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Midafternoon, when the initial exit polls came in, the first hints of history in the making began to flicker through the nation's e-mail system. They confirmed what some Bush aides had feared--that they had lost momentum in the closing days. Gore had hit Bush hard on not being ready to lead, on not even knowing that Social Security was a federal program. The ticket that promised to restore honor and dignity to the White House turned out to have four arrests between them. The news of Bush's drunk-driving record was hurting, said a senior Bush adviser. "That's the only thing that changed in the last days of the campaign." Voters who had made up their mind in the closing days were breaking to Gore.
All afternoon, Gore was at the Loews Hotel in Nashville, sitting in his hotel room in his blue suit and tie, on the radio, giving interviews at five-minute intervals one after another. So were Joe Lieberman, Karenna, Tipper. Everyone was on the phone, on the air. Gore consulted with staff members about his speech for that evening, how he wanted to frame a victory and how he would handle a defeat. He asked for a section about his father, how he had lost Tennessee but had never stopped loving it and calling it home, and how sometimes it was better to lose because you stood up for what you believed in.
Shortly before 8 p.m. the networks announced that Gore had taken Florida. The battleground states of Michigan and Pennsylvania soon fell as well, and every anchor became a math teacher, showing how it was increasingly difficult for Bush to find the 270 electoral votes he would need to win. All the networks were reading the data from the Voter News Service consortium and grinding it through their own analysis to try to be the first to declare a winner. Little things can make a difference when every minute counts, and what they didn't know was that VNS had a bad sample in Tampa, some faulty data in Jacksonville. Plus there were voters in Palm Beach who told the exit pollers that they had voted for Gore, when in fact their vote had been registered for Buchanan.
Bush had hoped to have a special dinner with his wife and parents and brother Jeb, cherishing the knowledge that the exit polls were telling them everything they wanted to hear. But Bush was already tense when he got to the Shoreline Grill early that evening. As the family members made their way under dim lights to the restaurant, Bush's shoulders were more hunched than usual, his father looked as if he were suffering from an ulcer, and Barbara wore a smile as tight as a fist. By then they knew the race was much closer than Rove had promised it would be. But it wasn't until the news that Gore had captured Florida appeared on a TV screen in the restaurant that the mood turned from grim to black.