In a 2001 article, “Trust the People:  Political Party Coalitions and the 2000 Election” in Jack Rakove (editor), The Unfinished Election of 2000, I wrote the following:

            The 2000 National Election Studies continued to conduct interviews for nearly two months after election day.  Presciently, they added a question asking whether the election was fair.  From the very beginnings of the post-election interviewing, two-thirds of the Republicans thought that the election was fair, but Democrats and independents were in the middle, with somewhat less than half of them agreeing.  During the period when the Supreme Court returned the first decision to the Florida Supreme Count on December 3 to when they made their final judgment on December 12, Republicans became even more sure that the election was fair (80 percent agreeing with this judgment) and independents and Democrats became less sure, with only about 40 percent believing it was fair. [Footnote:  The post-election interviewing by the National Election Studies does not create a random sample for every day so the observed changes could be the result of the changing composition of the people interviewed.  I have checked this possibility by extensive internal analysis of the data and by considering other published polls.  The results reported in the text seem quite genuine. (My thanks to Richard Goulding for researching the other polls.)]  

It is not surprising that Democrats thought the result unfair and Republicans thought it fair, but the telling fact is that even independents thought the election was more unfair than fair.  In addition, the survey asked people to rate the Supreme Court on a ‘feeling thermometer’ from 0 to 100.  Again, around the first twelve days of December, people’s feelings toward the Supreme Court dropped sharply by about five points, a drop of 7.5 points among Democrats, a drop of 5.7 among independents, and an increase of 4.3 among Republicans.  It is hard to know whether this will have a lasting effect, but there is no question that people noticed that the Supreme Court intruded in the electoral process in a way that only partisan Republicans found acceptable.

Henry E. Brady

Goldman School of Public Policy

University of California Berkeley