As the November 2026 presidential election approaches, the U.S. prepares — from the president’s political actions promising to impact (and influence) the election, across to big money, polling, campaigning and media… The upcoming election will be fateful and historic
Here, StratDem looks back and looks forward…
A 2000 Presidential Election That Shook a Nation
Recalled as a Fateful 2026 U.S. Presidential Election Approaches
Revisiting a History-Making Vote, Voting Lists, Candidates, and Courts
By SJ Schmidt, Editor, Strategic Demands
August 1, 2026
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November’s 2026 U.S. midterm elections will determine your future and future of the nation.
Is a drama-laden political shift coming, or will post-election headlines again be dominated by Trump and MAGA? The president appears uncertain about the outcome, given his recent efforts to use electioneering to improve his chances. Time will tell, but this election is unquestionably a critical turning point. To understand what may be ahead, we should look back to another high-stakes contest: the 2000 presidential election that shook the nation.
The election of 2000 brought an end to the Clinton years. The vice president, Al Gore, was nominated by the Democratic party to step up and the Republicans chose George W. Bush to run, as the son of a former president, and brother of Jeb Bush, Governor from Texas. All hell was about to break out, but we didn’t know it until it was upon us.
A new century and millennium were dawning. Much seemed possible back in those days. Later it was said that the 2000 election changed everything. It clearly changed the way the country saw the state of Florida, and how the power of the U.S. Supreme Court came to be defined. A 5–4 Court decision on December 12, 2000 by the conservative justices gave the state’s vote and national electoral vote to Bush.
The Supreme Court decision was preceded by political maneuvers, a series of charged actions including purged voting lists, candidates who misled with their campaigns, ‘stop the vote’ post-campaign ‘dirty politics’, and a stoppage that brought an ultimate US Supreme Court ruling, all of which combined to change U.S. history in monumental and lasting ways.
This 2000 election now once again looms in the rear-view mirror providing memories that could act, and will act one way or the other, to change U.S. history in monumental, lasting ways. Let’s consider what is going on with election law legislation in the form of new Congressional legislation that is aggressively being pushed by the U.S. president. Its melodic title is the SAVE Act. Its provisions bring us directly to the election of 2000.
Quick Comparison between the 2000 and 2026 Elections
Let’s return to the Florida of 2000 with a pre-election voter list being questioned and challenged.
Let’s drill down into some of this history. It begins with a demand to ‘clean the lists’, to scrub database lists, voter rolls of registered voters who, in this case, were accused of criminal backgrounds and thus ineligible to vote. It sounded on face value a reasonable request.
Here’s how one independent analyst later described how the database list ‘cleaning’: ‘’(Before) the 2000 election… Florida Governor Jeb Bush’s Secretary of State Katherine Harris requested a list of Texas felons from Texas Governor George W. Bush’s Department of Corrections. She then ran that list of Texas felons — more than 50% Hispanic and Black — against the Florida voter roll list. The result… was that in the months just before the 2000 election around 80,000 mostly-Black and Hispanic fully-legally-eligible but also mostly Democratic-voting Floridians were purged from that state’s voting rolls. Thousands of Black and brown voters whose first and last names just happened to be the same as Texas felons; lots of Jose Garcias and James Browns.’’
The list cleaning turned out to be ‘problematic’, as it later became evident and also turned out to be a reason for Gore losing to Bush in the first count after election day.
The question of voter disenfranchisement being tied to vote outcomes has loomed large in the South particularly ever since the Civil War and now is looming across the country, as there have been many (unproven) claims of non-citizens voting illegally. Although multiple studies over years have shown that non-citizen voting is minimal and far from determining outcomes of elections, the issue of illegal voting has remained top of the political hit list.
Though unproven, constant repetition of claimed voter fraud has led over years directly to voter disenfranchisement efforts, particularly in the form of the voter list filtering and ‘cleaning’.
The 2000 experience in Florida is back in 2026, and now with extended database capabilities, from access to purging techniques.
In 2026, database voter lists of all states are being demanded to be questioned by the president’s officials. With an executive order and power of the presidential pulpit, the president is escalating demands that states provide voter information to the U.S. Department of Justice, or else face criminal charges. This past week, the president and his representatives threatened to have state officials criminally indicted with felonies, if they do not turn over their voter lists/rolls, i.e. voter information to the president’s officials.
Although the state-based election system is supported in the U.S.Constitution, the president’s proposed changes to state election laws and administration are profoundly problematic in law.
The legislation and executive actions, as reported by the Associated Press here, here, and here, deliver news of the president’s proposals as well as well as analysis reminding us how elections can be impacted. History demonstrates how election outcomes can be swayed outside the voting booth, that is, in how voters are registered, how registered voter lists can be scrubbed, and purged prior to elections, and how candidate actions and court decisions can determine ultimate outcomes.
Today, we need to recall past experiences as we consider the current president’s proposals and election actions that have encountered deep push back across the country.
The mid-term election in 2026 can be seen as having multiple similarities to the 2000 election. Multiple questions remain regarding how the 2000 presidential election was determined and, as history can agree, election integrity is at stake.
The issue of election integrity is at hand and carries deep importance for the working of our democratic republic. Election law, voting rights, and the integrity of elections are essential for public trust and for vital democratic institutions.
Turning points in the 2000 Bush v. Gore U.S. presidential election result
How were Voting/Registered Voter Lists ‘Cleaned’ in Florida before the 2000 Election? The issues of concern here include how cleaning/filtering purging of names on voting lists are designed and developed. What are the criteria, the systems in place for targeting and removing voters, and what are the systems available to prevent errors and fix errors when they occur?
It is essential to understand digital choices to be made by companies chosen to do database accessing, filtering, and scrubbing of voting lists. Let’s consider how Florida proceeded in 2000.
The Florida ‘Felon Disenfranchisement’ Project
The Database Technologies (DBT), Jeb Bush-Katherine Harris story
https://sourcewatch.org/index.php/Voter_roll_purge_in_the_2000_Florida_election
https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/vote2000/report/exesum.htm
https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/research-reports/voter-purges-report
Click on the above links, which present a case for felon disenfranchisement (denial of voting rights), which went far afield.
The state and DBT tech applied filters to voter lists were subsequently found to be deeply flawed and acted to prevent legitimate voters from voting.
The numbers disenfranchised (over 50,000) add up to far more than the 500+ vote margin difference recorded in the first vote total outcome between George Bush and Al Gore.
The Ralph Nader ‘Spoiler’ Story
In the 2000 presidential election, of the 5,963,110 votes cast in Florida, George Bush received 2,912,790, and Al Gore 2,912,253 votes, giving Bush a 537-vote margin of victory. Ralph Nader, in the original Florida vote count, received 97,488 votes.
Did Nader ‘spoil’ the outcome? Time to revisit the Nader story: told from a Nader campaign insider point of view.
Ralph Nader, the Green Party nominee for president in 2000, had pledged before his selection as the nominee to 1) meet with the Democratic party candidate, Al Gore, to discuss the Green Party platform positions that aligned with the Gore campaign platform. This agreement by Nader also included a pledge not to campaign actively as a ‘spoiler’ in ‘swing states’ where polling indicated were close elections.
In the fall of 2000, Florida’s polling indicated it was a close election as the November 2000 vote approached. Nader and Gore had chosen not to meet with each other before the election date, breaking both men’s pledge, and Nader then chose to campaign in Florida during the last weeks of the campaign.
The Nader decisions, and Gore decisions, both can be seen as having had measurable impacts on the outcome of the vote.
The Al Gore story
Did Al Gore’s inability to win his ‘home state’ of Tennessee act to turn the outcome of the election?
Yes
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Gore_2000_presidential_campaign
Did Al Gore’s choice of Joe Lieberman impact the vote and election outcome?
Yes
The ‘centrism’ of Liberman, and positions taken by the first Jewish vice-presidential nominee, contrasted with the stance of Gore on multiple policies. Significant pre election polling indicated that Lieberman as VP would have no effect on their vote and that Lieberman did not add blocs of voters to the Gore campaign.
https://www.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/08/07/cnn.poll/index.html
Did Al Gore’s concession, after the presidential vote was challenged and went to a recount in Florida, have an impact on the outcome?
Yes.
Al Gore conceded the presidency to George Bush after a 36-day Florida recount was proceeding and the US Supreme Court had interceded.
Studies also show that Gore likely would have won a statewide recount of all undervotes and overvotes, which are ballots that included multiple votes for president and were thus not counted at all. However, his legal team never pursued this action.
The studies also support the belief that more voters went to the polls in Florida on Election Day intending to vote for Gore than for Bush.
The Florida Ballots Project
The players: A national media consortium – composed of CNN, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Tribune Company, The Washington Post, The Associated Press, The St. Petersburg Times, and The Palm Beach Post – paid for the National Opinion Research Center, or NORC, at the University of Chicago to review 175,010 disputed Florida ballots – 61,190 undervotes and 113,820 overvotes.
How it worked: NORC, a highly respected data and research organization, conducted the counting of ballots. Their goal was not to determine a winner, but to “examine the ballots to assess the relative reliability of the three major types of ballot systems used in Florida.” Carefully vetted coders reviewed the ballots, and NORC’s raw data is available to the public online.
The study, released in November 2001, took place over 10 months and cost nearly $1 million. The Washington Post explained, “153 field workers spent 6,500 hours describing every dimple, chad, erasure and relevant marking. Typists entered 17.5 million pieces of information into Chicago computers.”
The different media organizations applied NORC’s raw data to several distinct recount scenarios.
The results: The two major conclusions here are that Gore likely would have won a hand recount of the statewide overvotes and undervotes – which he never requested – while Bush likely would have won the hand recount of undervotes ordered by the Florida Supreme Court, although by a smaller margin than the certified 537 vote difference.
A sampling of headlines from the time include “Florida Recounts Would Have Favored Bush, But Study Finds Gore Might Have Won Statewide Tally of all Uncounted Ballots,” from The Washington Post, and “Study of Disputed Ballots Finds Justices Did Not Cast the Deciding Vote,” from The New York Times.
The ‘Stop the Vote’ Republican protests
What effect on the 2000 presidential vote did the so-called ‘Brooks Brothers riot’ have on the vote outcome? What ongoing effect did the ‘Stop the Vote’ riot, as it was called at the time, have on political strategies. It can be said and convincingly argued that the perceived ‘success’ of the ‘Stop the Vote’ in 2000 led directly to the ‘Stop the Steal’ calls in prior to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2020.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brooks_Brothers_riot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/January_6_United_States_Capitol_attack
‘It’s insanity!’: How the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot’ killed the 2000 recount in Miami…
On election night two weeks earlier, news anchors had awarded the Sunshine State’s crucial 25 electoral college votes to Al Gore, then to George W. Bush, before finally admitting that Florida was simply too close to call.
Gore had phoned Bush to concede only to recant as the gap between the candidates shrank to several hundred votes in the state, with thousands of “hanging chads” and “pregnant chads” and “dimpled chads” and “pimpled chads” to contest.
The ‘Stop the Vote’ episode played a key role in clinching the election for Bush.
“We all had Brooks Brothers blazers.” The word in Miami, as violence occurred, was these were folks from other states. One photo of protesters inside the election office shows almost a dozen out-of-state GOP operatives, shouting and waving their arms.
Perhaps the most famous operative on the scene was Nixon’s “dirty trickster” himself: Roger Stone.
In a 2008 New Yorker profile, Stone claimed he had been recruited by none other than James Baker III, the former secretary of state leading the Bush recount team, and that it was Stone’s idea to court protesters via Cuban radio.
“The idea we were putting out there was that this was a left-wing power grab by Gore, the same way Fidel Castro did it in Cuba,” he told Jeffrey Toobin. “We were very explicitly drawing that analogy.”
Stone claimed he ran the Brooks Brothers riot from a Winnebago near the election office. “I set up my command center there,” he told Toobin. “I had walkie-talkies and cell phones, and I was in touch with our people in the building. Our whole idea was to shut the recount down. That was why we were there. We had the frequency to the Democrats’ walkie-talkies and were listening to their communications, but they were so disorganized that we didn’t learn much that was useful.”
Accounts of the planning and execution of the ‘Stop the Vote’ action in Florida being a prequel of a sorts. The ‘Stop the Vote’ demonstrations were described as preventing a ‘stolen election’ per Roger Stone, the ‘self-described GOP hitman’ and Matt Schlapp, who went on to a notable Republican party career. Years later, in 2020, Roger Stone played a prominent role in the ‘Stop the Steal’ riot in Washington DC.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exactly-roger-stones-role-capitol-090116766.html
Did the Supreme Court go too far in deciding the 2000 election and put George Bush in office, with all the subsequent outcomes in US politics, initiation of multi-year war in the Middle East/Near East and beyond…
A review of the Supreme Court decision that put George Bush in office (via Wikipedia):
Bush v. Gore, 531 U.S. 98 (2000), is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court on December 12, 2000, that settled a recount dispute in Florida’s 2000 presidential election between George W. Bush and Al Gore. On December 8, 2000, the Florida Supreme Court had ordered a statewide recount of all undervotes, over 61,000 ballots that the vote tabulation machines had missed. The Bush campaign immediately asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stay the decision and halt the recount. The U.S. Supreme Court granted certiorari and, in a 5–4 per curiam decision on December 12, 2000, ordered on equal protection grounds that the recount be stopped. Specifically, it held that Florida’s counties’ varying standards for discerning voter intent violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause of the U.S. Constitution. The case had also been argued on Article II jurisdictional grounds, which found favor only with Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and William Rehnquist.
The majority held that no alternative method could be established within the discretionary December 12 “safe harbor” deadline set by Title 3 of the United States Code (3 U.S.C.), § 5, which the Florida Supreme Court had said the Florida Legislature intended to meet. The Court, holding that not meeting the “safe harbor” deadline would violate the Florida Election Code, rejected an extension of the deadline proposed by Justices Stephen Breyer and David Souter to allow the Florida court to complete the recount using a uniform statewide standard. That deadline arrived two hours after the release of the Court’s decision.
The Supreme Court’s decision in Bush v. Gore was among the most controversial in U.S. history, as it allowed Florida Secretary of State (and co-chair of Bush’s Florida campaign) Katherine Harris‘s vote certification to stand, giving Bush Florida’s 25 electoral votes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore
25 Years After Bush v. Gore, Supreme Court and Election Law Still Feels the Fallout
Looking back and looking forward…
The 5–4 decision started a long slide in public approval of the court …
The 5-4 decision started a long slide in public approval for the court, accentuated by a widening partisan gap.
In sum, we must ask the question of questions.
Will the 2026 election shake the nation, as the 2000 election shook the nation?
Will the outcome be a shock, a foreboding shock, and ongoing serious threat to the Republic…
Place your bets, are you ready?
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