I remember when the Supreme Court stole the election in broad daylight for Bush and all of the savvy people shrugged. Many of them heaped praise on Gore for conceding. #goodtimes.
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Same. It was a terrible start. I was like so they’re just gonna stop counting???? It was so awful to experience in real time and then be gaslit and called a conspiracy theorist when you say outloud it was stolen.
Same. (Was hollering for a free 🇵🇸 then, too, fwiw.)
Listened to an ep of NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing Election 2000, the steal, and ranked-choice voting shortly thereafter, and I then immediately realized #RankedChoiceVoting was the only hope to save us from our two-party, corporate duopoly.
Right in retrospect that was the beginning of the end of the US as we knew it.
Once the right realized they could just steal elections & get away with it, they no longer needed a message that could win at the ballot box. They only need to get close enough to suppress & cheat their way over the top.
I know this sounds like "Not all savvy people!" But I was APPALLED. That was one of worst Supreme Court decisions in U.S. history, down there with Dred Scott, Koramatsu and Plessy v. Ferguson. Never forgave Scalia for that travesty.
I wasn't old enough to vote in 2000, and I remember being confused why nobody cared that they were stealing an election. I was already suspicious of US democracy for various reasons, but that basically confirmed that our elections are meaningless.
That was my first election and it radicalized me more than few other events in my life. When people praised Bush II for being better than Trump, I wanted to punch them. He's WHY we have Trump.
Yes, the US went through a coup in 2000, stealing the government from the winner of the election. Several of the Never Trumpers participated in that coup.
the start of the downfall of out democracy and our political system. scotus always deferred elections to state gov but reversed on this one the florida scotus decision. disgusting bush jr evil followed forn8 years.
And they did the same when Hilary "lost" with 3 million more votes in 2016. And they never bother to do anything about gerrymandering, the electoral college, the filibuster, purges of voter rolls, or open intimidation at polling places and drop boxes, like we saw last year. It's a bipartisan project
That was a critical juncture in the timeliness. Jeb Bush, the president's brother, was governor of Florida and was uniquely positioned to hand the election to his brother based on "hanging chads," which were the 2000 mules of Y2K.
The problem then was the media called Florida way too soon and no one will ever know what effect that had on Floridians and also why results can't be shown now until polls are closed!
Also how fox became a Lego News source because they wouldn't call Florida and then once the media realized it messed up ended up following Fox lead and they looked the the most competent station on television at the time.
Also Bush losing the popular vote was the best thing that could have happened to him because if they did a recount in just Florida to see the winner Americans would start to realize that only Floridas votes matter and who knows what would have happened then 👀
the alt-right playbook has the best explanation for dems' preoccupation with polity and procedure that i've heard and the tl;dr of it is it's a shield. an excuse for not doing what they know their voters want (& simply allowing what their donors want to happen instead)
I was young, our school teacher tried to explain the weirdness of the situation to us and failed, we just didn't get that we were having our futures stolen
I'm from NJ, my state hasn't gone for a GOP candidate since Reagan in 1984, I was safe voting however I wanted. (The last thing I will say about the 2000 election is ... Ralph Nader has great PR.)
Could perhaps in retrospect have been the beginning of the slide that got us here. Gore wanted to protect the surplus Clinton left and Social Security-he was an advocate of policies to address climate change. I doubt he would have tortured people or started wars with lies. GW Bush? Where is he now?
I remember. And i remember being spitting mad. I still am. It was when i realized that things had changed really for the worse, knowing how bad they had always been.
There was no institutional foothold for sounding the alarm because the Democratic Party had more at stake in appeasing its opponents than in vigorously defending the franchise and democracy. Huh. This is sounding oddly familiar....
predicated on the claim that the uncertainty of recounting ballots, in the most jack-off-about-democracy country ever, for a transfer of power that was *2 months* out, was too dangerous and problematic, so just this once they were gonna call it. lmao
Thousands of people feeling disenfranchised, lots of which were POC, and thousands of southern more conservative leaning democrats thought Gore was too liberal 🙄.
It’s super complicated, there have been several books written about the 2000 election but that’s the over simplified version.
I still believe in my heart of hearts that if Gore had been president we wouldn't have invaded Iraq and we would have done a lot more to prevent climate change.
Considering how completely captured by neo-conservatism the Democratic party is, I wouldn't be so sure of that. And the Democrats had two terms of Obama and Biden. They could have done more about global warming if they wanted to.
Gore had a stronger stance on climate than Obama. And the Iraq war was manufactured by Dick Cheney et Al. The timeline would be vastly different had bush not been president. No patriot act. No Iraq war. No ICE.
There was a thread the other day where a bunch of blueMAGAs were blaming Nader voters for 2000 🫥 One guy had an extended crash out calling me ableist slurs before blocking me bc I said Gore won the popular vote lol. Anything to maintain their cross-generational cognitive dissonance
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Listened to an ep of NPR’s Talk of the Nation discussing Election 2000, the steal, and ranked-choice voting shortly thereafter, and I then immediately realized #RankedChoiceVoting was the only hope to save us from our two-party, corporate duopoly.
Once the right realized they could just steal elections & get away with it, they no longer needed a message that could win at the ballot box. They only need to get close enough to suppress & cheat their way over the top.
https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2020/10/17/politics/bush-v-gore-barrett-kavanaugh-roberts-supreme-court
(i know u know this btw)
*gestures at america in 2025
Twice in my lifetime, the clear winner of the majority vote lost the election
Shit like that is why it’s so easy for people to shrug. We know the entire system is rigged
I'm from NJ, my state hasn't gone for a GOP candidate since Reagan in 1984, I was safe voting however I wanted. (The last thing I will say about the 2000 election is ... Ralph Nader has great PR.)
predicated on the claim that the uncertainty of recounting ballots, in the most jack-off-about-democracy country ever, for a transfer of power that was *2 months* out, was too dangerous and problematic, so just this once they were gonna call it. lmao
It’s super complicated, there have been several books written about the 2000 election but that’s the over simplified version.