ASHVILLE - His lifelong dream of the presidency in a shambles, Al Gore stood alone in a tunnel at Legislative Plaza yesterday, ready to take the stage in the pre-dawn rain and concede the 2000 election to George W. Bush.
Then his campaign chairman, William Daley, walked up with stunning news: The seemingly lopsided loss of Florida was now a near-tie, with the chance that Gore could not only claim the state, but the title of the nation's 43d president.
Gore and Daley joined other aides. ''You're not going to do this,'' they said, urging their candidate to postpone his concession.
A few hundred miles away, in Austin, Texas, Bush had reveled for 50 minutes in the belief that he had followed his father's footsteps to the White House. His parents and brother Jeb, the governor of Florida, celebrated with him upstairs at the Texas Governor's Mansion, happy their family had matched the record of John Adams and John Quincy Adams, the first father-son combination to hold the presidency.
Then Bush picked up the phone. Gore was on the line.
''Let me make sure I understand,'' Bush said, doing one of his patented, exaggerated double-takes. ''You're calling me back to retract your concession?''
''You don't have to get snippy about this,'' Gore said.
Bush defended the Florida results. His own brother Jeb had assured him.
''Let me explain something,'' Gore told him, according to the Associated Press. ''Your YOUNGER brother is not the ultimate authority on this.''
With those two moments - in Nashville and Austin - what is shaping up to be the closest election in the nation's 224-year history slid into limbo.
Gore, trying to succeed President Clinton, clung to his victory in the nation's popular vote, believing he might also reach the necessary 270 Electoral College votes to become president if a recount in Florida swung the state in his behalf.
Bush, trying to avenge his father's loss to Clinton and Gore in the bitter election of 1992, boiled with exasperation, believing he had gained 271 electoral votes and thus had fulfilled the constitutional requirements to assume the presidency.
''I was fully prepared to go out and give a speech and thank all my supporters,'' Bush said as he sat at lunch yesterday. ''And he withdrew his earlier comments, and here we sit.''
Majority doesn't always rule
While much of the American democracy is based on the concept that the majority rules, presidential elections are unique in that they are actually determined not by the masses, but by the vote of the Electoral College.
A total of 538 electoral votes is dispersed among the states based upon their population, with California and its teeming cities having the most - 54 - and vast-but-sparsely-populated states like Alaska or Vermont holding just three.
That two-tiered approach creates the possibility of one candidate winning the popular vote but another claiming the presidency through the Electoral College.
So each presidential election boils down to perceived pockets of strength and simple math: Can a candidate win the popular vote in enough states to cobble together the accompanying electoral votes into a 270-vote majority?
Recognizing the lingering political costs of Clinton's impeachment, Gore's strategists abandoned any pretense of sweeping the nation, and instead adopted a simple strategy.
It called for the vice president to win in the largely Democratic Northeast; to claim California and its electoral mother lode, and to hope for success in a ''trifecta'' of vote-rich states: Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Florida.
Also figuring in their calculation were victories in reliably Democratic Hawaii and Washington state, which had been thrown into doubt because of Bush's strong campaigning and the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader's appeal to the abundant environmentalists in the Pacific Northwest.
As the polls closed Tuesday night, Bush jumped out to an early lead. He won in both Indiana and Kentucky, the first two states to close their polls. Gore, however, struck back with an early success: At 6:50 p.m. Central time, the networks projected that he would take Florida.
''I think we're going to win in one of the great nail-biting elections in history,'' said Gore's adviser Robert Shrum, whose wife hugged him as the two heard the news on a television set in the Loews Vanderbilt Plaza Hotel. ''It's just a matter of adding up the votes now.''
Skipping a party
Bush learned that he had lost Florida shortly after 6 p.m. He and his family were having dinner at the Shoreline Grill, an upscale Austin restaurant, where he was seated near his brother Jeb. Shortly afterward, Bush, his wife, and his parents left unexpectedly, skipping a planned election party with 100 friends and family at the Four Seasons Hotel next door. Jeb rushed to find out what had gone wrong.
''Needless to say, there was some consternation with the Florida governor during our family dinner when somebody jumped the proverbial gun,'' George Bush said yesterday. ''He's the person who really went through some interesting emotions.''
Bush's chief political strategist, Karl Rove, determined the count might be incorrect. He and other aides huddled in the campaign headquarters at the corner of 3d Street and Congress Avenue, making phone calls to Florida, precinct by precinct, to figure out where the count actually stood.
By 8 p.m., Rove decided the map was too close to call, and the campaign phoned the networks to demand a retraction.
''It was devastating when Florida went south,'' said a media adviser, Mark McKinnon. ''The whole campaign went dark. And we really thought it was going to be tough to pull off. So when the projection came and they were putting it back into the undecided column, we all got revived.''
In Nashville, the Gore campaign experienced the opposite range of emotions. The Loews lobby, which had pulsed with the highs of the election, emptied out, and aides who had predicted victory retreated to their hotel rooms to sweat out the returns.
As the night went on, Gore fulfilled the rest of his strategy. The networks called Pennsylvania and Michigan on his behalf, followed by California. Washington and Iowa were leaning in his favor.
But at 9:06 p.m., CBS News anchor Dan Rather intoned, ''It's beginning to look increasingly like the advantage is going to George W. Bush.'' Four minutes later, he added that Gore was ''hanging, hanging by a thread.''
At 1:15 a.m. Central time, the joy that had crept back into Bush's campaign headquarters was transformed into unbridled ecstasy. The networks had given Florida to Bush, and had announced he had won the election.
Rove picked up the phone and called the Governor's Mansion. ''Mr. President, you've won,'' he said.
Campaign aides flocked from headquarters to the event site, some in tears, and several aides began giving victory interviews. ''It all happened boom, boom, boom,'' said Stuart Stevens, a media strategist.
Music blared, and at 1:40 a.m., someone announced that Bush would be coming out to speak, prompting hundreds to come back to hear him.
Gore gets bad news
The network reports that Bush was leading in Florida by 50,000 votes, with 98 percent of precincts reporting, were grim news for the Gore campaign.
The vice president, standing in the 7th-floor room at the Loews where he and his staff had drafted a victory speech, instead returned to the ninth floor to deliver the bad news to his family. Aides worked up a concession speech.
''It's a short, simple, and, I think, moving speech, which fortunately was not given,'' Shrum said of Gore's planned remarks.
Gore changed from an outfit of jeans, flip-flops, and a polo shirt into a blue business suit. Then he and wife Tipper got into an armored vice presidential limousine for the drive to Nashville's War Memorial and the Legislative Plaza out front.
As everyone rode in silence, a pager on the hip of Michael Feldman, Gore's traveling chief of staff, beeped in alert. ''Call switchboard,'' the message read, referring to the White House switchboard. ''Call holding with Michael Whouley.''
Whouley, a scrapper from Dorchester, Mass., was in charge of Gore's get-out-the-vote effort and monitoring the returns in the ''boiler room'' at campaign headquarters. Logging onto the Florida secretary of state's Web site, he couldn't believe his eyes. Gore wasn't trailing Bush by 50,000 votes: It was still quite close.
''This thing is 6,000 votes. Where are you?'' Whouley shouted, when Feldman returned his page. By that time, the motorcade was just two blocks from Legislative Plaza. Feldman put Whouley on hold, and used his cell phone's conferencing feature to patch in Daley, riding ahead in another staff van.
''By the time we got Michael back on the phone,'' the margin''had gone from 6,000 to less than 1,000,'' Feldman said. Further buoying their spirits were reports of thousands of yet uncounted absentee ballots, as well as news of some ballot irregularities in Florida.
Determined to put on a brave face, Gore had marched from his motorcade directly to the tunnel beneath Legislative Plaza. He was just about to take the stage when Daley caught up with him. Gore returned to a holding room.
By 2:30 a.m., Daley called Evans back to say the election's results were in doubt. Several minutes later, Gore placed the call to Bush. ''Circumstances have changed,'' the vice president said. Privately, Bush aides were incensed.
As Gore headed back to his motorcade for the return trip to his hotel, Daley took the stage with a quickly drafted statement that read: ''This race is simply too close to call, and until the results, the recount, is concluded and the results of Florida become official, our campaign continues.''
The statement reverberated through the Bush campaign, prompting Evans to draft remarks of his own.
Taking the stage where Bush had expected to lay claim to the American presidency, he announced: ''They're still counting, and I'm confident that when it's all said and done, we will prevail.''
Johnson, traveling with Gore, reported from Nashville; Kornblut, traveling with Bush, reported from Austin.
