A nation on edge, as race remains in limbo

Early Wednesday morning the presidential race, plagued all night by close calls and missed calls, stood at a stand still.

The race came down to Florida, where a margin of just more than 500 voters appeared to turn the Sunshine State to Bush.

Pundits were reexamining calls they had made earlier in the night, discussing the possibility of a recount and analyzing the slim margins that divided the candidates and decided the election.

Reports surfaced that Gore had called Bush and recanted his earlier concession of the race.

And there was no sign of either of the candidates.

There were more than a few hiccups throughout the night. Near 2 a.m. it appeared Texas Gov. George W. Bush would be the 43rd president of the United States. But a few hours later, Bush staffers were calming the celebration in Austin, saying a party might be premature.

It was not an easy election to watch. For the first time in years, no analyst nor pundit could pick a clear winner even as the states' polls closed one by one. The numbers bounced around all night, just as the polls bounced around all summer and fall in this most expensive presidential race in history.

Early on, however, it looked like Vice President Al Gore might run away with it. In a call that proved far too premature, television networks awarded Florida's coveted 25 electoral votes to the vice president.

Within hours, though, news organizations and their analysts had changed their minds. After receiving frantic calls from the Bush campaign disputing their early verdict on Florida's results, the networks pulled the state out of the Gore column and back into the "too close to call" category, where it loomed large until the early hours of the morning.

"It was certainly quite a flip when they took Florida back in the undecided column," University politics professor and presidential scholar Fred Greenstein said last night. "I can't remember a point where a state was moved back. They've been doing these calls as far back as 1960."

While Florida remained on the horizon after midnight, Bush and Gore stayed neck-and-neck. Each time the networks gave Bush a state, they followed quickly by adding electoral votes to the Gore column. As late as 1 a.m., the candidates were locked in a tie at 242 electoral votes.

Meanwhile, controversy reigned in Missouri, where a circuit court extended polling hours in St. Louis to accommodate long lines of waiting voters. When new arrivals began to join the lines, however, enraged Republicans went to a federal judge, who refused to reverse the ruling, and then to a three-judge appeals court panel, which ordered the polls immediately closed.

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As the St. Louis case suggests, turnout seemed high nationwide in an election that many had earlier cited as invoking political apathy. The Associated Press reported that more voters came out this year than in 1996, but fewer than in 1992. Estimates put turnout at approximately 52 percent of adults, with many states seeing long lines and large crowds at polling places.

Large get-out-the-vote efforts by both campaigns probably drove up turnout in several battleground states.

High turnout is often an advantage for Democratic candidates, but the edge was not enough for Gore to capture the presidency.

One thorn in Gore's side was Green Party nominee Ralph Nader '55. In several key states, Nader drew more than enough votes to account for the difference between Bush and Gore. In particular, exit polls in Florida suggest that Nader's candidacy was an important factor in what will turn out to be the decisive state in this election.

Despite his success at the polls, it did not appear Wednesday morning that Nader would reach the 5 percent of the national vote that he needed for the Green Party to get federal campaign funding in the next election.