On this day in 2001, more than five weeks after balloting ended, Vice President Al Gore, the 2000 Democratic presidential nominee, presided over a joint session of Congress that certified George W. Bush of Texas, the Republican nominee, as the winner. The disputed outcome in Florida caused the delay. It was resolved when the U.S. Supreme Court ruled, 5-4, on Dec. 12 to halt a statewide manual recount of the ballots ordered, in a 4-3 vote, by the Florida Supreme Court.

Bush’s margin of victory at that point was less than one half of one percent. The high court’s ruling gave him Florida’s 25 electoral votes. That, in turn, gave him 271 votes to Gore’s 266 — one more than the 270 required to be declared the winner. It paved the way for Bush to take the oath of office on Jan. 20, 2001, thereby becoming the nation’s 43rd president.

Story Continued Below

Although Gore finished second in the electoral vote, he received 543,895 more popular votes than Bush. This marked the fourth election in U.S. history in which the winner failed to get a plurality of the popular vote. The others were the elections of 1824, 1876 and 1888.

Gore failed to win the popular vote in his home state, Tennessee, which both he and his father had represented in the Senate, making him the first major-party presidential candidate to have lost his home state since Democrat George McGovern lost South Dakota in 1972.

Furthermore, Gore lost West Virginia, a state that had voted Republican only once in the previous six presidential elections. He also lost Arkansas, the home state of two-term President Bill Clinton, after having largely shunned Clinton’s help during his own presidential campaign. A victory in any one of those three states would have given Gore enough electoral votes to win the presidency without Florida.

Bush lost Connecticut, the state of his birth. He was also the first Republican to win the presidency without winning Vermont or Illinois, the second Republican to win the presidency without winning California — James A. Garfield in 1880 was the first — and the only victorious Republican to fail to receive any electoral votes from California. (Garfield had received one vote.)

SOURCE: WWW.HISTORY.COM