The 2000 election is, to this day, the most controversial presidential election in the history of the United States of America. It was contested between Al Gore, then the Vice President of the United States under sitting president William Jefferson "Bill" Clinton, and Texas governor George W. Bush.
At the time the United States itself was in what most folks now consider to be a golden era of peace and prosperity. The internet bubble was slowly deflating rather than bursting, yet Clinton's management of the budget and national debt had put the counttry in a position of financial strength that, had it been managed prudently, would have stood us in good stead for generations. As a result of that, quality of life and economic opportunity had both shot through the roof and Gore was a heavy favorite to win the presidency.
The republicans decision to nominate Bush, a man who former Texas governor Ann Richards had once quipped "was born with a silver foot in his mouth," addressing both Bush's privileged Ivy League elitist upbringing as well as his propensity for misspeaking rather stupidly, seemed to make Gore an even bigger favorite. Most people upon seeing Bush on the national stage for the first time felt he was impossibly out of his depth, and was clearly a figurehead or puppet being manipulated by the right wing elite.
But the 2000 election wasn't to go off as people expected. Gore ran an incredibly bad campaign, letting a mid-summer 20 point lead narrow into a dead heat as election day neared. Bush even pulled ahead in most polls with a week left, but Gore's aggressive campaigning allowed him to tighten the gap (though of all the pollsters only Zogby had it as a dead heat) and, on the day of the election, it was anybody's game.
The day of the election came, and it was clear that Gore had won. The final popular vote favored Gore by more than half a million - 50,999,897 to 50,456,002.
Sadly, rigged results had made the state of Florida itself a toss-up and rather than have a decisive winner on election day, a series of legal challenges meant that there could be no winner declared for a full month. The controversy that came of this legal absurdity led to one of the saddest affairs in the history of the united states, and was ended only when the Supreme Court - not the people - declared Bush the winner of Florida's 23 electoral votes and, therefore, the 2000 election itself.
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