Kevin: December 12th, 2000, Washington, D.C. The Supreme Court has just handed down a ruling that decides who becomes the next president of the United States. And the nine people who wrote it are running on fumes because the deadline they've spent all week fighting about, a federal cutoff called the Safe Harbor, falls on today. The clock ran out while they were still typing. Two questions live inside the ruling. The first Was the recount down in Florida broken? Seven of the nine justices say yes. The second, what do you do about a broken recount? Five, say stop it. Four, say fix it. The opinion has no author. It's what lawyers call a per curium, Latin for by the court, a decision signed by nobody and owned by everybody. Buried in it is one strange sentence. The reasoning here it says Is limited to the present circumstances. Nine people are choosing who will run the country, and in the same breath, telling every judge who comes after them not to treat this as a rule. At the dead center of the five who voted to stop sits one man. He agreed the recount was broken. He voted to end it anyway. His name is Anthony Kennedy. During his 30 years on the highest court in the land, he was often the swing boat. landmark cases, including Citizens United v FEC, Shelby County v Holder, and the case we're talking about today, Bush v Gore. So what if Kennedy, on that second question alone, not the Constitution or the Law, just the fix, had said count it instead of stop it. Let's hit Control Z. Welcome to Control Z Rewritten, the podcast where we take the biggest decisions in history and ask, What happens if they go the other way? Not random what-ifs, real 50-50 calls with alternatives that were actually on the table. One decision, we hit control Z, try it the other way, and see what changes. Al Gore won the 2000 election. The popular vote, anyway, by almost 544,000 votes. More Americans walked into a booth and chose Al Gore than chose George W. Bush. But in the United States, that's not how you win the presidency. You win it in the Electoral College, a system where each state gets a pile of votes roughly equal to the size of its delegation in Congress, and whoever reaches 270 of them moves into the White House, no matter what the nationwide headcount says. In 2000, every electoral vote was spoken for, except one state's Florida. Twenty-five electors up for grabs. Take Florida, And you take the country. So how close was Florida? Well, out of nearly 6 million ballots cast, the certified margin was 537 votes. Bush, 2,912,790. Gore, 2,912,253. A difference of about 9,000ths of 1% in the one place that decided. Everything that year. When a race is that tight, Florida law forces an automatic machine recount, so the machines went back to work. Bush had started the night ahead by a little over 1,700 votes. After the recount, his lead shrank to 327. Gore's team then asked for hand counts in four heavily Democratic counties Belugia, Palm Beach, Broward, and Miami Dade. Which the law allowed. And that's where the real trouble begins. Because to recount a Florida ballot by hand in the year 2000, you first had to understand the Chad. No, not the guy that you follow on TikTok. This is the way that Floridians voted in 2000s. So Floridians voted on punch cards. You took a stiff paper card, slid it into a holder. and pushed a little stylus through a pre-scored hole next to the name you wanted. A clean punch popped out a tiny rectangle of paper, the Chad, and light shone through the hole and the machine read a vote. Push too softly though, and that little rectangle didn't come free. It hung by one corner, or it hung by two, or it just bulged in the middle without breaking like a window screen somebody leaned on. Election workers squinting at millions of these cards built a whole vocabulary for the failures. A Chad clinging by a single corner was a hanging chad. By two corners, a swinging chad. A Chad that bulged but never broke was a pregnant Chad. And the faintest mark of all where the stylist pressed but nothing gave was a dimpled Chad. I believe there was also a giga chad, but I can't verify that. The confetti wasn't the problem. The problem was that nobody agreed what counted. In one county, a dimple was a vote. In the next county over a Dimple was nothing. And in Palm Beach County, the standard changed more than once during the same recount, which means the same dented card could be illegal vote on Tuesday and garbage on Thursday. The fight crawled through the courts for five weeks. Florida Secretary of State, a Republican named Katherine Harris, set a hard certification deadline while three counties were still counting. The Florida Supreme Court stepped in and pushed it back. On November 26th, Harris certified Bush the winner by that 537 vote margin, with some recounts still unfinished. Gore formally contested the result. And on December 8th, the state's High Court did the dramatic thing. By a vote of 4-3, it ordered a hand recount of every undervote in Florida, all 45,000 or so ballots the machines had read as containing no presidential vote at all. The dimples and the hanging chads, the whole shoebox of ambiguity. With those added in, Bush's lead fell from 537 to 154. 154 votes in a country of 280 million people. The next day, December 9th, the US Supreme Court froze the recount 5 to 4 while it decided what to do. Oral arguments came December 11th, and the ruling landed December 12th. The Safe Harbor deadline, that federal cutoff I mentioned, the date by which a state is supposed to lock in its electors, so Congress has to accept them without a fight. The judges handed down their decision on the very day the clock hit zero. The ruling everybody calls five to four was actually two different votes stapled together, and only one of them was five to four. The first vote was about whether Florida's recount was fair. Seven of nine justices said it was not. The reasoning came from the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, a piece of the Constitution that says, in plain terms, the government can't let one person's vote count for more than another's by running them under different rules. And Florida was running them under different rules. A dimple counts here, a dimple's worthless there, Tom Beach changing its mind in the middle of the job. Seven justices, including two of the court's four liberals, looked at that mess and agreed it crossed a constitutional line. Only two of them, John Paul Stevens and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, disagreed even with that, arguing that federal courts should leave Florida's election law to Florida. So seven to two, the recount was run as broken. Almost everybody on board. Then comes the second vote, the one about what to actually do, and the court splits straight down the middle. Five justices, William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O'Connor, Antonine Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Anthony Kennedy said there was no time left. They argued that since the Safe Harbor deadline was that very day, December 12th, you couldn't build a fair uniform recount and run it in the hours that remained. So the only move was to halt the count, throw out the Florida court's order, and leave Bush's certified 537 votes standing. Four justices, Stevens Ginsburg, David Souter, and Steven Breyer, said the opposite. They argued it should be sent back to Florida, force one clear rule, and let the count finish. Two of those four, Souter and Breyer, had agreed there was a constitutional problem in the first place. They simply thought the cure for a broken count was a better count, not no count. Justice Stevens put his dissent in writing, and the line is devastating in how plain it is. Under their own reasoning, he wrote of the majority, the appropriate course of action would be to remand to allow more specific procedures for implementing the legislature's uniform general standard to be established. Translated out of lawyer, you said the problem is inconsistent rules. The answer to inconsistent rules is consistent rules. So write the consistent rule and count the ballots. You don't burn the house down because the thermostat's broken. Now the man in the middle, Anthony Kennedy. Kennedy was one of the five who voted to stop. But what separates him from three of those five is very important context. Rehnquist, Scalia, and Thomas didn't just vote to halt the count on the clock. They signed a second, separate opinion built on something called the Article II theory. An argument that Florida's Supreme Court had illegally seized a power the Constitution hands specifically to the state's legislature, the power to decide how that state picks its electors. For those three, the recount had to die for two independent reasons: no time and no right. Kennedy didn't sign that second opinion. His vote to stop rested on one thing alone, the clock. This makes Kennedy the softest hard vote on the court. He wasn't driven by a deep theory about who gets to run elections. He just looked at the calendar, decided that a fair recount couldn't be finished in time, and chose to stop instead of fix. So here's the control Z, and it's small and surgical. Kennedy keeps every other position. He still believes the recount was broken, he still signs on to the equal protection finding, but he changes his mind on one question, the remedy, and crosses the room to join Breyer and Souter. The four who wanted to count become five. And the holding of Bush v. Gore flips from stop the count to count it under one rule and finish by December 18th. Florida gets six days. That's the whole hinge. We're not building a new theory of the Constitution or a new reading of a single word. Simply one justice deciding that the cure for a broken count is a fair count. And we know with a precision that's almost unfair what that fair count would have found. In the year after the election, nine of the biggest news organizations in the country, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, CNN, the Associated Press, and a few others pooled their money and hired the National Opinion Research Center, also known as NORC, at the University of Chicago, to do the thing the Supreme Court voted to stop Florida from doing. Count. Every disputed ballot in the state. All 175,010 of them. About 63,000 were undervotes, the ones the machines read as blank. 111,000 were overvotes. And the overvotes are the key to this entire story. An overvote is a ballot where the machine thinks you voted for more than one candidate, so it throws the whole thing out. Sometimes that's a person who genuinely couldn't decide. Often though, and especially in Florida, it was confusion. The most infamous culprit was the butterfly ballot in Palm Beach County, a layout that ran the candidates down both sides of a single column of punch holes. So the second hole on the left, the one that a reasonable person would assume went to the second name on the left, actually registered a vote for somebody on the right. People punched two holes trying to fix their own mistakes. Others punched their candidate, then wrote that candidate's name in the write-in line to be safe, which the machine read as two choices and tossed. The count found two facts that sound like a contradiction but aren't. First, in the narrow recount that was actually ordered, just the undervotes, Bush still wins by about 493 votes. Second, when you count the overvotes too, the whole picture flips. Because Gore's name was marked on 84,197 of those rejected overvote ballots, and Bush's on only 37,731. If you run a full statewide count of every disputed ballot under one consistent standard, Gore wins Florida by margins that run from 107 votes at one end to a few hundred at the other, just depending on the standard. And the strangest part, the majority opinion itself. The one that halted everything openly admitted that there was something unfair about counting undervotes while ignoring overvotes. The justices saw the problem. They named it on the page, but they let the clock. It's late at night on December 12th, 2000. Anthony Kennedy has crossed the room. The Supreme Court sends Bush V. Gore back to Florida with the instruction the Florida justices have been waiting weeks to hear. Count every disputed ballot in the state, under votes and over votes alike, under a single standard, the clear intent of the voter. Finish it by the 18th. Tallahassee moves fast because it has no choice. County canvassing boards reconvene in fluorescent backrooms across the state, and the squinting starts again. Except this time, the rule is identical everywhere. A dimple is a dimple in every county or in none of them. Across town, the Republican-controlled legislature watches from the Capitol. They've already opened a special session, openly preparing to do an extraordinary thing, name their own slate of electors for Bush, and ship it to Washington. Regardless of what the count says. James Baker, the man running Bush's legal operation, files emergency motion after emergency motion in state court. Florida judges deny every one. Baker eyes a return trip to the U.S. Supreme Court, and that court, having just ordered this recount with its own hand, refuses to hear the same case twice in one week. By December 18th, the day the Electoral College meets, Florida finishes counting. Gore wins the state by roughly 300 votes. The number is ugly and contested. The process is a circus, and observers are screaming at each other in three different cities. But when the dust settles, the certified result reads Al Gore. And now the cruelest seat in America belongs to Jeb Bush, the Republican governor of Florida and the brother of the man who just lost the state and with it the presidency. The certification needs his signature. He can refuse and trigger a constitutional crisis that could end in his own impeachment, or he can sign away his brother's presidency with his own pen. Jeb signs, nobody claps. Legally, There's no other move on the board. The fight moves to Washington for one last stand. On January 6th, 2001, Congress meets in joint session to formally count the electoral votes, and the official who is to preside over that session by the plain rules of the Constitution is the sitting vice president, Al Gore. Gore stands at the front of the chamber and gavels through the count that makes him president. Several Republican members of the House rise to object to Florida's electors. Under an old statute called the Electoral Count Act of eighteen eighty seven, an objection only goes forward if at least one senator and one representative sign it. Republicans find the signatures and the two chambers split off to debate. But knocking out Florida's votes takes a majority in each chamber, and a Senate split 50-50 can't deliver one. The objection collapses. Florida's 25 electoral votes go to Gore. The final tally: Gore 292, Bush 246. Two days later, on January 8th, George W. Bush formally concedes. The push comes from inside his own camp, Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice and the big Republican donors, all of them warning that a fight dragging past Inauguration Day would scorch the country and everyone who'd built their career along with it. When he finally stepped to the microphone, the concession is short, correct, and colder than any speech he's ever had to give. On January 20th, 2001, Al Gore places his hand on a Bible and becomes the 43rd president of the United States. He won the popular vote by 543,895 ballots, and Florida by 300. And somewhere between a third and half of the country is certain he stole it. The conservative media machine that spent the 90s building itself talk radio, Rush Limbaugh, Fox News Channel. All turn on the new president with one unified message. The recount was a theft, the Democrats rigged it, and this man is a fraud. A bumper sticker slogan had floated around that fall in the real timeline aimed at Bush that read Selected, not elected. Within days, that is actually flipped around and slapped on Al Gore. He takes the oath in front of a crowd, and behind the crowd are the signs. The handoff is the smoothest part of a brutal winter. Gore had been Bill Clinton's vice president for eight years, so the government doesn't empty out the way it does when the other party wins. The appointed staff, the deputies, and the national security hands are already his people or at least in the same orbit. What the recount steals is time. The weeks a new administration normally spends getting its Senate confirmed appointees vetted and seated all vanished into Florida, and a lot of the top jobs are still waiting on confirmation when the year turns. He fills them out fast. Richard Holbrook, the diplomat who negotiated the nineteen ninety five deal that ended the war in Bosnia, takes the State Department. Leon Firth, Gore's foreign policy advisor of two decades, becomes National Security Advisor. Senator Bob Carey takes the Pentagon. Larry Summers is kept on at Treasury. And Eric Holder moves up to Attorney General. And one man keeps his job without a fight, a counter-terrorism official named Richard Clark, who'd spent years inside the government raising alarms about a network called Al-Qaeda, and who now reports to people who take him very seriously. President Gore's first crisis isn't a foreign one. It's the economy, and it was coming no matter who won. The stock market frenzy over internet companies that had swelled all throughout the late 90s, what we call the dot-com bubble. Had already begun deflating by the spring of 2000, but by 2001, it goes into a full recession. Overpriced tech stocks crater, the money supply tightens, and Gore, three weeks into the job, owns it. And what he does next is where the ripple effect forks for the first time. In the world that actually happened, our real timeline, President Bush's first-year win was a $1.3 trillion tax cut weighted heavily towards the highest earners. Gore can't pass anything like that, and wouldn't even if he could. He's got a House of Representatives run by Republicans and a Senate split exactly in half. So instead of a giant legislative win, he gets a smaller, targeted package through, an expansion of the tax credit for working families, ⁓ money for roads and bridges, and funding to wire the country for broadband internet. The enormous budget surplus President Clinton left behind doesn't get spent down nearly as fast. And the government's books stay in the black years longer than they did in reality. On the morning of September 11th, 2001, 19 men board four commercial airliners, and nothing about who sits in the Oval Office changes that. It would be easy here, though dishonest, to say that a sharper, more focused president saw it coming. But he didn't, and he couldn't have. The 9 11 Commission, which spent years dissecting the attacks afterward, concluded that they happened because of failures of imagination, policy, and Capabilities and management, and those failures were a decade in the making. The intelligence community had known since 1994 that terrorists were thinking about flying planes into buildings and never made it a priority. The FBI had at least five separate chances to find two of the hijackers while they were living openly inside the United States, and they missed all of them. The machinery That should have caught them was broken in ways that had nothing to do with the November 2000 election. If anything, Gore inherits the same handicap Bush did. The contested election devoured the transition. And on the morning of the attacks, only 57% of the top 123 national security jobs that require Senate confirmation were actually filled. A government missing half its senior people walked into the worst day in its modern. History. Gore's transition is just as rushed and his bench just as thin. Richard Clark, with his better access and his years of warnings, gets a more serious hearing in a Gore White House, but the Commission's own grim verdict was that even aggressive action on the warning signs probably wouldn't have stopped it. So the towers come down, the Pentagon burns, and nearly 3,000 people die on a clear Tuesday morning. And Al Gore, the president half the country still calls illegitimate, becomes a wartime commander in chief. The country rallies to him the way countries do. His approval ratings, battered for nine months, surge overnight. Three days after the attacks, Congress passes the authorization for use of military force, a short Sweeping resolution handing the president the power to make war on whomever planned the attacks. It passes ninety-eight to nothing in the Senate and four hundred twenty to one in the House, the lone no vote from a congresswoman from California named Barbara Lee. The same resolution passes in this timeline because the rage is total and the language is broad. Gore points it at Afghanistan, where the Taliban government is sheltering the man who ordered it all, Osama bin Laden. and hands them the same ultimatum President Bush did in our timeline. Give him up or lose your country. The Taliban refuses. So, in October 2001, American Special Forces and Afghan allies come down on them like a hammer, and by November, the Taliban has fled Kabul. Bin Laden runs for the mountains of Torobora, and in the chaos and the thin force committed to sealing the passes, he slips away. Barely But he gets out. The Iraq War was not a reaction to September 11th. It was a project with a specific list of authors, and in the alternate timeline, none of them works in the administration. In the real world, the road to invading Iraq ran through a small, determined group of officials who had wanted to topple Saddam Hussein for years before anyone outside a war room had ever heard the name Al Qaeda. Dick Cheney was vice president. Donald Rumsfeld ran the Pentagon. Paul Wolfowitz was his deputy. Around them was a movement called the Neoconservatives, a faction inside the larger conservative world that believed America should use military force to tear down hostile governments and replace them. And they'd been saying so in public since 1997 through an outfit called the Project for the New American Century. When that group sent an open letter to President Clinton in 1998 demanding he remove Saddam by force, Eighteen people signed it. Ten of them walked into the Bush administration three years later. How badly did they want it? The journalist Bob Woodward reported that on the morning of september twelfth, two thousand one, with the wreckage of the towers still smoking and nobody yet certain who was behind the attack, Donald Rumsfeld sat in a cabinet meeting and argued that Saddam Hussein should be made a principal target of the first round of terrorism retaliation. This is the day after the worst attack in American history, with the actual killers still unconfirmed, and the Secretary of Defense was already pointing at Iraq. The National Security Archive later found that the administration didn't build a case for war and then decide, it decided and then went shopping for a case. Take those people out of the building, and the project has no engine. Under President Gore, Dick Cheney is a private citizen. Donald Rumsfeld holds no office, and Paul Wolfowitz writes op-eds that nobody in power has to read. The Secretary of State is Richard Holbrook, a multilateralist who believes in alliances and negotiated settlements, and whose obsessions run toward the Balkans, not Baghdad. The national security advisor is Leon Firth, a man known for careful, rigorous analysis rather than ideological crusades. And the 9-11 Commission found no credible evidence connecting Saddam Hussein to the attacks. Without the specific people in the specific chairs, there's no momentum, no pressure campaign, and no manufactured case. So Iraq is not invaded in 2003. Saddam stays in his palaces, boxed in by UN sanctions and the occasional American or British airstrike, exactly as he had been all throughout the 1990s. The absence ripples outward and it keeps tracing back to the same missing men. After September 11th, some kind of expanded surveillance law was going to pass no matter who was president because the fear was overwhelming and no politician wanted to be the one who looked soft. So, in this timeline, a version of the Patriot Act still becomes law with broad powers to monitor and investigate. Under an attorney general like Eric Holder with stronger civil liberties instincts, the bill comes out somewhat narrower, but the most contested pieces survive because Congress will not risk appearing weak on terror. The thing that doesn't happen is the secret part. In the real world, President Bush quietly ordered the National Security Agency to wiretap Americans without warrants, in direct violation of a law called FISA. Which requires the government to get a judge's permission before listening in on people inside the country. The program was illegal. The White House hid it from the public until a newspaper exposed it in 2005. And it had a name straight out of a spy novel: Stellar Wind. The whole operation was the product of one man's expansive theory of presidential power, Dick Cheney's belief that a wartime president can do nearly anything he likes. That theory has no home in Gore's White House. There is expanded legal surveillance, but there's no secret illegal dragnet. The same goes for the darkest chapter of this. The legal machinery behind America's torture program, the formal opinions written inside the Justice Department arguing that the president could authorize the torture of prisoners came from Cheney's hand-picked lawyers, men like David Addington and John U. Those memos were cracked open two doors. The first led to Guantanamo Bay, the American military prison on a base in Cuba where terror suspects sat for years without trial. The second led to Abu Ghraib, the Iraqi prison where American soldiers tortured and humiliated detainees in photographs that circled the globe in 2004 and gutted the country's international standing. None of those lawyers work for President Gore, so the memos that justified all of it never get written. And the prisons they were built to authorize never open under his watch. Gore had been the country's loudest voice on climate change since before most Americans even recognized it as a phrase. He'd warned about it as a senator in the 1980s. He wrote a best-selling book on it, Earth and the Balance, in 1992. And as vice president, he personally flew to Japan to negotiate pieces of the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, the first big international treaty to cut the gases that heat the planet. What he could never do was get that treaty ratified. And as president, he still can't. The Senate had voted ninety-five to zero in nineteen ninety-seven in something called the Bird-Hegel Resolution, against signing any climate treaty that doesn't also bind developing nations like China and India. And the math doesn't change just because Gore is now in the Oval Office. There's a difference, though, between failing to pass a treaty and actively torching one. And that's the first thing Gore changes. In the real timeline, One of Bush's earliest acts was to yank the United States out of Kyoto entirely. This happened in March of 2001. Gore doesn't do this. The country stays inside the international framework, and his Environmental Protection Agency keeps its legal authority to treat carbon dioxide as a pollutant it can regulate. As president, he pushes the renewable energy incentives straight from his own campaign platform. These include a tax credit covering 20% of the cost of rooftop solar panels, credits for wind and solar power production, and tougher mileage rules for cars. Carbon regulation in the United States starts earlier than it did in our timeline. Then, in late August of 2005, a Category 4 hurricane named Katrina turns toward the Gulf Coast, and everything about climate politics in our alternate timeline changes. The storm hits no matter who's president. Hurricanes don't check the party of the man in the White House. And New Orleans sits below sea level behind levees the Army Corps of Engineers had built and patched over decades. It's vulnerable on the calmest of days. What's different is everything that happens after Katrina makes landfall. In the real world, the federal response was a catastrophe so total that a bipartisan house investigation titled its report A Failure of Initiative and called the whole thing a national failure. Part of that collapse was structural. FEMA, the Federal Emergency Agency, had been swallowed into the giant new Department of Homeland Security in 2002 and stripped of its independence and its budget. This reorganization happens in the alternate timeline, too. But a Gore administration runs a government that treats competence as a religion. They staff the agency with professionals instead of patronage hires, and they dust off a disaster simulation called Hurricane Pam, an exercise that had wargamed almost exactly this scenario, and that the real government promptly ignored. As a result, the evacuation moves faster and the supplies are pre-positioned. Federal assistance arrives in days. Rather than a televised week of families standing on rooftops and dying in a convention center. New Orleans still floods and the city is still gutted, but the response is the difference between a tragedy and a national disgrace. And in the weeks after, the money and the muscle that pour into rebuilding are aimed squarely at making the next storm survivable. Bush in the real aftermath never said the word, but Gore does. Standing in the wreckage of a drowned American city, With the whole country watching and grieving and ready to listen, President Gore calls Katrina what he believes it is: a warning shot from a warming planet, and he spends every ounce of the political capital a unifying disaster hands a president to do something about it. That single decision to seize one of the most emotional moments of his presidency and aim it straight at the climate breaks the log jam that it held since Bird Hegel. The country raw and frightened, follows him. The legislation that follows the investment and the shift in what ordinary Americans will accept puts this timeline roughly 15 years ahead of where the real world sits today on cutting emissions. The planet is not saved, it's still warming and the work is nowhere near finished. But the country spent fifteen extra years actually doing that work. And that reshapes the whole century. For the President Gore timeline The longest shadow of all falls back across the Supreme Court, the same place where we started this story. In the late summer and fall of 2005, two seats come open in quick succession. Chief Justice William Rehnquist dies of cancer. Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, another pragmatic swing vote at the center of the court for a generation, retires to care for her ailing husband. The important thing to note as we speculate on alternate history. Is these departures had nothing to do with politics or who won an election. They were a matter of illness and age and a private life, so they happen on the same schedule in any timeline. The big difference is who fills those chairs. In the real world, President Bush named John Roberts and Samuel Alito, two reliable conservatives who hauled the court rightward and have kept it there for two decades. Roberts and Alito joined the five vote majority in Citizens United in 2010. The decision that let unlimited corporate cash flood American elections. They also supplied the votes to gut the Voting Rights Act in Shelby County in 2013 and to overturn Roe versus Wade and erase the constitutional right to abortion in the Dobbs decision of 2022. President Gore fills those same two seats with justices of his own. O'Connor's swing seat moves left, and Rehnquist's chair goes to a liberal. The court that sits from 2005 onward looks less like the one we know and more like the moderate, closely balanced bench of the 1990s. As a direct result, Citizens United does not come down the way it did. The Voting Rights Act survived Shelby County, and Roe v. Wade, the ruling a conservative court would erase in the real 2022, remains the law of the land. By the time Gore stands for reelection in 2004, the legitimacy wound has never fully closed, and it never will, but he runs as something close to unbeatable in the pre social media age, a wartime president. His Republican challenger is John McCain, the war hero senator from Arizona. And McCain runs hard at the legitimacy question, at Gore's handling of the economy, and really at anything else within reach. But it isn't enough. Voters rarely fire a commander in chief in the middle of a fight, and Gore is running against the people who actually attacked the country, and a serious and competent administration has waged a war seriously and competently. There's no quagmire in Iraq to drag him under. There's no occupation gone wrong, there's no scandal of a war sold on a lie. Gore beats McCain in a race decided by a hair and serves a second term. Now let's add up what that second term doesn't contain. The Iraq war never happens, so the roughly 4,400 American service members it killed in our world are alive in this one. The $2.1 trillion war zone bill, part of the $8 trillion the post 9 11 wars would eventually cost, is never spent. There is no occupation curdling into years of insurgency and ruin. There's no fabricated case about weapons of mass destruction. Paraded before the UN and then exposed as being false. There's no global collapse of trust in American honesty because there's nothing to be dishonest about. And there's no ISIS, or at least not the one we know, because the historical trail of that group runs directly back through the Sunni insurgency of the Iraq War to its parent organization, Al Qaeda in Iraq, an enemy born from the chaos of the invasion. Without that invasion, there's no vacuum. And without the vacuum, there's no caliphate. The Great Recession of 2008 lands differently as well, because the conditions that turned a housing slump into a global meltdown look different under Gore. The reckless deregulation and the willful blindness to a swelling housing bubble that defined the real run-up don't get the same free reign from an administration warier of letting Wall Street police itself. The bubble inflates smaller and the warning signs get attention sooner. What was a once in a century financial catastrophe in our world is in this one a sharp but survivable downturn, a bad year or two followed by recovery, as opposed to a lost decade. And politics keeps moving without the war that reshaped it. The anti war fury that lifted a young senator named Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton in the real two thousand eight Democratic primary simply isn't there. Because there's no catastrophic war to be furious about. So when Gore's second term ends, it's Clinton who runs and Clinton who wins, defeating former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney and taking office in 2009, on the strength of the experience and the establishment backing that in the real world the anti-war movement used as a club against her. Obama's turn comes later in 2016, but he's on his own clock. But one thing refuses to change, and it's the thing this whole story keeps circling back to. The machinery of grievance, the talk radio and the cable news, and the permanent industry of political rage. It was built on the right through the 1990s, and it runs no matter who wins. In our timeline, it spent years insisting the Democrats and a runaway Florida court tried to steal an election that Bush won. In this one, It spends those same years insisting a stolen recount handed the presidency to Al Gore. It's the same engine and the same fury. It just has a stronger grievance aimed at a new enemy. Flip the one vote, and you don't cool the rage. You just give it a fresh target and a president who this time actually won. Seven Supreme Court justices looked at Florida's recount and agreed it was broken. Five of them decided the cure for a broken count was to stop counting. Anthony Kennedy was one of those five. He never wrote down a single word in favor of the other path, the one where you fix the count instead of ending it. Other justices wrote those words. Stevens wrote them, Briar wrote them. Kennedy just didn't cross the room. Sit with how small. The thing is. One man, one vote on a narrow question that wasn't about the Constitution and wasn't about the law, but about the remedy. Count it or stop it. And hanging off that one syllable of difference, a war that kills four and a half thousand Americans and hundreds of thousands of others, or no war at all. A secret illegal surveillance program or one that stays inside the law? A Supreme Court that swings hard right for 20 years, or one that holds in the center? Thousands of people who are dead in our world, breathing in the other. The whole weight of the early 21st century balanced on whether a single justice says fix or stop. The strangest thing the alternate timeline shows you isn't what changes, it's what doesn't. In the world where Kennedy crosses the room, And Gore wins, the country is just as broken, just as enraged, and just as convinced it's been cheated. The only thing that flips is which half of the country believes it. Stop the count, and half the nation spends a generation sure the election was stolen from them. Continue the count, and the other half does. Unfortunately, the grievance doesn't heal, it just changes hands. Justice Stevens saw it coming. And he wrote it down that same day in the last line of his dissent. The identity of the loser, he wrote, is perfectly clear. It is the nation's confidence in the judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law. That loser loses no matter how Kennedy votes. Count or halt, fix or stop. The confidence drains away either way. Stevens wasn't describing one timeline, he was describing the Of the court wading into that river at all. The vote that didn't switch made George W. Bush president. The vote that did would have given it to Al Gore. But neither one could hand the country back what it lost in that room on December 12, 2000. The belief that the nine people who decided it were judges and not just politicians and rogues. Decisions don't get do-overs, but on this show they do. If you like the show, please rate and subscribe wherever you happen to be listening. It helps other people find it, and it allows me to understand whether people actually enjoy this show. Until next time, I'm Kevin Perez Allen. Thank you for hitting CtrlZ.