n the big battleground states, Vice President Al Gore was propelled by the strong support from labor unions, working women, and voters who made up their minds in the last days before the election. Governor George W. Bush of Texas was the favorite of men, the well-heeled, and voters who thought his honesty and leadership would make him a better president.
And even as the election remained deadlocked late into the night, it appeared that those two clusters of colliding forces would lead the candidates to carve up this crucial electoral territory.
For months, the two presidential candidates fought fiercely to win the electoral-vote rich states of Pennsylvania, Michigan, Florida, and Wisconsin, saturating their airwaves with advertising and visiting the states dozens of times.
But the battle didn't end there. Late into last night, the close combat continued, with Gore taking Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Illinois, while Bush appeared to hold a slight advantage in Florida and Wisconsin. And because neither candidate swept the largest electoral states, they faced the challenge of stitching together a majority beyond the major battlegrounds.
Initially, the television networks projected Gore had won the Sunshine State. But as the votes got tallied, it appeared that Jeb Bush, the Florida governor, had not let his brother down, after all. Bush refused to concede that he had lost either Florida or Pennsylvania.
In Florida, with 25 electoral votes, Bush counted on both his brother to generate a record turnout and for Miami's conservative Cuban-American community to give him a boost over Gore. The Democrats were relying on senior citizens, who make up one-third of Florida's voters, and on vice presidential candidate Joseph I. Lieberman's popularity among Jewish voters to help them win the state.
Exit polls conducted by the television networks showed that senior voters in Florida, so hotly wooed on the issues of Social Security and prescription drugs, were equally divided - 49 percent for Gore, 49 percent for Bush. Gore carried Hispanic voters, 57 to 40 percent.
In Pennsylvania, 64 percent of voters told pollsters they preferred Gore on the issues of prescription drugs, education, and Social Security.
Michigan voters rated the economy as the issue that mattered most, and by a 63-to-35 percent margin they favored Gore's positions. Asked what qualities they considered most important in a president, Michigan voters rated honesty as first, and by a huge 80-to-15 percent margin, they gave Bush the nod on that.
The gender gap, the difference between the way men and women vote, was more pronounced than it has ever been in a presidential election and dramatic in battleground states. Exit polls showed Gore getting 53 percent of the female vote in Wisconsin but only 37 percent of the male vote. In Michigan, 54 percent of the men voted for Bush but only 40 percent of the women supported him.
Pennsylvania, with 23 electoral votes, has come down on the winning side in the last 10 presidential elections, and Gore and Bush campaigned there as if their election depended on it. Among the voters who decided in the last three days - 11 percent of the total - 53 percent voted for Gore and 36 percent voted for Bush.
Both organized labor and the NAACP poured millions of dollars into get-out-the-vote drives, and the result was large turnouts in major cities and strong support for Gore in union households.
The vice president did well in Pennsylvania's urban centers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, and he did better than expected in the Republican-leaning suburbs around Philadelphia, where Bush had campaigned vigorously.
In an effort to drum up votes for Gore in Philadelphia's black community, the Democrats rushed the Rev. Jesse Jackson into the city late yesterday afternoon to make turnout appeals on black radio and rally workers headed home from work.
The black vote in Philadelphia was considered essential to Gore's chances of victory in Pennsylvania, where Democrats traditionally count on winning the city with a margin of better than 250,000.
Bush had counted on Tom Ridge, the popular Republican governor, to help him carry the state. Exit polls showed Bush was not winning among Pennsylvania's large population of Roman Catholic voters, who were targeted by the GOP. According to exit polls, they split evenly among Bush and Gore.
No state was more of a battleground than Michigan, where GOP Govenor John Engler was a strong Bush partisan and where the National Rifle Association went all-out to get hunters and gun owners to back Bush. But the state's largest labor unions endorsed Gore, and union members, including United Auto Workers, who have a contract agreement to get Election Day off, were pressed into action in a massive get-out-the-vote operation to try to hold the state for Gore.
It appeared to have had an impact. Among voters from Michigan union households, 63 percent supported Gore, 33 percent went for Bush, and 3 percent supported Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.
Michigan, with 18 electoral votes, gave majorities to the Clinton-Gore ticket in 1992 and 1996.
Gore also received 92 percent of the black vote in Michigan and 59 percent of voters who identified themselves as working women.
Generally, in the battleground states Gore did better among low- and middle-income voters, among those who called themselves moderates, and among young voters. Independents were breaking evenly between Bush and Gore. Bush was doing better among voters who were married and had children, among men, and with voters who earn more than $100,000 a year.
According to exit polls, the voters viewed Bush as more honest and a stronger leader, while Gore was considered more caring and experienced. Bush was doing better in the suburbs; Gore was getting more support in battleground cities.
Organized labor was also playing a role in Wisconsin, a traditionally Democratic state where Gore was being vexed by both a Bush grass-roots army led by Tommy Thompson, a four-term GOP governor, and by pockets of strong support for Nader. In Madison, for example, the state capital and the home of the University of Wisconsin, Nader was garnering 7 percent of the electoral vote.
''Nader could provide the margin of victory here for Bush,'' said Jeff Mayers, editor of Wispolitics, an online news service in Madison. Mayers said turnout had been steady to heavy around the state, both in the Fox River Valley, a GOP stronghold, and in Milwaukee, where Gore counted on a big African-American voter turnout.
