The riot that saved America Republican activists stopped the steal in 2000

“We’re getting screwed.” To Brad Blakeman, that much was clear. It was a few weeks after the 2000 election, and the future of the republic rested almost literally on a handful of ballots. Al Gore and his Democrats had won the popular vote by a handy 0.5% — but owing to the vagaries of the electoral college, neither he nor George W. Bush could quite tumble over the finish line. The winner, in the end, would be decided in Florida, with its 25 electoral votes, and where a machine recount suggested Bush led Gore by 327 ballots.

The problem, for Blakeman and his fellow Republican activists, was that it wasn’t over yet. Gore could still ensure a manual recount in Democratic parts of Florida: and chose four stalwart blue counties around Miami and Orlando. Hence that ominous feeling of being screwed — and hence what happened next. On 22 November, 2000, desperate to secure a Dubya presidency, Blakeman led a dozen unlikely revolutionaries — white 30-something dressed in chinos and Oxfords — to the 19th floor of Miami-Dade’s Stephen P. Clark Government Center. There, site of the recount in Florida’s most populous county, they engaged in a strange act of civil disobedience.

Shouting “no justice, no peace!” and other slogans not heard before or since from bespectacled men in collared polos, Blakeman and his gang were unsurprisingly easy to mock. Yet what wryly became known as the “Brooks Brothers Riot” — so named after the stuffily upmarket clothes brand — ended up changing the course of history. “It worked,” laughs the 67-year-old Blakeman, now greyer and paunchier than he was a quarter of a century ago. “It worked so well that the people back in office had thought we had lost our minds. It put a chill through the rest of the recount.” And so it proved: the recount was soon halted, Bush won Florida, and the United States continued on its merry path of foreign peace and domestic prosperity.

Well, not quite. But if it’s tempting, almost exactly 25 years on, to see parallels between Blakeman’s experiment and the far angrier insurrections of more recent times, the true lesson of the Brooks Brothers Riot is how it’s remembered. For the fact is that, whatever progressives claimed both then and since, it was Democrats who abused democracy in the 2000 election — one of the opening salvos in a political war that has displaced integrity for an endless nightmare of hyper-partisanship.

It’s hard to remember now, but the 2000 presidential race really did feel like the “most important election of our lifetime”. Pitting Bush, the folksy governor of Texas, against Gore, Bill Clinton’s patrician vice president, it was the first race where “liar”, “major league asshole”, and “fascist” all entered America’s political lexicon. The irony is that the parties had never been closer. “We always talk about meeting in the middle,” Dr Andrew Busch, a presidential historian at the University of Tennessee says, “and there was a meeting in the middle”. From free trade and balanced budgets to hawkish foreign policy, with Pax Americana still unsullied by events the next September, Bush versus Gore was a match made in Davos heaven.

Yet prodded, perhaps, by the stylistic differences between the two candidates — Bush: a baseball-loving “bro man”; Gore: a wonkish environmentalist — election day divided America almost exactly down the middle. Over 100 million people cast their votes in a race eventually decided by just 537. And, as so often, where the country waddled, Florida barrelled headfirst with a Cuba libre in its fist. In this microcosm of the 50-50 nation, the machine recount saw Bush lead by a mere 0.00005%. All eyes, alongside packs of lawyers from the pair of rival parties, trooped down south for a manual try-again. Duane Gibson was among those Republican congressional aides who took unpaid leave and a $25 per diem in return for umpiring chaos. Before he left his DC home, Duane Gibson told his wife he’d be gone for “a couple of weeks before Thanksgiving”. Not quite: the election would not be called for another 37 days, three full weeks after the holiday.

By the time half of Washington had reached the Sunshine State, the battlelines were drawn. With their slim machine-counted advantage, the Republicans were in a stronger position, even as the Democrats were reduced to haggling over ballot designs. Here enters a true icon of our story: the “hanging chad”. In Palm Beach County, in Florida’s prosperous southeast, voters did their democratic duty via machines, which punched holes next to the names of their preferred candidates. But faulty devices — or else the arthritic hands of Palm Beach’s famously geriatric residents — led some punch holes to only partially pierce. Hence those “hanging” chads, making it unclear exactly who thousands of Floridians had wanted to elect. All that before you factor in the so-called “impregnated” chads: where the punch holes had been dented but not pushed through.

With the benefit of hindsight, of course, it all sounds like the kind of bureaucratic hoohaa that makes you want to down a keg with the nearest Florida Man. But, at the time, what happened here gripped the nation, with both camps soon becoming masters in judicial skullduggery. Under Florida law, each of the state’s 67 county election boards could order a laborious hand recount of undervotes. But the statute also mandated that results be certified one week after election day: 14 November. Jeb Bush, the Florida governor and Dubya’s kid brother, kiboshed an informal agreement on a state-wide recount. Republicans, after all, had the lead, and why would they help Gore?

Hardly very gentlemanly — but the Democrats would more than out-do their opponents on that score. Unable to secure a statewide recount, Gore instead picked four large progressive counties, Palm Beach, Broward, Miami-Dade, and Volusia, in which Democratic election boards would certify a hand recount of 1.8 million votes. The process called for Republican observers to sit across from a Democratic counterpart, while courthouse employees hand-counted ballots and judges kept an eye on things. Most chads clearly fell one way or the other — but some didn’t. Democrats rightly argued that impregnated chads were not immaculately conceived: a voter must have caused the dent. Republicans countered that impregnated chads could only be tabulated if statutes allowed. Unfortunately, Florida law was mute on the specifics.

In the end, such calculations were based on grubby politics. “Somebody’s going to try to take advantage of the rules one way or the other,” Gibson says. “And your job is to be the roadblock against that.” Yet as he continues, what the Democrats tried that long-ago autumn went far beyond the rough-and-tumble of party politics. In these recount counties, after all, the judges and much of the courthouse staff were card-carrying Democrats, with some more than happy to put views on the table.

Consider, for instance, how the recount rooms worked. In theory, any observer was allowed to watch the process — in silence. But, as Gibson says, these rules were unevenly applied, with one Democratic observer cheerfully telling counters to challenge ballots that didn’t suit her politics. Tom Pyle, another Rioter who worked for a Republican House whip, says he saw similar mischief. At one point, he noticed a discrepancy between the actual vote tally and the formal ballot number. But, when Pyle objected, the Democratic judge didn’t seem to care. And when that 14 November certification deadline came and went — suits and countersuits made it impossible to tally 1.8 million ballots in time — there was other nakedly partisan behaviour: with a Democratic Palm Beach County judge ordering canvassers to count impregnated chads, contradicting the area’s previous standard.

In the end, Florida’s Supreme Court, composed of several Democratic-appointed judges, extended the certification deadline to 26 November. But even that, and the Miami-Dade’s election board’s frantic decision to recount a mere 10,750 ballots, out of the roughly 650,000 available, left little time for the Gore campaign to find the votes it needed. As pressure mounted, things got even more surreal, like when the board dismissed 25 pairs of volunteer counters to tally the ballots themselves, or else when they moved proceedings to what they grandly called a “tabulation room” on the 19th floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center — but which resembled little more than a poky old storeroom. As if designed to add to the Republican ignominy, Blakeman and the others were reduced to hanging about outside, peering in, one anonymous Rioter recalls, through “a tiny window.”

This, then, was the moment that history collided with sleep deprivation and vicious political partisanship: and a revolution erupted. The first chants — “let the press in!” — caused the election board to allow journalists into the counting room. “‘Heck, we are making progress,’” the anonymous Republican remembers thinking. “So, we started with ‘let us in, let us in!’” At that moment, like some latter-day version of Delacroix, the press played its part. And why not: well-coiffed rabble-rousers made for great televised theatre. “We were playing to the cameras,” Pyle admits. But, as Blakeman repeats, shouting worked. By 10:30am, the hubbub caused the board to stop the count.

If the scene inside the Government Center was a zoo, the streets outside it were a jungle, as thousands of Republicans arrived to join in the fun. Marchers wore t-shirts emblazoned with “Who Let the Chads Out?” Some dressed as Pilgrims — even in sticky Florida, it was still Thanksgiving — while others held signs saying “Stuff Turkeys, Not Ballots”. “We were making fun of hippie protesting type stuff,” Pyle says, “but honestly after a while we were really getting into it.”

And, again, the antics worked. The Miami-Dade election board stopped its recount, Palm Beach County missed the court’s deadline, and Florida Republicans duly certified Bush the winner. Belatedly, on 8 December, Florida’s Supreme Court ordered a statewide recount — but you get the sense that, by this point, the wind had gone from Democratic sails. The following day, the US Supreme Court intervened, voiding the recount on the grounds that the state lacked any uniform standard for tabulating fuzzy votes. Given federal law explicitly said electors had to choose the president by 12 December, the upshot was clear: Gore was out of time and Dubya was heading to the White House.

What happened first, though, was that Democrats lost their minds. I was one of them. The Brooks Brothers, to me, were a mashup of every cinematic preppy bully come to life. Jerrold Nadler, a New York Congressman, thought they goose-stepped Bush to the White House, denouncing the Rioters’ “fascist tactics” and for “trashing every institution that gets in their way.” Joe Geller, the chair of Miami-Dade Democrats agreed. “These people,” he said, “reminded me of the Brownshirts in Germany.”

For the Rioters themselves, such abuse was distinctly welcome. “It kind of irked me,” Pyle recalls, “that I was being called a fascist for just exercising my rights.” Is that fair? Not entirely. Republicans were hardly straightforward white hats in this American showdown. Early on, Dubya had refused a one-on-one meetup with Gore to broker a vote-counting compromise. His kid brother — ya’ know, the governor of Florida — was anything but impartial. More Floridians probably had intended to vote Gore. But Florida law was mute on the specifics of “intent”. And besides, politics ain’t a game, and Republicans were playing for keeps.

There’s a more fundamental point here too. Whatever me and every liberal I knew claimed at the time, the Brooks Brothers Rioters didn’t try to steal the White House. The Democrats did — with their dodgy ballots, their procedural shenanigans, their last-minute venue shifts to the 19th floor of the Stephen P. Clark Government Center. And all this in a race that the Republicans almost certainly won, as subsequent non-partisan studies showed.

And yet, my party’s “big lie” continues. Somehow, the standard liberal narrative is that Gore, like an episode of Scooby-Doo, was cheated by a gang of chino-clad kids. Every 22 November, Left-leaning journalists twist the past to their liking, with both The Washington Post and the Guardian accusing the Brooks Brothers Rioters of stealing the election. After the far nastier 2021 riot at the Capitol, these claims unsurprisingly took on a still-more pungent tone, with The Nation arguing that you can trace a direct line from the 2000 farrago to the mob, the shaman, the violence. As the magazine put it in August 2022: “The post-election uprising in Miami-Dade County gives the lie to the depiction of the failed Trumpian coup as an isolated event.”

That’s true — just not in the way The Nation thinks. For the Brooks Brothers Riot really was a watershed moment, in that it heralded a broad culture of dishonesty on both sides of America’s fractured political spectrum. The big lie is wrong, Left and Right. Whatever he and his supporters might claim, Trump lost 2020 in a relative rout. On the other hand, Bush won in 2000, by the hair of his chinny-chin-chin, and the Brooks Brothers Rioters were understandably suspicious of Democratic election boards counting votes with no clear standards. American democracy is, and will continue to be, a rambunctious experimental mess of gridlock, intersecting interests, and head-on political collisions. We keep it by telling the truth, even when it hurts. Just be thankful that collared polos remain optional.

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