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No matter how hard they work and how far they travel and how much they want it, when judgment day dawns, the candidates usually stand still at last. They go to the polls and cast their votes. Then they take a deep breath and just hold it for the rest of the day. Bush woke up Tuesday morning at 6, made coffee for his wife, fed his cats, read his Bible and called his folks to reassure them that he would, indeed, become the 43rd President of the U.S. His chief strategist, Karl Rove, had been assuring him that victory was his--5 points in the popular vote, 330 electoral votes. How was he feeling? "Calm," he told the assembled reporters. "Let me see if you got this by now. I trust the people. I trust their will. I trust their wisdom."
The other man--bleary-eyed, wired, hoarse, drained of everything but spirit after campaigning for 30 hours straight--had never even made it to bed, and he was not about to stop. Gore began Monday at dawn in the rain outside the John Deere factory in, of all places, Waterloo, Iowa, then on to Missouri, Michigan and Florida, where as the sun came up, he delivered Cuban pastries from a local bakery to hundreds of cheering volunteers. By this time the reporters trailing him had propped their tape recorders up on the tables and curled up underneath them.
Throughout the day Tuesday, the campaigns knew that turnout was huge in the battleground states--lines stretched around the block in Cleveland, Ohio; voters waited for hours in Nashville, Tenn.; and some precincts in Florida were reporting that 80% of registered voters were at the polls. In New Mexico, snowplows were used to deliver ballots in a storm; some precincts had no electricity, but the voting machines had backup batteries.
Election Day began badly for Donna Brazile, Gore's chief turnout strategist. Her suitcase had vanished. It contained her life, she said, including her Bible and, most irreplaceable, her "grounding stones," which her grandmother had given her and which are sort of her good-luck charm. She was in no mood to be out of luck at that particular moment. The first alarms went off at Gore headquarters at 6 a.m. Workers there started hearing that voters in heavily Democratic Palm Beach County were confused by the ballots. "The ballots do not line up in the machine with the correct candidates," said Joan Joseph of the Palm Beach County Democratic Party. "People who think they are voting for Gore could be voting for Pat Buchanan, because the word Democrat is lined up with Buchanan."
As soon as party officials realized the problem, all hell broke loose. They began frantically calling Democratic Party state headquarters and Gore's command center in Tallahassee. In the meantime, the Democrats frantically printed flyers to warn voters about the problem and tried to get party activists to the polling places to sound the alarm. But they had already missed the important prework hours.