The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer

JIM LEHRER: Good evening. I'm Jim Lehrer. On the NewsHour this election night, the latest returns and projections; analysis by Mark Shields and Paul Gigot; perspective from Haynes Johnson, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss and Richard Norton Smith; plus, a look at the press coverage of the campaign.

JIM LEHRER: This was indeed election day in America. Polls have already closed in most of Indiana and Kentucky, and the Associated Press projects Governor Bush the winner over Vice President Gore in both of those states. That gives him a total of 20 electoral votes. Earlier, both men cast their ballots in their home states. Vice President Gore voted in Carthage, Tennessee, and he predicted victory. He spent the remainder of the day at home with his family. Governor Bush voted in Austin, Texas, near the Governor's Mansion. He said he was calm, but his parents were nervous. They planned to join him later. Vice President Gore made his final stop in Tampa, Florida, around dawn today. He told the crowd about a midnight event in Miami's South Beach.

PAUL GIGOT: Just before I went out to make the speech, somebody had one of the television cable networks on, reporting news at the top of the hour. And it was a roundup of the campaign activities. And it said, "at this hour, George W. Bush is asleep, and Al Gore's preparing to speak to 25,000 people in Florida." (Cheers and applause) Well, it's almost 5:30 AM Texas time, and George W. Bush is still asleep, and I'm still speaking to people here in Florida. (Cheers and applause) This is the closest election...this is the closest election in 40 years since the time in 1960 when John Kennedy beat Richard Nixon by a margin of one vote per precinct. I want each of you to get one more vote per precinct in your precinct today.

JIM LEHRER: Governor Bush chose Bentonville, Arkansas, for his final rally last night. He talked about his journey to election day.

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: You know, it didn't seem all that long ago that Laura and I got on an airplane out here and headed up to Iowa and New Hampshire. And here we are, I guess about 17 months later, coming back home. (Cheers and applause) I've got a report from the field. I've got a report from the field. We have just seen thousands of fellow Americans. We've laid the groundwork, and if the people do what I think they're going to do, you're looking at the next President of the United States. (Cheers and applause) All around the country, we've been urging our folks to make sure they don't rest until everybody goes to the polls, but my days of traveling the country, at least for this part of my job, are just finished. I want you to know, my spirits are high. I feel great. (Cheers and applause) We put it all out there. We crossed the finish line in a sprint. And I feel... I can't tell you how good I feel.

JIM LEHRER: All of our program after the News Summary tonight will be devoted to the election. In the non-election day news, the U.S. Supreme Court heard arguments in a major clean-air case. Lawyers for business groups said the Environmental Protection Agency overreached when it set new limits on soot and ozone in 1997. They said it should consider the cost of compliance. But the EPA said it's not required to consider the cost when it sets a pollution standard. The outcome of the case could affect clean-air rules and possibly other regulatory actions. A ruling is expected by July. In the Middle East today, Israel and the Palestinians traded new accusations about violating a six-day-old truce. It has reduced violence, but not ended it. Today, a Palestinian gunman was killed in clashes with Israeli troops. Another Palestinian man died of wounds received last week. Despite the fighting, the Israelis reopened Gaza Airport during daylight hours. One flight took 23 seriously wounded Palestinians to Germany for treatment. In Manchester, England, today, a three-month-old girl was in critical condition after being surgically separated from her Siamese twin sister. The weaker twin died during the 20-hour operation. Their parents objected to the separation on religious grounds, but a British court ordered it to proceed. Doctors said both twins would have died if they'd remained joined. And that's it for the News Summary tonight. Now it's on to our election coverage.

FOCUS - ELECTION 2000

JIM LEHRER: And we begin most appropriately with the two men who have been with us from the beginning of this election year, Shields and Gigot. Syndicated columnist Mark Shields, "Wall Street Journal" columnist Paul Gigot. Okay, Mark. What -- if anything -- does Bush winning Kentucky and Indiana tell us about the big picture?

MARK SHIELDS: Well, it doesn't tell us who the winner is, Jim. It does tell us that Al Gore, like Bill Clinton, his own President, a border state Democrat from Tennessee, is not running as well as Kentucky as Bill Clinton and he did twice in '92 and '96. And the concern the Democrats have expressed is that the Gore campaign, the Gore ticket, has shown a weakness that Democrats hadn't shown in the past in rural areas. And if it's any... Indiana, Charles Manson on the top of the Republican ticket could carry Indiana. Whereas Kentucky is... there's a couple House seats in Kentucky the Democrats had a real shot at, in Northrop and Louisville and Dr. Ernie Fletcher, a freshman Republican. So if George Bush is running well there, it probably helps him.

JIM LEHRER: Do you need to add or subtract, Paul?

PAUL GIGOT: The Kentucky race is the most important one there, and this rural points that Mark makes is I think going to be one of the defining elements of this election.

MARK SHIELDS: May, I think will be one of the defining elements of this election. The rural, urban divide. We really do seem to have something of a polarized electorate along those grounds. And Kentucky is a sign of that. Of course, it's important for... Clinton carried it twice. If Al Gore can't carry it, he also abuts Ohio and Tennessee, two other very important states. So it's a Harbin jury that George Bush will be a lot more competitive than Bob Dole was.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of Harbin jury, what you've all looked at so far in exit polls and reporting, will it be as close as a lot of the polls projected going?

PAUL GIGOT: It looks like it's going to be pretty close, Jim.

JIM LEHRER: A long night, Mark?

MARK SHIELDS: I think so, Jim. What strikes you as you look at the results in this election is how change is the one constant in America. The last time a Bush won the White House, that's only 12 years ago. He carried New Jersey, carried California, carried Illinois, carried Pennsylvania, carried Florida, lost states like West Virginia and Iowa and Wisconsin and Minnesota. If anything, the latter states are up for grabs. George Bush is more than competitive; he has had a lead in those states. And in the earlier states that his father carried in 1988, that's where the Democrats are banking on, especially that golden triangle of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, which are crucial and central to Al Gore's hopes.

JIM LEHRER: Things just aren't as predictable as they once were.

PAUL GIGOT: We're a changing country. People move. It's amazing. I mean, you've got -- Florida is a very different state now than it was in 1988. A lot of people who used to live in Michigan and Wisconsin now moving down to Florida. It's much less like Alabama and it's much more like Michigan or even Pennsylvania -- a suburban state.

JIM LEHRER: Speaking of those three states, those are the early ones to watch, are they not? They're all Eastern Time zone. We could know them fairly soon.

PAUL GIGOT: Three very important ones.

JIM LEHRER: Florida, Michigan, and Pennsylvania.

PAUL GIGOT: And they're large states. I think they're very significant. Florida and Pennsylvania in particular because they have heavy senior populations. People know that about Florida. Less well known is that Pennsylvania is the second most senior state in the country. And it will be a test, I think, of whether Al Gore's finish on Social Security really struck home.

JIM LEHRER: Mark, one thing to remember as we go into this tonight, after all these months, and we just heard George W. Bush say, "17 months ago." I mean, Al Gore began at the same time, probably even earlier. And one of them was going to lose tonight. Losers don't do well in American politics afterward, do they?

MARK SHIELDS: No, losing is the only sin in American politics, Jim. I was thinking, it's the first line in everyone's obituary, ran for President and lost in whatever year. And you think particularly - I remember when Fritz Mondale, Walter Mondale, vice president, senator from Minnesota, distinguished public career, ran against Ronald Reagan in 1984 and got buried. Two weeks before that election he called on one of oldest and most trusted political friends and said, "don't let me lose Minnesota, whatever you do." And they devoted time, effort, energy and resources to save him from that indignity and that humiliation of losing his home state. But the thing about it, after that defeat, like two years after the defeat, Fritz Mondale ran - George McGovern had lost in 1972, and Mondale had lost 49 states. The story goes, from both of them, Mondale said to McGovern, "tell me, George, when does it stop hurting? " And George McGovern answered, "I'll let you know." That's how painful it is.

JIM LEHRER: Looking at this race specifically, Paul, do you believe that if... one of them is going to lose. Do they both face the same kind of fate, who is George Bush, who is Al Gore, if they in fact lose?

PAUL GIGOT: It used to be you could lose and run again. Tom Dewey did it. Adlai Stevenson did it.

JIM LEHRER: Richard Nixon.

PAUL GIGOT: In the media age, the television age and with our elongated process, now 17 months, it's a lot harder, because we really do pick through the entrails, no question about it, of your life and everything. If Al Gore loses, this is his chance, and I think that he does... he will not have another chance. If George W. Bush loses, you could see somehow that he might be able to be competitive again because by and large I think Republicans feel he's run a good campaign - that it's been a tough case to make for change with this good economy. But even at that, I don't know. It would be difficult.

JIM LEHRER: In a word?

MARK SHIELDS: I don't think so, Jim, because the people who survive a defeat like that are Reagan, a leader of a movement. I mean, Ronald Reagan ran three times, don't forget that. He ran in '68 for the nomination, didn't get it, ran in '76 for the nomination and didn't get it -- finally won in 1980. But he stayed alive because he was the leader of the movement in that party. There were true believers. There are very few true believers zealots tonight, for either George Bush and Al Gore. There's fans and supporters, but very few people say, "he's got to keep goin'.

JIM LEHRER: All right, gentlemen. I've said it to you many times before, but I really mean it tonight: Don't go away.

FOCUS - READING THE POLLS

JIM LEHRER: A look at the final polls today and to Ray Suarez.

RAY SUAREZ: We get that assessment from two pollsters. Republican Bill McInturff, who worked on Senator John McCain's presidential bid; and Democrat Sam Popkin, who worked with the Gore campaign. He teaches political science at the University of California, San Diego. Well, gentlemen, you've both been dipping into a vast river of intelligence all day. The polls are still open in almost all of the United States, but what can you tell us so far about the size and shape of the electorate? Bill?

BILL McINTURFF: Well, I think we're going to have higher turnout than 1996. It's a much closer election. It captured people's imaginations. I think Ralph Nader will contribute to higher turnout. And I think the other thing that's going to be true is the intensity among the Republican base. They've been waiting ever since Monica Lewinsky to kind of clean out the White House -- and amongst, as Paul mentioned, rural voters. I think the National Rifle Association and the work they've done in rural America is going to be critical to the margins tonight, if George Bush does very, very well in some of these states.

SAMUEL POPKIN: I think without a doubt you might call the venison belt where the election is going to be decided, the states that are often heavily Democratic on the Great Lakes, but where very large numbers of union men, for example, like to go hunting. The question is, do they want to lose their gun or their pension? And I mean there's the two scares, and I think all year it's been clear that over the last eight years, the ground has shifted both on guns, as Bill pointed out, and also on choice. You know, the country is pro-choice 2-1, but when it comes to the battles today over partial-birth abortion, the country is almost evenly divided. So a lot of the easy rally cries the Democrats had for a while are a little bit spent, and it will be very interesting to see how this comes out in the exit poll.

RAY SUAREZ: Along with hunters and union men, some of the targeted votes included Latino, blacks, seniors. A lot of places on the East Coast have an awful lot of those citizens. How was the turnout effort? Did it accomplish much in those categories?

BILL McINTURFF: Well, that's of course the key to this election, which is the percent of African-American turnout in most key states. I only have a handful of states where we're hearing reports from the ground. What we're hearing is high turnout, I mean high turnout everywhere, but I think that the... I think what we're hearing is in Central Pennsylvania and in rural West Virginia and through the, you know, the rural parts of Michigan, the turnout there is very, very high, and it's dwarfing the increased turnout in the urban areas. And I think that augers well for Republican success this evening.

SAMUEL POPKIN: I think another factor that hasn't been mentioned much in this cycle is there's been a real change in the last eight years in the nature of the senior citizen vote in this country. I mean, very frankly, the Roosevelt seniors are almost gone, and the Reagan and Nixon seniors are a much more affluent bunch. So they're much more evenly divided between the parties. There are a lot of states where Al Gore would win in a landslide if we took away the vote at age 60.

BILL McINTURFF: I think what you're seeing is the Democrats ran their character scare campaign on Social Security. They tried to run on prescription drugs. And I think what you're going to see tonight is those things did not quite stick; that amongst people over 60, we're going to see a very, very close election, and we're going to see an election where especially prescription drugs did not move and did not cut the way the Democrats expected with the senior votes. And that's going to, again, I think put Governor Bush in a position to be very, very competitive this evening.

RAY SUAREZ: A large number of states are recording they got record number of absentee ballot requests, Florida, California, Nevada, Tennessee; huge mail-in votes in Washington and Oregon. As pollsters, how do you account for those?

SAMUEL POPKIN: Well, it's... I've helped work on the polling in Washington and Oregon, and even more surreal is to be polling when 20 percent of the people in your sample have already voted. And you're asking questions to establish the boundaries and the balance in the electorate. There are already people who have turned in their ballots. So you now have a very different party organization. You have get out the mail. And you keep track of whose ballot has been reached. And I think almost there's an incentive for people to vote early so they won't get bothered anymore.

BILL McINTURFF: I think what the absentee ballots tell you, one, it's an intensity factors for election turnout going up, but, number two, it's a money issue. Both parties have spent enormous sums of money on these kind of voter programs. But absentee ballots are going to be important for one other reason. We're going to have states that are very, very close, like Florida, like Pennsylvania, but in Florida, we already know and in the Republican Party, we have 110,000 more absentee ballots from Republicans than Democrats. And given that I think Governor Bush will be running at 90 percent of the Republican vote, that's an enormous margin. Tonight if we see in the exit polls in Florida a very close race or we see the votes being counted today that it's very close, we're going to find there are some Republican cushions in absentee ballots in Pennsylvania and in Michigan and in Florida, because of the enormous efforts by these state parties, especially in Florida, where I believe actually we have the best party operation in the country that has banked those extra votes before tonight on behalf of Governor Bush.

SAMUEL POPKIN: I want to point out, in the history of the exit polling operation, there has never been an election in which in any single state the absentee ballots were more Democratic than the at-the-polls ballots supporting what Bill says.

RAY SUAREZ: Well, we'll talk again later. Bill, Sam, thanks a lot.

FOCUS - POWER STRUGGLE

JIM LEHRER: Now, the control of Congress and to Margaret Warner.

MARGARET WARNER: 34 Senate seats and all 435 House seats are up for election today. For perspective on these contests, and what's at stake, we turn to two veteran Congress watchers: Tom Mann, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution; and Ron Faucheux, editor-in-chief of "Campaigns and Elections" Magazine. Welcome to you both. Tom, going into this election season, both Republicans and Democrats thought the Democrats had a chance of taking the Senate and House back. How unusual is that to have that much in play?

THOMAS MANN: It is amazingly unusual. We haven't had a situation like this for 48 years. You go all the way back to the 1952 election to find a situation where both chambers had their majority up for grabs in the election at the same time we had a genuine contest in the presidential race. So it's unprecedented. We went through decades in which we thought it was a birthright for Democrats to be in the majority, and now we have very evenly balanced competition for control.

MARGARET WARNER: So Ron, explain what it was about the lineup going into this that made both parties think that maybe more Republicans were vulnerable or that the Democrats had a real shot?

RON FAUCHEUX: Well, there were two things. First of all, the Democrats chipped away at the Republican majority that they won in 1994. They chipped away at it in '96 and again in '98, even when they weren't expected to by a lot of people. Then the Republicans had more open seats this time, so there was more exposure. They had less incumbents from stronger districts. So it gave the Democrats an opportunity to go for it. And they went for it. It looks very, very close now.

MARGARET WARNER: So big campaign themes: Did Either party run kind of with a unified agenda?

THOMAS MANN: They really didn't. They all talked about the same things, that is Republicans moderated their ideological fervor, say, from 1994 and the Contract With America, and suddenly they had plans to save Social Security and prescription drug benefits and Patients' Bill of Rights. They just happened to be different from the Democrats. I think they were looking to blur the differences to recruit the strongest candidates they could, and remember, this is really coming down to two or three dozen seats out of 435 in the House. So it's money, it's candidates, and it's blurring differences, no overriding themes.

MARGARET WARNER: Now, let's look ahead to tonight. We just were hearing both from Bill McInturff and Sam Popkin about this tremendous turn out the vote, both mail efforts and other mobilization. Does that kind of effort on the part of the presidential candidates have a spillover on Senate and House races?

RON FAUCHEUX: It certainly does, because usually the coat tails are from the ground up. If the party can build a good turnout effort, get out their base, at the same time, the other candidates at the higher levels are doing it, it certainly can have a big impact. It's not so much that the presidential candidates carrying down ballot races... it's the grassroots support that sort of is carrying and holding up the whole ticket.

MARGARET WARNER: So in other words if, as Sam Popkin called it, in the venison belt -- you had a huge NRA operation, that could help House and Senate candidates of the Republican Party, and likewise labor with Democrats?

THOMAS MANN: There are some central Pennsylvania districts that are going to be helped by that NRA turnout, but there are going to be me districts, say, in Michigan that will be helped by tremendous labor get-out-the-vote efforts. It was a holiday for the UAW in Michigan today, and that will certainly make a difference. There's also the matter of how strongly the presidential candidates are running. Montana, Bush will run strongly. That's going to give an edge to Conrad Burns in hoping to hold on. And in Nebraska, Ben Nelson's going to face a difficult....

MARGARET WARNER: The Democrat?

THOMAS MANN: The Democrat, because that's another strong Republican state. But Hillary Rodham Clinton is helped in New York because we presume Al Gore will run very well in that state.

MARGARET WARNER: How evenly were the two parties matched when it comes to the Senate and House races? Because usually Republicans have a huge advantage.

RON FAUCHEUX: In terms of money?

MARGARET WARNER: Yes.

RON FAUCHEUX: I think for the most part the Democrats did pretty well this year as far as narrowing that money gap that the Republicans had. Although, you have to look at it race by race, because in some states, and some districts, you have the party spending more must be than the candidates, which is a trend that we've seen in recent elections, and that sort of throws off all these money calculations.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. So are there races tonight, Senate races, first of all, are there such things as bellwether Senate races? When will we have a good idea what's going to happen in terms of control of the Senate?

THOMAS MANN: Actually, I think we're going to have to wait the whole night. First of all, we need to see how many Democratic seats fall to the Republicans, because if more than one or two fall, then it's pretty hopeless for the Democrats to gain a majority. So the Virginia race is very important, Chuck Robb, because we already know Nevada is likely to go Republican. So that's important to watch. And then to see if those initial races on the East Coast in Florida, in Delaware go Democratic, and if the Democrats hold their seats in the two big states of New York and New Jersey.

MARGARET WARNER: And then how soon might we have an idea about the House races? That's going to be... because there are no real exit polling projections on this.

RON FAUCHEUX: I'll have to give you the same answer Tom just gave for the Senate. I think you'll have to wait until you hear from California and the state of Washington. There are probably five or six key districts in those two states that very well could determine who will have the majority. And I suspect we won't know that for quite some time -- unless there's a big trend that we see early.

MARGARET WARNER: All right. Well, we'll be back later to watch all this. Thank you both.

FOCUS - ELECTORAL COLLEGE

JIM LEHRER: Back to the presidential election. There's more to that than just counting the votes. There's also something called the electoral college. We begin our look at that with a report by Kwame Holman.

KWAME HOLMAN: For millions of voters today, there's a good chance their ballot today included a disclaimer like this from Florida: A vote for the candidates will actually be a vote for their electors. Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate says choosing electors is what all voters did today, whether they knew it or not.

CURTIS GANS: You are voting for the candidate, but you're also voting for a number of electors who are pledged to the candidate who are selected before the election by each party, and approved by each candidate. These are the people who actually elect the President.

KWAME HOLMAN: Electors from each state have chosen the President since the beginning of the republic. Gans says the system, known as the electoral college, achieves exactly what the Framers of the Constitution had in mind.

CURTIS GANS: Their basic concern was not to have a President stronger than the Congress. The President was going to be seen as an administrator and an executor of the Congress' will. And therefore, the President should not have a popular mandate over and above Congress.

KWAME HOLMAN: Under the electoral system, today in Florida, for example, a group of pro Bush electors competes against Gore electors. Winning the popular vote means all of that candidate's electors also are chosen -- in Florida's case, 25 electors, each representing one of the state's 25 electoral votes. Across the country, there is a total of 538 electors or electoral votes up for grabs today. Two electors from each state correspond to that state's U.S. Senate representation for a total of 100. Then there's one elector for every member a state sends to the House of Representatives - 435 in all. Washington, D.C., which is not a state, chooses three electors. To get to the White House, a candidate must win the popular vote in enough states to collect 270 electoral votes. The system corresponds to population. California is the most populous state, which gives it the most Congressional districts and thus the most electors, 54. At the other end of the spectrum, each of these least populous states has just three electoral votes. The electoral system process begins at the major parties' summer conventions every four years. For most states, party leaders nominate the electors -- usually reliable party loyalists. Weeks after today's election, the winning candidates elector's will gather in 50 state capitals.

SPOKESMAN: They cast their votes in December. The votes are kept and unsealed in January. And then the President is officially elected. In reality, whatever happens this night, you know, determines what happens in both December and January.

KWAME HOLMAN: But the electoral system includes a few variations. First, no federal law requires an elector to vote for the party's candidate, and over the decades, a handful of electors has strayed. In 1976, for example, an elector pledged to Gerald Ford voted for Ronald Reagan, who had lost to Ford in the Republican primary. In 1988, a Democratic elector flipped the ticket, choosing Michael Dukakis for Vice President and running mate Lloyd Benson for President. A second variation, exceptions to the state winner-take-all rule. In Maine and Nebraska, the winner in each congressional district wins that electoral vote. And what happens if there's an electoral vote tie? Again, Curtis Gans.

CURTIS GANS: If the ballots that the electors cast ended up 269-269, then the selection of the next President would go to the U.S. House of Representatives, the new House of Representatives, which would vote by state delegation with each state having one vote. So whoever had a majority of - more of the state delegations would be the next President.

KWAME HOLMAN: But, of course, in 53 presidential election leading up to tonight, that's never been necessary.

JIM LEHRER: Gwen Ifill takes it from there.

GWEN IFILL: For more on the electoral college and the presidency, we turn to our NewsHour regulars: presidential historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Michael Beschloss, and journalist and author Haynes Johnson. Joining them tonight is presidential biographer and historian Richard Norton Smith. Doris, never have so many heard so much about Rutherford Hayes and Benjamin Harrison. This electoral college mishmash that we're all trying the figure out, is it anti-democratic or is it just the way the founders intended?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: It may be one of those institutions or one of those vestigial organs like the appendix, that it is the way the Founders intended it, but it can produce a problem for our system. Take the two examples that you cite. With both Hayes and Harrison, who did not win the popular vote but won the electoral vote eventually, their presidencies were doomed almost from the start because they came in with no real mandate and there was frustration. And I have a feeling that in today's age, if that split occurred and one of these candidates won the popular vote and the other the electoral vote, there would be a real uproar, because unlike the days when the Founders created this system, where only property holding males could vote, we have broadened that electorate out. You don't have to own property, you don't have to be a man. You can be a black American, and you can be a woman. And I think one person, one vote means so much more in the ideology of this country, that I'm only hoping even though it's great for the media, it might be fun for us historians, I hope that the result tonight is that one person wins both the electoral and the popular vote.

GWEN IFILL: I don't know about great for the media. I find it nerve-racking. Richard, Gerald Ford came close to being able to take advantage of this, didn't he?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH: He did. One thing Doris said - because I think there would be an uproar among the talking heads, among people like us, and cable America. And there would be an immediate demand to abolish this thing, but remember, Gerald Ford became President at a time when his legitimacy was in much greater question than a minority vote winner in a popular election. And people accepted him. And I have to say, I'll stick up for the Founders, because I think they knew what they were doing. They were not creating a pure democracy. They were creating a republic. They were filtering democracy, if you will. There's a famous story in which Thomas Jefferson asked George Washington to justify a Senate that was not popularly elected. And Washington talked about a hot cup of tea. And the hot cup was the House, elected directly by the people. And the saucer was the Senate. And you poured the hot tea into the saucer to cool it off. The electoral college to some degree performs that same function.

GWEN IFILL: Or it became lukewarm in the end. Haynes, was this as the Founders intended? Are you going to stick up for the Founders?

HAYNES JOHNSON: I love the Founders. I bow before the Founders. They created this game great system. Those young men with powdered wigs and silken britches and all that - and they devised this wonderfully complicated system. It's the marvel of8the world, except for the joker in the deck -- and that's the electoral college. It was made for mischief. We've been lucky in this country. I disagree with Richard in this sense: We had the race in 1876. The country almost had Civil War. And in today's climate, I think it would be even worse if you had a tie or you had a one person who won the popular vote and another person actually lost the electoral college. I think today's world, it should be a democratic basis, one vote for one person. That's the only thing in the whole Founder's system thatI think just wasn't made for this age we're in now.

GWEN IFILL: Michael Beschloss, if there were a 269-269 tie, do you imagine that people would rise up as one and say, "never again" and throw this whole thing out?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think they would. But it would be too late. Usually, Gwen, it's the case we only want to reform the system when there is a near miss. Take a look at 1968. That's a time when Richard Nixon was running against Hubert Humphrey and George Wallace. There was the worry Wallace would deprive Nixon or Humphrey of a majority and then be in a position to make a deal with Humphrey or Nixon to get the votes that essentially George Wallace would be choosing the President of the United States. And as a result, there was a suggestion for reform in the 1970's. President Carter in 1977 suggested the idea of going directly to a popular vote, no electoral college, but also saying that if no candidate got more than 40%, there would be a runoff because he thought it was important that if you're going to be President of the United States, you had to have at least something more than 40%. There was another suggestion for reform, too. And that is a little bitter earlier, someone suggested that you keep the electoral college, but you have two votes per state for the winner of the state, and then allocate the votes by congressional district. I think that might be a compromise that might work.

GWEN IFILL: Doris, does the electoral college survive because it never gets this close basically?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think if these occurrences had happened more often, we probably would have had more momentum for reform. But I think what happens is after we get through 1968, when, as Michael mentioned, it was a very close deal worrying that Wallace might have enough bargaining power to secure a real concession from either side, after we got through '76 when it was possible that if Ford had won only two more states, he might have won the electoral college and not the popular vote, that's why I use the analogy of the appendix. You don't want to have an operation unless it's absolutely a crisis. So the energy fades away. And then we wait until the next time it comes. But you look way back in the history, and, in fact, there were two duels as a result of the screw ups in the electoral system the first time. 1800 with Thomas Jefferson, when Burr and he were tied by this fluke in the electoral system at that point. Then you had Hamilton siding with Jefferson and eventually Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel and killed him as a result. In 1824, Clay supported John Quincy Adams and one of Jackson's supporters challenged him to a duel, and they almost killed each other. So there's been a lot of mischief around. I think it's time we focus on this. We're not going to have duels between Gephardt and Tom DeLay, I don't think - but that might make it interesting.

GWEN IFILL: Maybe a duel without guns we'll have. Richard?

RICHARD NORTON SMITH: One other thing, here we go - you know, this is a federal republic. It's a government of people, but it's also a government of states. And one of the arguments for the electoral college, paradoxically, although California and New York have these huge blocs of votes, we're talking about these big states, the fact is if you did not have a very close race in the electoral college, these candidates would not be making repeated visits to New Mexico and New Hampshire and West Virginia and Arkansas. The fact is they are flown over much of the time. They are almost left out of the democratic process.

HAYNES JOHNSON: I don't disagree with that, Richard. I do think it ought to be proportional. If you got 49% of the vote of your delegation, that ought to be 49% of the electoral college. But the real problem is, Kwame mentioned the electors, the faithless electors as they're called, who actually are not pledged to vote for anybody. Somebody who cast a vote for Lloyd Bentsen in West Virginia and he wasn't even on the ballot -- think about this election if you came down to one vote and you had a faithless elector - or in the case of Harry - 15 electoral votes cast - he wasn't on the ballot. Think what would happen in today's world. I just think that's made for this.

GWEN IFILL: Michael, based on what we've seen about this electoral college, when you see something this close where we could each actually have this conversation on election day, what does that tell us, if anything, about what Americans are thinking about on election day?

MICHAEL BESCHLOSS: I think it tells us that as far as the electoral college is concerned, this is something people have very much ignored. And think about what might happen tonight. One of the scenarios could be, George Bush wins the popular vote -- Al Gore wins the electoral college. And if that happened, I think what we'd hear tomorrow is, a great cry saying, "the electors for Gore should actually switch to Bush to reflect the popular vote." My guess is that wouldn't happen when the electors meet in mid-December. I think it could compel Al Gore, if he were elected, to appoint more Republicans to his administration and operate in a way that otherwise would not be the case. So it's another case and you find this so often in American history, Gwen, where you have got a situation that's a danger, and Americans don't focus on it until it's a clear and present one.

GWEN IFILL: A constitutional crisis, Doris?

DORIS KEARNS GOODWIN: I think it would certainly be a public crisis. I mean, I agree with what was said before. There have been other times when Presidents had to come in with even less legitimacy. But it certainly would not help Mr. Gore if he came in without win the popular vote. I don't think it would be a constitutional crisis because he will have one. There's nothing that can take that away from him. But it will leave his presidency without the same mandate. Think about it. Lyndon Johnson had to come in after the assassination of John Kennedy. In his own state in Texas he felt naked, like a pretender to the throne, illegitimate. And he became an extraordinarily powerful President in only eight months time. So they can get around it, but it doesn't start it off on a good foot. That's why I hope it doesn't happen that way.

GWEN IFILL: Okay. Richard, one more chance to stand up for the Founding Fathers.

RICHARD NORTON SMITH: I think my argument has been confirmed. The last thing we want to do is to touch the Constitution amidst a hue and cry, a clamor from talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, keep your hands off the Constitution.

HAYNES JOHNSON: Let us have our say, though, too in this thing. I think we've been lucky so far.

GWEN IFILL: Okay. Doris Kearns Goodwin, Michael Beschloss, Richard Norton Smith, Haynes Johnson, we'll see you all later.

FOCUS - CAMPAIGN COVERAGE

JIM LEHRER: Now, a look at the quality of the information the voters received about the candidates and their positions from the press. Media Correspondent Terence Smith has that.

TERENCE SMITH: The quantity of the reporting on the presidential race increased dramatically this year, with traditional news outlets being joined by all newscable channels and even the Internet. But what about the quality, to say nothing of the accuracy? To help us answer that question we're joined by Marvin Kalb, executive director of the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy; by Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism; and by William Powers, media columnist at the "National Journal." Gentlemen, welcome to you all. Marvin Kalb, grade the media performance in this campaign, if you will, on the basis of accuracy, fairness, and maybe enterprise.

MARVIN KALB: And in ten seconds. I'm a hard grader. I would say overall about B +. I think that the American people got, in fairness, degree of objectivity, responsibility on the part of the press, pretty much the information that they probably needed to cast an intelligent vote. But there are holes in it. And they're bothersome. And in connection with a judgment on the holes in the journalistic coverage, I would give it a D. And there are three areas. I think foreign policy was just ignored during this campaign. I think the press had a responsibility....

TERENCE SMITH: By the candidates or by the press or by both?

MARVIN KALB: Well, you see, if the candidates want to ignore it, that's one thing. That may be to their political advantage, but the press cannot ignore it. We live in a very complicated world. It's dangerous as hell out there. And the journalists should have been in a position time and time again to question these people about what they would have done. You got a lot of generalities, but not enough questioning.

TERENCE SMITH: The other two holes?

MARVIN KALB: The other hole... I think one of the others would be young people. There was very little attention being paid to a large group of people that our Vanishing Voter Project showed really are disconnected from the political process. And we spent very little time as journalists looking into that. And then thirdly, there is a large underclass in this country. If you looked at the coverage, you would think that everyone is a millionaire. That's not true. There are about 20% to 23% of the American people who are underprivileged, hugely underprivileged. They were ignored. They shouldn't have been.

TERENCE SMITH: Those sound like big holes. Bill Powers, how would you grade the performance in this campaign?

WILLIAM POWERS: I would give the media an A, much improved grade, actually. I was stunned at the extent to which the media responded to criticisms that have been made over recent years, particularly the last few elections and tried to do a better job. Partly it's a result of the explosion. You have got more outlets competing with each other, so they're trying new things. For example, there was a call in the last few elections to have more involvement of real people. We need to see more real people voicing their opinions, getting involved in the media coverage. Well, real people were all over the networks after the debates, were they decided yet, Bush, Gore - I mean, that particular feature was a bit of a flop because real people who are undecided don't have much to say generally, and they didn't have much to say, but it showed the media sort of trying and, as I said, trying to improve on mistakes they made in the past. Another improvement was character coverage. You saw these incredible biographies of the candidates, both in the major newspapers, spilling over to the smaller newspapers, and then on TV. You saw these long, two-hour George Bush biography, Al Gore biography that I thought were extraordinary. The "Washington Post" did 75,000 words of pure biography on Gore alone. The "New York Times" did about that much on the t two major candidates combined. That's a book. That's a book-length amount of information.

TERENCE SMITH: Okay. Tom Rosenstiel, we have a mixed grade. We have an A. What say you?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Well, the press has improved in terms of covering campaigns. The problem is that we don't really... we have too narrow a definition of what a campaign now is -- of what a political election now. As the politics, as campaigns themselves have become more intricate, more sophisticated, the strategies, the tactics, we've improved at our coverage of that, but that has consumed now the focus of most of the press. There are a lot of things that journalists once did that they no longer do, no longer have time to do as they have focused instead on this more intricate kind of campaigning.

TERENCE SMITH: Such as?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Such as nothing on doors and talking to voters. We can put them in an artificial focus group, but it's so artificial that it doesn't work. Knowing states, knowing county chairmen -- thinking of the election the way Teddy White did in 1960 as a national window on us as a people -- what this campaign says about us. So we know a great deal about the what of these two campaigns. We have a much less clear idea of the why. Why have neither of these guys closed the deal?

TERENCE SMITH: Why is it so close, too?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Why is it so close. Why are the gyrations up and down? One consequence of not understanding the underlying factors that are going on in the country and driving the campaign, it makes, I think, in the end it will make it harder for the winner to govern. What was the meaning of the election? We don't know. We've already got exit polls coming in tonight. And we don't know.

TERENCE SMITH: Marvin Kalb, there is often said to be a tilt in the press, either an alleged liberal bias or going overly soft on George W. Bush. Did you perceive a discernible tilt in the coverage when you look at it across the board?

MARVIN KALB: I think that there was a tilt, but I don't think it was one of those deliberate tilts. I don't think it's a matter of the press being very liberal, no matter how they vote, actually -- and therefore covering it in a certain way. I think this business of expectations came into play here. Every journalist....

TERENCE SMITH: You're talking about the debates?

MARVIN KALB: In the debates particularly. The journalists were just hugely wrong about the debates. Gore was supposed to wipe up the floor with Bush. Well, it turns out that Bush's numbers began the rise in that three-week period of the debates themselves. And so the reporting was that Gore was terrific. He was going to be absolutely outstanding. No one took into account the possibility that if you set the bar real low for Bush, all he had to do was pronounce America properly and it would be a terrific thing. And that is in fact what happened.

TERENCE SMITH: Bill Powers?

WILLIAM POWERS: I thought there was something encouraging in that, Marvin, which is that you had these pundits after the debates saying that Gore had won, had done well or Bush had done well, or whatever, and then you would see the polls almost consistently in the three debates were the opposite after few days gap. And it turned out that the pundits were not having the influence that we have said they have here - and it's running America and so forth. I think we're seeing as the media explodes and there's more and more pundits all over the place they have lesspower. I think that's a good thing.

TERENCE SMITH: Well, that's the issue. Do they have influence, or are....

TOM ROSENSTIEL: It's a little of both. Each individual pundit has less. There are no mega pundits anymore.

WILLIAM POWERS: Thank God.

TOM ROSENSTIEL: However, so many people now are getting their journalism, getting their information from the punditocracy instead of actual information. One of the reasons that the pundit class was so ineffectual in its reaction to the debates was because they're sort of tepid the moment after the debates. It's difficult to digest. It's like a poll that's taken too early. It's meaningless. Everything is in flux. However, we did a study of most of the coverage through October at the project and found that 70% of the debate stories focused on the performance aspect of the candidates, who is breathing heavily and invade invading... whose hair was combed properly. Now, this redounded very much to Gore's disadvantage because the expectations were high and because theatrically he was less adept than Bush. And I think that probably does account for one of the reasons that Bush seemed to benefit from the debates was the press context. The press doesn't tell people what to think, but it does tell them what to think about.

TERENCE SMITH: But in the final study you did through the course of the campaign, in the final phase funded incidentally by the Pew Charitable Trust, as is the media unit of this broadcast, you found a gentler treatment of George W. Bush?

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Yes. I think again because of the tactical, the sort of overwhelmingly tactical focus of the coverage, Bush has run a better tactical campaign. Gore has run a less adept campaign from a purely campaign standpoint. And the coverage we found in October was twice as likely to be negative towards Gore and twice as likely to be positive toward Bush. So the bias here is not a liberal-conservative bias, but it's a bias around the story frames, the story lenses that the journalists use.

MARVIN KALB: But that is to me the whole point. So what? So what if this campaign is not run as smoothly. So what if the guy's tie is on slightly askew. What is it that these people are saying? In what way, for example, would a future president, one of these two people, actually respond to a crisis? Would George Bush send American forces to the Middle East in defense of... he spoke very warmly of defending Israel. Would he, in fact?

TERENCE SMITH: Did you get the answer to that in all that reading you did?

WILLIAM POWERS: My feeling on that is the issues matter, of course, hugely. But performance, it all tells you a lot about a president. He's performing when he's responding to a crisis. He's performing in front of the nation in a debate. I think if he decides to handle the debate a certain way, that element of the performance not only affects the voters but tells you a lot about them.

MARVIN KALB: Bill, I think there are two things. And we're so hung up these days on how people look on television, how they sound on television, quality of the voice, that sort of thing, that we don't any longer focus... that's wrong. We don't any longer sufficiently focus on what it is that these people are actually saying.

WILLIAM POWERS: I think we do both.

TOM ROSENSTIEL: Implicit in the role, the enhanced role of the handler is the notion that they know how to move the electorate. They know what will move votes. And that tends by nature to be something that is more manipulatable, something that implies a somewhat more cynical view of how politics works. You can't really shape what George W. Bush believes in, but you can shape how he presents it.

TERENCE SMITH: Very briefly in the time we have left, what about the missed stories of this campaign? Where there some?

MARVIN KALB: I think some of those missed stories....

TERENCE SMITH: You mentioned in the beginning.

MARVIN KALB: Another one which I think is just beautiful, it's the Pat Buchanan story. About a year ago, oh, yes, a year ago Pat Buchanan was going to have X amount of strength and draw strength away from Bush and the Republicans. Nobody gave a hoot about Nader. And suddenly Nader emerges from the left. That was certainly a story that nobody foresaw a year ago.

TERENCE SMITH: We're almost out of time. Just a topic?

WILLIAM POWERS: I do think Marvin hit on it in his first comments. You have areas -- poverty and so forth -- that were addressed by candidates. What we got coverage on was the positions, but not the problem -- there should have been more focus on -- here's why they're coming up with positions on these things because this is going on in America; we didn't have reminders. And I missed that on many of these issues we mentioned.

TERENCE SMITH: Gentlemen, we have to leave it there. Thanks, all three of you.

FINALLY - ELECTION DAY

JIM LEHRER: And yes, before we go tonight, some election day poetry and to former poet laureate Robert Pinsky.

ROBERT PINSKY: The 1884 Cleveland-Lane presidential contest was like that of 2,000, extremely close. But that 19th century campaign involved personal attacks and rhetoric, savage beyond anything we have seen or heard in our lifetimes. Walt Whitman nevertheless celebrated that election with a poem, praising not the campaign, or the candidates, but something larger: "Election Day, November 1884."

If I should need to name, O Western World, your powerfulest scene and show, 'Twould not be you, Niagara -- nor you, ye limitless prairies -- nor your huge rifts of canyons, Colorado, Nor you, Yosemite -- nor Yellowstone, with all its spasmic geyser-loops ascending to the skies, appearing and disappearing, Nor Oregon's white cones -- nor Huron's belt of mighty lakes -- nor Mississippi's stream: -- This seething hemisphere's humanity, as now, I'd name -- the still small voice vibrating -- America's choosing day, (The heart of it not in the chosen -- the act itself the main, the quadriennial choosing,) The stretch of North and South arous'd -- sea-board and inland -- Texas to Maine -- the Prairie States -- Vermont, Virginia, California, The final ballot-shower from East to West -- the paradox and conflict, The countless snow-flakes falling -- (a swordless conflict, Yet more than all Rome's wars of old, or modern

Napoleon's:) the peaceful choice of all, Or good or ill humanity -- welcoming the darker odds, the dross: -- Foams and ferments the wine? it serves to purify -- while the heart pants, life glows: These stormy gusts and winds waft precious ships, Swell'd Washington's, Jefferson's, Lincoln's sails.

RECAP

JIM LEHRER: And again, the major stories of this election day: Polls have already closed in most of Indiana and Kentucky. The Associated Press has projected Governor Bush the winner in both of those states over Vice President Gore. Those results give Bush 20 electoral votes so far out of the 270 needed to win the White House. We'll be back at 10:00 Eastern Time on most PBS stations with full coverage and analysis of these election returns. Between now and then, the Online NewsHour will feature an updating electoral map and results in key races. We'll see you thereand of course again here tomorrow evening with complete analysis of the overall results. I'm Jim Lehrer. Thank you and good night.