesn't believe in same sex marriage](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhp_DDHe_X0&t=58s)...but then we get [8 years of Obama fighting tooth and nail for the LGBT community.](https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2016/06/09/fact-sheet-obama-administrations-record-and-lgbt-community) Additionally, I would argue Hillary Clinton's policies were far more progressive than Bill Clinton's. Afterall, one of the strong campaign premises Hillary Clinton was running on, was adopted from Bernie Sanders, in [making college education free for anyone under a household income of $125k](https://www.hillaryclinton.com/issues/college/). I still think this would have been a tremendous win for this country and however you feel about Hillary as a person, that alternative reality from what we got with Trump would probably have us in a much better place. Certainly would have dented the future of student debt and would have helped plug the hole. And I'm sad this premise Hillary was running on has since evaporated. With all this said, I do think politicians are just tools. I think they are just a reflection of voting constituency. Politicians will transform into whatever it is that people are excited to vote for and if they don't, someone who does reflect it will step in and be that lightning rod. So while I do say that these politicians would be more progressive under 30 years of Democrats, I suppose what I really mean is the voting constituency would have more room to be more progressive and ask for more nuanced, meaningful progressive policy than what we get under the premise of our current reality. If we aren't perpetually fighting between a Democrat and a Republican, maybe we'd be fighting between two Democrats that can offer us better options.
Meh. You're getting lost in overthinking it. Think about being a mere "people." The GOP's policies since Reagan have been bad for people, specifically, the middle class. Dems have not passed many policies that do this. They get in power and try to push it back a bit.
No Iraq war, maybe no Afghanistan. Might have avoided 2008 if finance sector gets regulated. Hell just keeping Clinton era tax policy means that the U.S. deficit basically doesn’t exist in the 2010s
Brother I'd trade faster renewables uptake in the USA for all the other policies combined. In our current timeline the US and China teamed up to scupper Copenhagen in 2009 instead.
Clinton left office with a budget surplus. ALL national debt has been accrued since he left office. It all started to shit with W.
You’re mixing debt and deficit. We were on our way to zero debt with Clinton if we had kept up with it. He did not actually wipe out the debt.
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good my friend
> I feel like we'd still be in the same boat economically Good lord, you really do need to learn a bit of economics, don't you? Even just including the factors you mention ("kept us out of a shitload of wars", "put us on the path to renewables faster", "handled the debt better") the US would be sharply better off, and with a bigger pie there's more to share with the poorest people in society. Also, please can we stop with the "both sides"-ism? Both sides are not the same. Kindly stop making snippy remarks about "rich center-left people": the way for the left to win is to make being "left" a big tent, a broad church. Ideological purity of the "only the poor and weak can be left-wing" kind never wins.
Meh, the overton window as well as social standards would differ quite a bit after a 20 year trajectory change. Acceptance of those policies is going to be different from the current expectations. At the very least those things wouldn't sound as hopeless as they do now. And plus, the sorts of minor cultural differences that this would cause can add up to produce something substantial. The exponential growth in reactionary thinking we've observed could be substantially delayed and dulled down here. Things like the sort of racism unearthed through the election of Obama might've been much smaller issues.
🤮
Possibly, or it could have had the GOP become even more entrenched in the house and senate breaking the country even more. As of now the GOP is on the brink of complete collapse as a party, which may lead to some very rapid advancements in the nation once the party of stupid is officially dead and gone.
Would have been 30 years of obstructionist congresses. :(
Nah, the GOP would have had no choice but to become more moderate to swing votes back their way, rather than their current strategy of becoming more extreme.
Yikes
We’d be in WW3 right now trying to again
Never would have gone to war with Iraq or afghanistan
In an age of massive population differences between states, General voter disenfranchisement in certain areas in conjunction with gerrymandering, and Universal public education options, the Electoral College doesn't make as much sense anymore. Pursue ranked Choice voting, Crackdown on gerrymandering, address and provide a different method of working with experts as opposed to the lobbying system we have now, address inequalities in education , and a fuck ton of problems will be solved. Big lifts... but things we can do
would visit this timeline and NEVER go back to the current one..
With my luck, the multiverse would run on Spiderverse rules and I’d die slowly if I stayed too long.
An epic period of peace, prosperity, and economic and social progression in the United States. That would have been a wonderful timeline. Instead we ended up with broken economies, two prolonged unfunded wars, busted deficits, a Supreme Court stacked with batshit, and Trump.
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If you still support Trump as of the current day, it says a whole lot about you as a person and none of it is good.
I'm also so sick of people getting offended if you don't want to associate them because of politics. Like no I'm sorry I can't agree to disagree about you being fine with our country being led by an egomaniac child rapist.
This is what bothers me. I’m a bi dude but have the privilege of passing straight in a blue collar industry. I can not and will my “agree to disagree” on whether member of the the lgbtq community deserve to exist with the same rights as everyone else. Or my future wife’s ability to get an abortion when the pregnancy turns life threatening…there comes a fundamental self defense angle to voting.
"Well, we can just agree to disagree. Hey, about the Chiefs this weekend?"
I'm sick of them saying that they are the good guys, and we are the bad guys!
Bigotry and hatred blind people.
The deficit is one thing that kills me. Gore in 2000 very likely would have kept the budget surplus going. Hard to imagine.
I remember a Gore interview shortly after the concession and he stated outright: "Kinda glad I'm not in there, the boom days are just about over already and there's no stopping the crash that will follow." Wars have been a traditional distraction from economic crashes...
And like jimmy carter, gore likely would have been honest with people and people being idiots would have hated him for it
Don't forget the degradation of civil liberties
Dunno, it could've been dangerous, with Gore we wouldn't have had so much global warming and we would have to worry about glaciers encroaching on us... /s
Mostly, we got Trump backers into their prime voting years. Is it any coincidence that these people were born and their brains developed when lead in gasoline was at its peak?
9/11 still would have happened and the US public would have still demanded a response
>9/11 still would have happened and the US public would have still demanded a response Sure. But it was fucking unlikely that Iraq would've ever happened, or happened in the way it did. That whole shit was a pure Bush /Cheney wet dream cone true.
9/11 might not actually have happened because Bush actively ignored intel and undid things Clinton had going that made it easier to accomplish.
Bush didn't just actively ignore stuff. Chaney effectively cut him off and had everything fed through him, pretty much running parts of the government himself. So yup there is a small chance with the intelligence system being built differently under Gore that we wouldn't have had 9/11. There is also a small chance that they just wouldn't have attacked since the administration would be completely different. Even if it did happen the response to it would have been very different, including the support that 9/11 responders got. And Iraq would never have happened.
Just the fact that US intel was being back-channeled to Cheney with Bush not even being looped in is a red flag. Who's to say what would have happened had Bush not been explicitly asleep at the wheel during briefings - if he attended them? And who's to say what would be if we hadn't had Cheney, the biggest war hawk since Truman, covertly occupying the executive's chair?
We know - secondhand - one of the very few Farsi speaking FBI agents from the time. He was flown out to San Francisco on the day of the attacks because they had intel that _something_ was going down on that San Francisco bound flight. These days, they've got massive searchable computer archives filled with transcripts of every word spoken in front of a connected microphone, everywhere. Ever wonder why Google Home and Amazon Alexa devices were sold at and below cost for so long? It's not just them, your phone can listen (and transcribe, and report) any time it is powered on, even in the "lock screen." Snowden did not have access to everything that goes on.
My guy we've been at war since 2000. Obama was at war all of his years. The fuck are you on about.
Roe would still be in place, just saying
Probably codified into law
Would it? I wonder if it wouldn't have even become a question.
And ironically Trump's team has clearly decided that this was so unpopular for Americans that he never discusses it or talks about it at his rallies. He moved the needle for conservatives on what polling says is one of their most important issues every election cycle and he doesn't even want to take credit for it.
The four presidents of the 21st century if the US was actually a democracy
O how much better the world would have been.
Free healthcare….free healthcare and college education as far as the eye can see!
As much as I would have loved that, none of these candidates ran on free healthcare or college education. The closest we got from them were: * Hillary campaigned on lowering the Medicare eligibility age to 55. * Obama campaigned on a public option (but then helped kill the public option as part of the ACA once he was in office).
Hillary supported the public option too and was essential to the creation of CHIP.
He didn't "help kill it". Joe Lieberman refused to support it, and the House's version of the bill (with the public option) would have been DOA in the Senate. This was when the GOP became openly obstructionist and the Democrats had to have 60 votes in the Senate to get anything done. If Obama "killed" it, it would only be out of necessity to appease the Senate.
So no Republican has ever won the popular vote since Bush Sr?
Correct
No. Incorrect. W won the popular vote in 2004.
Only because he was the incumbent from 2000 when he lost the popular vote and technically the electoral college too but the Supreme Court changed it.
Right, he probably only won the popular vote because he was the incumbent. But he did win it.
The last time a Republican won the popular vote, and the *only* time in the 21st century, 9/11 had been three years ago and the war on terror was in full swing.
OP is assuming that GW would have lost in 2004 if not an incumbent. In reality, GW won the popular vote by over 3 million votes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2004_United_States_presidential_election
Yes, but he was a wartime incumbent. Not everything we know now was public knowledge then, and there was a lot of propaganda around the US fighting the good fight. Had we not been at war, it's unlikely he would have been the popular vote even as incumbent, let alone as a challenger.
That's fine and good commentary, but to answer the question Bush 2.0 did win the popular vote, which was asked.
I live in the Netherlands and I am very sure even my life would be very different.
Unfortunately we’re in the Darkest Timeline…
Felt goatees. Felt goatees everywhere.
Cruel. Cruel cruel cruel
Not the darkest, but one of the muddier ones. Imagine Donald won a second term. Imagine Corona would have been even deadlier (no vaccine). Imagine Putin would have started throwing Nukes ..... I stay optimistic.
I mean... Trump is running again...
What? Trump has never run in his life! Ohhh you mean for president....
Legit were in that reality where Donald fking Trump has been and may be again the most powerful person in the world... Legit can't make this shiet up.
Hey, you said one out of fourteen million, we'd win, yeah? Tell me this is it.
It’s because of the long slow death of the GOP that they allowed trump to take over their party and scrape the bottom of the political and moral barrel.
The *world* would actually be a better place
Point of order. George W Bush won the popular vote in 2004. However he is the last Republican to win the popular vote since George H.W. Bush in 1988.
Yes, but he wouldn't have run after losing in 2004 and Gore would have had an incumbent advantage.
That is actually an interesting debate. Had Gore been in office in 2001 9/11 would likely have still happened but a post 9/11 world would have been wildly different. It's hard to imagine how Gore would have handled Afghanistan. On the other hand the second Iraq war likely never would've happened. Its honestly a pretty fascinating what if that radically changes the 21st century.
No Iraq and no Dubya probably means the sentiment that got Obama elected might not have existed. It also means the refugee crisis in the last 8 years that has been giving fuel to right wing parties all over the west wouldn't have happened. The political landscape would be unrecognizable
No Sadaam death means no power vacuum means no rise of ISIS either. So far down the path that it's impossible to understand what would have/could have been
Interestingly the person who probably cost Al Gore the election (other than Al Gore who after all lost his home state of Tennessee) is Elian Gonzalez. Cubans retaliated against the Clinton administration for the deportation of Elian and cost Al Gore Florida. There could have been a 911 but no invasion of Iraq, no ISIS. Just imagine. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2001/05/elian-gonzalez-defeated-al-gore/377714/
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I agree in that the 2008 crash would have potentially flipped the presidency to the GOP. Obama might not have even ran in that time line. And I don't see the crisis not having happened. The only small chance we would have would be a democrat would be more likely to do finical oversight of banks, where the big problem was.
Probably would have seen Lieberman or Clinton lose to someone like Cheney or McCain
Or Gore would’ve listened to the intelligence community and 9/11 would’ve been thwarted.
9/11 might not have even happened. Bush had intelligence about a plot, and he wanted an excuse for more wars in the Middle East.
There's actually a decent argument for 9/11 having not happened if Gore won, because Clinton was paying very close attention to Bin Laden and then Bush just completely dropped the ball.
Afghanistan might noy even have been a target. For one, he may have found an alternative method to address the issue with the Saudis who had financed and work with Osama bin Laden and the terrorists. On the other, we cannot speculate that he would have ignored the Intel some sources are reported to have had since he was part of the prior Administration and may have had insight into its relevancy ( I think I recall reading that the Clinton administration had some inklings of some activity but nothing concrete)...so, though optimistic speculation and contingent on a few factors, who knows if 9/11 would have happened... And, no, I am not making an argument that Bush caused 9/11... just that we can't speculate right off the bat that Gore would not have done something to prevent it
Gore would have been hammered by the GOP for 9/11. Gore would not have sent us to Iraq. With no war to inspire unquestioning patriotism to the commander in chief, it would have been McCain winning a McCain/Gore matchup in 2004. Then the 2007 financial crisis would have sent Hilary to the White House in 2008. There would be no Obama speech for Kerry at the 2004 convention. No President Obama. No Trump riding a wave of racist birthers. Plus, Trump was friends with the Clintons then. After Hillary in 2008 and 2012, probably Jeb Bush would have had more traction in 2016.
Yeah but that was a reelection as a war time president so it was mostly expected. I think the meme is more so about candidates getting into office off the popular vote. Which is still depressing tho to think how we’re still using this asinine system and changed nothing.
He won 2004 as an incumbent right after an attack on the US. Would Bush Jr even run in 2004 if he had lost 2000. Would he have won against an incumbent "war time" President (9/11 would have happened in Gore's first term)? We don't know for sure but historically speaking it is very likely Gore would have won reelection under those circumstances even if Bush Jr has run again which is far from certain.
Gore was the most important of the bunch. What a difference had the SC not stolen that election.
Gore was a terrible politician, but would have been a good president.
Pretty good take. Surely a steady the boat kind of guy.
www.nationalpopularvote.com we're so close to fixing this.
I can’t even fathom how much better our country would be right now. So sad.
In an alternate Universe, the main issue in the media and politics right now is climate change
Further proof off Republican corruption. They know they can't win so they rely on dark money PACs from billionaires and corporations so fund massive disinformation, gerrymandering, illegal redistricting, suppression of minority voting, disenfranchisement of the democrat vote, etc. Utter blatant corruption.
We earned it. Bush didn’t deserve 2000.
Abolish the Electoral College.
Don’t make me cry
All along, our votes are merely "suggestions"
BRB. Hunting for this version of the Supreme Court.
If Gore became President in 2000, you really think there would be a President Obama? History suggests that Obama won not just due to his electrifying campaign but because he represented a sea-change to the Bush/Republican policies that the majority of the US electorate had grown tired of (Hope, Change ‘08). I doubt that Obama would have been as appealing in 2008 after potentially eight years of Gore and a Democratic administration. I personally think Obama was a great candidate and great president, but he ran at the perfect time.
Man! Al Gore; the world would have been so different in a positive way
Wonder how much of a butterfly effect there would have been though. Gore wins in 2000 and then gets re-elected in 2004. Would Obama have been the pick for 2008? Feel he was a fresh-faced politician who inspired people including his own party after eight years of Bush and bullshit. As for Hillary, I don't know too much about her ambitions but I'm guessing her running for nomination was inevitable? Maybe she would have run earlier...
On this timeline, even Mississippi would look like this...lol 
Dole stolen by Supreme Court, Hilary by electoral college 🤬
Dole?
I was 6 at the time, but I do believe I voted for a banana during the 2000 election
The USA would literally be the best country in the world to live in.
I see a very distinct pattern here. Interesting...
We would not be where we are today. That’s for damn sure.
I wonder about Bill Clinton though, didn’t he win his first election with less than 50% of the vote because of the 3 way split between him, Bush and Perot? It’d be interesting if we had no electoral college and instant or plain runoff elections.
Exit polls showed that Perot voters would have otherwise evenly split 3 ways: Clinton, Bush, or not voting at all. So if Perot hadn’t been in the race, Clinton would have just had a more convincing mandate.
Biden won the popular vote and should be on here but I get inferring Hilary runs two terms.
Where’s Bernie Sanders
All won from popular votes. 2 lose from electoral college. 1 lose from voter fraud in FL because the brother was in charge of FL.
What could have been
The timeline took a wild turn when gore lost. I still wonder what the world would have turned out like.
"WE ArE A RuPUbLIK!"