Why did George W Bush win the 2000 Presidential Election?
In the closest Presidential election since John Kennedy edged out Richard Nixon in 1960, George Walker Bush beat Al Gore in a hotly disputed race where the winner was effectively decided by the Supreme Court. Bush took advantage of Al Gore’s crucial errors of judgement, and used some clever politics to win an election he really lost.
The fact remained after the legal wrangling and the disputes over ballot papers, that George Bush had gained almost half a million less popular votes than Al Gore. The vagaries of the Electoral College system meant that he became President after winning more “points” from each state than Gore. The “winner takes all” system means that a candidate will gain all Electoral College votes that a state has to offer regardless of whether he wins by one vote or one hundred thousand votes. The last time this happened in an election was in 1888 when Grover Cleveland won without the popular vote. The key electoral state of Florida was the clinching factor in 2000, where George Bush was declared the winner by 537 votes. But later it emerged that there had been problems with casting votes in Palm Beach. Palm Beach, an area with a high percentage of Jewish retir
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