Abstract
The media incorrectly called Al Gore the winner of Florida at 7:48 p.m. eastern time with 12 min still remaining to vote in the 10 Central time zone counties in Florida. In addition, the media reported that polls “close in Florida at 7:00 p.m. eastern time,” which may have misled some panhandle voters into thinking their polls closed at 6:00 p.m. central time. Given the closeness of the popular vote in Florida, and the degree to which the outcome in the state was contested, these media miscues could have been decisive in the election. When Bush was behind in the recount, his supporters adamantly claimed their candidate suffered a loss of votes because of these media miscues. We test this hypothesis and reject it. Our regression results find no significant impact on the Gore/Bush vote differential, nor do we find any impact on voter turnout or third party voting, in these counties.
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Notes
- 1.
Several of these studies were featured on the www.yahoo.com site and were summarized on Greg Adam’s web page at Carnegie Mellon University (madison.hss.cmu.edu) and Jonathan Okeefe’s webpage (bestbookmarks.com), which are archived at the Internet Archive.
- 2.
We know of only two other attempts to study this particular issue. Romely (2000) finds that George W. Bush’s relative performance was better in the central time zone counties in 2000 than was Bob Doles performance in the election of 1996. Using a larger panel of Florida presidential elections since 1976, Lott Jr (2005) finds an “unusual and large drop off in Republican voting rates” in Florida’s western panhandle.
- 3.
(Gore %-Bush %) \(\times \) 100.
- 4.
(Total votes 2000/Total votes 1996).
- 5.
((Total votes 2000/Registered voters) \(\times \) 100).
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Sobel, R.S., Lawson, R.A. (2017). The Effect of Early Media Projections on Presidential Voting in the Florida Panhandle. In: Hall, J. (eds) Explorations in Public Sector Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-47828-9_7
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