User:DukeOfDelTaco/sandbox/Results of the 2000 United States presidential election
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This workpage details the results of the 2000 United States presidential election, which was the 54th quadrennial presidential election held on November 7, 2000. Republican nominee George W. Bush, the governor of Texas and eldest son of former president George H. W. Bush, won the election, defeating Democratic vice president Al Gore. It was the fourth of five presidential elections, and the first since 1888, in which the winning candidate lost the popular vote, and is considered one of the closest elections in U.S. history, with longstanding controversy surrounding the ultimate results.
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538 members of the Electoral College 270 electoral votes needed to win | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Turnout | 51.2% 2.2 pp | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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On election night, it was unclear who had won, with the electoral votes of the state of Florida still undecided. The returns showed that Bush had won Florida by such a close margin that state law required a recount. A month-long series of legal battles led to the highly controversial 5–4 Supreme Court decision Bush v. Gore, which ended the recount.
The recount having been ended, Bush won Florida by 537 votes, a margin of 0.009%. The Florida recount and subsequent litigation resulted in major post-election controversy, and with speculative analysis suggesting that limited county-based recounts would likely have confirmed a Bush victory, whereas a statewide recount would likely have given the state to Gore. Ultimately, Bush won 271 electoral votes, one vote more than the 270-to-win majority, despite Gore receiving 543,895 more votes (a margin of 0.52% of all votes cast). Bush won 11 states that had voted Democratic in the 1996 election: Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Kentucky, Louisiana, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio, Tennessee and West Virginia. This was the first election since 1948 in which the Democrats won the popular vote three times in a row.
As of 2022[update], this is the earliest election in which all four major-party presidential and vice-presidential candidates are still living. This was also the last time that New Hampshire voted for the Republican nominee.