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Down in Austin, Rove and polling analyst Matthew Dowd were in their adjacent offices, glued to their computers and telephones. "They were like mad scientists with those calculators," says media strategist Mark McKinnon. "They were punching them so hard and so fast, it sounded like a machine gun." At various points one of them would shout that they were a thousand votes down or a thousand votes up. "We lived and died a thousand times tonight," said McKinnon. Spectators hovered outside Rove's office, looking in through a glass window. "We were all standing around like expectant fathers," says Jim Ferguson, a member of Bush's outside ad team. "We were all looking through the window hoping the baby wouldn't come out with three heads." On several occasions, Rove ordered people to stand back from his door, as though his office--or he himself--were a victim of exhaustion, collapsed on the ground on a hot day and in need of both air and medical attention.
At 9:55 p.m., CNN took Florida back from Gore, and the other networks shortly followed, declaring it too close to call. The lobby of the Nashville Loews was suddenly empty. Campaign chairman Bill Daley was on his cell phone, and he looked sick.
For his part, Bush "was like a prizefighter pulling himself off the mat," said a source who was in frequent touch with those at the mansion. Bush kept calling Rove at the headquarters, demanding new information. "How's it look?" he would ask. "Anything new?" By 1:30 most states had tumbled one way or the other, and both men had a total of 242 electoral votes. The counts were unimaginably, unbearably close. Florida was still undecided, but by 1 a.m. the Bush camp had more than a 200,000-vote cushion. Bush staff members knew Dade and Broward counties still hadn't reported, but their models told them they had a lead that was insurmountable. The margin would shrink, but then "it was just a matter of hanging on to the cliff by our fingers," remembers McKinnon. The problem is "each finger kept getting stepped on." He and Ferguson nipped out for a little tequila to calm their nerves. Rove, who was wearing his phone headset all evening, was calling a statistics professor in Texas for his analysis of how the numbers were running, and then yelling, "Get me Dowd!" to his secretary, whereupon Dowd would turn up with the latest news he had gathered from surfing the Web.
Around 2 a.m., Rove called the Governor. "Mr. President," he began, and then he told him what they'd just learned. They had won enough votes in Florida's Hillsborough County to win the state--and the whole prize. Ninety-eight percent of the precincts were in, and they were ahead by more than 50,000 votes.
At 2:15 a.m. the networks gift-wrapped Florida once more and this time handed it to Bush. "Everyone went insane, screaming and crying," McKinnon says. Virtually the entire staff in the headquarters left the building, forming a dance line up Congress Avenue along the eight blocks to the celebration site. The colored lights were flashing on the capitol; it's a miracle no one was electrocuted in the sweeping rain. At the rally, the television screens switched to a video of Bush on the trail, at home and on the ranch, all to the tune of Signed, Sealed, Delivered.