When Al Gore set aside partisan rancour 25 years ago

Twenty-five years ago this month, the words of one good man uneasily brought us all together. Al Gore did not have to concede Florida and with it, the 2000 presidential election and America’s future. With just 537 Florida votes separating him and George W. Bush, the US Supreme Court ordered an end to the recount of thousands of Florida votes. As a result, Gore could not know for certain that he had lost, and Bush could not know for certain he had won, according to the Tribune News Service.

A court decided the winner. Gore and Joe Lieberman could have kept fighting, and Bush’s camp could have sold a lot more “Sore Loserman” T-shirts (they’re still on eBay, for $12). Gore could have rallied angry supporters, feeding their outrage, especially after ballot studies that indicated Gore could have won. He could have challenged the legitimacy of GOP wins at every turn. He could have endlessly (and justifiably) hammered home the message that five Supreme Court justices, not the people, picked a president.

It would have been right for the man, but wrong for the country. Gore conceded. “What remains of partisan rancour must now be put aside,” he said. America was bigger than any political party, he reminded us.

Gore’s graceful concession set a new bar for presidential patriotism. Trump and his sycophantic Attorney General Pam Bondi marked the historic anniversary by suing to seize the ballots in Georgia’s 2020 election that Trump still won’t admit that he lost, five years later. Never mind that a hand recount confirmed that Trump lost Georgia to Joe Biden, or that the state’s Republican leaders confirmed he lost. Georgia is where Trump begged the Republican secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes to keep him in the White House. Atlanta’s Fulton County is where Trump was booked into jail after being charged with criminal interference for doing so.

Trump did win Georgia in 2024 when he secured a second term as president. He won at the US Supreme Court that year too. Having already discredited itself with its Bush v. Gore decision, the Supreme Court disgraced itself by ruling that the president can commit crimes with impunity. The criminal cases against him, including subverting the 2020 election, were dropped.

But Trump, the anti-Gore, can’t let the memory of losing 2020 go. The public should never forget Trump’s recalcitrance because it illustrates the extreme steps he will take to stay in power. This month also marks the anniversary of a 2019 Oval Office meeting between Trump and some of his most extreme advisers as they mulled over having the military march into cities, seize voting machines for “fraud,” and suspend the orderly transfer of power.

As he fights an old political war, Trump is laying the groundwork for discrediting future elections by falsely claiming that vote-by-mail ballots are rife with fraud. Any Justice Department finding of problems with the 2020 Georgia ballots will only add to Trump’s assertion, but that’s why any finding should be greeted with skepticism: Bondi’s DOJ has defied judges, misled grand juries and violated court orders on Trump’s behalf.

Does anybody seriously trust this DOJ to impartially sift through votes, when finding some wrong thing — anything — is central to easing Trump’s 2020 humiliation? The 2020 election also still reverberates in Florida, one of multiple red states that passed anti-voting laws after Biden’s victory. Republicans made it harder to help Floridians register to vote, harder to get a mail-in ballot and harder to get that ballot counted.

It’s tempting to look back at Gore’s gallantry and wish he had played rougher, especially when 25 years later it is increasingly difficult to vote at all and the principles he personified bend under the weight of an increasingly imperial presidency.