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| A History of U.S. Presidential Primaries: 2000 By Bob Benenson, CQ Politics Editor When it comes to electing the president, the modern campaign era has its roots 95 years ago when North Dakota held the first presidential primary. CQ Politics looks back and charts for you, election by election, how this process grew over the last century into the long and sprawling campaigns that have become part of the political landscape. This seventh in a series covers 2000. The front-loading of the primary and caucus calendar accelerated in 2000. The Iowa caucuses were held on Jan. 24, followed by the New Hampshire primary on Feb. 1. Republicans held February primaries in six other states: Delaware on Feb. 8; South Carolina on Feb. 19; Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 22 and Virginia and Washington on Feb. 29. Democrats tried to restrain the rush to the front by setting March 7 as the first date on which all states other than Iowa and New Hampshire could hold official delegate-selection events. But 11 states responded by crowding their primaries for both the Democrats and Republicans onto March 7, a regionally diverse grouping that included populous California, New York and Ohio, with their large blocs of delegates. Six Southern states joined up on March 14 to try to replicate the Super Tuesday of 1988 — but even this early date put those states in the position of just affirming the candidate choices that had already been set by the earlier-voting states. Once again, the front-loaded schedule worked greatly to the benefit of the front-running candidates: Al Gore, the two-term vice president under Bill Clinton, on the Democratic side, and second-term Texas Republican Gov. George W. Bush , a son of former President George Bush. Both candidates faced some early bumps but broke away from their competition by winning big on those multi-state primary days. Both candidates had significant assets entering the race. Running as the virtual incumbent, Gore enjoyed the upside of the Clinton administration’s two terms: The economy was strong, and though Clinton had deployed troops to intervene in the ethnic conflicts in the former Yugoslavia, the nation generally felt at peace in the post-Cold War world. Bush, after spending most of his adult life in business ventures, had a meteoric political rise, upsetting Texas Democratic Gov. Ann Richards in a hard-fought 1994 race and then winning re-election in a landslide in 1998. He reached out to centrist voters by calling himself a “compassionate conservative” and the equally alliterative if more awkward “reformer with results.” Overall though, he crafted a more ideologically conservative image than his father had and showed a better common touch. Bush quickly galvanized support from many Republicans across the nation who were determined to recapture the White House; he also tapped the large network of connections built by his father to raise unprecedented amounts of campaign money. But both candidates had serious flaws, too. Gore’s desire to associate with the popular parts of Clinton’s legacy was tempered by concerns about being linked to the scandals that had plagued the president — most prominently Clinton’s extramarital affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky that led to his 1998 impeachment by the Republican-controlled House on charges of lying to a grand jury (and his subsequent acquittal by the GOP-run Senate). Gore had his own image problems, as he was widely portrayed as a stiff and somewhat pompous personality. Bush, meanwhile, was cast as not too bright and lacking in national political experience, especially in international affairs. These doubts about the front-runners stoked the campaigns of challengers who ran as political outsiders: former New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley, Gore’s only opponent in the Democratic primaries, and Arizona Sen. John McCain , a Republican with something of a maverick image who blew past other contenders to turn the GOP campaign into a one-on-one showdown. McCain’s hopes for winning the nomination were based on three major factors: the former Navy pilot’s renown as a heroic prisoner of war during the Vietnam conflict; his willingness, even with his overall strongly conservative voting record, to take outspoken positions apart from Republican orthodoxy (including his long-running effort to overhaul the campaign finance system); and his calls for cutting what he called wasteful pork-barrel federal spending. That last position led McCain to take a risky strategic gamble by skipping the Iowa caucuses, largely because he had denounced federal subsidies, popular in the state, for the production of corn-based ethanol as an alternative fuel. But the caucuses nonetheless punctured the air of inevitability that Bush had sought to build around his campaign for the nomination: He received a modest 41 percent to second-time candidate Forbes’ 30 percent. McCain, meanwhile, was enjoying a boomlet in the press as he scoured New Hampshire on a campaign bus he labeled the “Straight Talk Express.” McCain then stunned Bush and many political pundits by defeating the putative front-runner by 49 percent to 30 percent in New Hampshire — a state where he benefited greatly from the fact that independent voters were allowed to participate in the Republican primary. The upset produced an intense, though brief, fight for political survival between the two candidates. Bush regained his footing somewhat by winning a week later in Delaware, with 51 percent to McCain’s 25 percent. But the focus of the campaign shifted to the Feb. 19 contest in South Carolina, where momentum would take a decisive turn. Again distancing himself from his father’s approach by voicing more assertively conservative views on social issues such as abortion, Bush — a self-described born-again Christian — built support with South Carolina’s significant constituency of religious conservatives. The Bush camp, orchestrated by longtime Bush consultant Karl Rove, ran a hard-hitting campaign questioning McCain’s conservative credentials. McCain accused the Bush campaign of being behind dirty tricks, including rumors circulated in the state that McCain had an illegitimate child by an African-American woman and was mentally instable because of traumas suffered as a POW. But Bush prevailed by 53 percent to 42 percent in the primary known as the gateway to the South. McCain would have one more heyday on Feb. 22, defeating Bush by 51 percent to 43 percent in Michigan, again with the help of independents voting in the Republican primary, and his expected home-state landslide in Arizona, where he took 60 percent. But Bush won the Feb. 29 contests in Virginia and Washington — which in turn set up his decisive near-sweep of the crowded March 7 primary schedule, in which his huge advantage in financial resources really kicked in. Bush won seven of the 11 contests held that day, including those held in the biggest states. Though McCain carried the four New England states voting that day, it was clear that Bush had unstoppable momentum — a sense confirmed the next week when he dominated the six Southern state primaries. The competition for the Democratic nomination was short-lived. Though Bradley ran a competitive New Hampshire primary campaign, he failed to win any contests and was forced out of the race by early March. Bradley sought support as a more liberal alternative to Gore, playing off the Clinton administration’s stated effort to move the Democratic Party closer to the political center — a strategy seen in the welfare overhaul compromise between Clinton and the Republican-controlled Congress in 1996. Bradley’s calls for overhauling the campaign finance system echoed a series of fundraising scandals, mostly related to the Democrats’ 1996 re-election campaign, that had tarnished both Clinton and Gore. Bradley also sought to draw support from some environmentalists who were dismayed with Gore, who had been one of the first major American figures to draw attention to global climate change but did not emphasize the issue during his presidential bid. Bradley, a Princeton University graduate and Rhodes scholar, also was acknowledged as highly intelligent, and enjoyed some celebrity as a former basketball star at Princeton and for the NBA’s New York Knicks. But Bradley’s dry style as a candidate failed to light sparks with many Democratic activists, and Democrats’ still-strong job approval ratings for Clinton, even as many disapproved of his personal behavior, carried over to Gore. The vice president trounced Bradley by 63 percent to 35 percent in Iowa, though Bradley was born and raised in neighboring Missouri. The nominating campaign briefly took on some life after Bradley held Gore to a 50 percent to 46 percent win in New Hampshire. But the Republicans’ decisions to move several primaries up into February while the Democrats did not allowed the GOP to dominate attention, and Bradley’s effort to make a case against Gore in the run-up to March 7 was overshadowed by the vitriolic battles between Bush and McCain. Bradley left the race shortly after Gore swept the 11 contests on March 7, most by overwhelming margins. Bush and Gore would go down to the wire in one of the closest and most controversial presidential elections in American history. Although Gore narrowly won the national popular vote, Bush claimed the decisive Electoral College victory by a razor-thin margin. The result hung on an extremely close contest in Florida, where more than a month of recounts, court fights and protests ended with a 5-4 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that effectively clinched the state and the presidential election for Bush. |