WASHINGTON, March 13 (UPI) -- In October 2000, United Press International was the only media outlet to predict at least the possibility that whoever won the presidency with a majority of the Electoral College might not be the candidate who received the most popular votes.
At the time, one month before the presidential election, we were pitied as politically naïve. As it turned out, we were politically lucky.
We did not really predict the election of a minority president. We only pointed to conditions that, for the first time in a long while, opened a "small window" for one.
As it turned out, Democratic Vice President Al Gore won the popular vote by more than 500,000 votes, but Republican Texas Gov. George Bush, after claiming Florida with the help of the Supreme Court, won the Electoral College by five votes, 271-266, and rode that limping mandate in triumph to the White House.
Since the middle of the 19th century, presidential electors have been selected by popular ballot, not by state legislatures, and there have been only three presidential races won by candidates who did not receive the most popular votes. All three were Republicans: Rutherford B. Hayes in 1876 (the disputed election is the subject of a new book by Chief Justice William Rehnquist); Benjamin Harrison in 1888 and Bush.
All three initially had to contend with a country that was skeptical of their victories and authority, to put it mildly. Bush himself was lightly regarded until the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, gave him a chance to display his leadership.
Could such an election scenario unfold again in 2004?
It could. Actually, the window of opportunity is slightly wider than it was in 2000.
All that is required is a sharply divided public and negative campaigns that turn off most of the indifferent but fire up the true believers.
Even the Electoral College arithmetic makes it easier for a minority candidate to win in 2004.
Electors are assigned to each state based on their congressional delegation: For instance, two senators plus four House members equals six electoral votes.
The Constitution gives state legislatures the power to decide how votes for president are cast. As the Supreme Court pointed out in Bush vs. Gore, there is no constitutional right of the individual to vote for president.
Voters in the vast majority of states may think they are voting for a presidential candidate, President Bush or Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass., but in actuality they are voting for slates of electors who are pledged to vote for one or the other in the Electoral College. The two exceptions are Maine and Nebraska, where two electors are chosen statewide by popular vote and the rest by the popular vote within each congressional district, according to the Federal Election Commission.
On the Monday following the second Wednesday in December -- blame federal law for this convoluted wording -- each state's electors meet in the state capital and cast their electoral votes. Each elector casts one vote for president and one for vice president.
The votes from all the states then are sent to the president of the Senate (usually the sitting vice president of the United States), who reads them on Jan. 6. Then someone officially becomes president or is re-elected. The swearing in occurs on Jan. 20, which is why the next administration begins in 2005, not 2004.
To win re-election, Bush must do at least as well as he did in 2000, hanging on to such traditionally Democratic states as West Virginia.
Democrats are fond of saying that if Gore had won West Virginia (five electoral votes), President Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas (six) or even his home state of Tennessee (11), Gore, not Bush, would be president.
True in 2000. Not true in 2004, except in the case of Tennessee.
Kerry has a more uphill battle than Gore in achieving an Electoral College majority, even if he continues to hold on to a the narrow popular lead that polls give him now.
The reason is that the states won by Bush in 2000, giving him 271 Electoral College votes, now account for 278 electoral votes because of congressional redistricting following the 2000 census, according to political analyst David Leip, while the electoral votes in states won by Gore (266 in 2000) have shrunk to 260.
The Sun Belt and Southern states, now for the most part firmly Bush territory, made the most gains in population and reaped the electoral benefits. Democratic powerhouse states such as New York, Illinois and Pennsylvania actually lost electoral votes. Another traditional Democratic state, California, gained as usual, but not enough to offset the losses in other states.
Moreover, if voters follow true to form in 2004, Bush will win big across the broad sparsely populated center and South of the United States. Kerry will take the large states, probably by big margins, but elsewhere runs the risk of diluting his popular vote by garnering majorities in the urban centers while losing the state at large in the winner-take-all system in 48 states.
For example, Kerry could win Atlanta big time but lose Georgia and its 15 electoral votes to Bush.
In 2000, Gore won California and its 54 electoral votes by more than 1 million popular votes. But the advantage California gave him was cut in half by Florida and its 25 electoral votes, which he lost by fewer than 600 popular votes. Kerry could do the same in 2004 -- win the big states big, so much so that he wins the popular vote, but lose the White House elsewhere by coming in a close second in the mid-sized to smaller states.
Or the opposite could certainly happen, given how evenly the country is split. Bush could win the popular vote, but lose Florida or West Virginia and Ohio and join his father as a one-term president.
None of this is proof, of course, that a minority candidate will win the 2004 presidential election. In fact, it's far more probable that the winner of the popular vote will also be the winner of the Electoral College.
But at least the window of opportunity for a minority president is open, even more so than it was in 2000.
If that happens, and the phenomenon is accompanied by expected glitches in new computer voting machines and the thousands of old machines that still have to serve through one more election, whoever is president in 2005 will have to work hard to win the confidence of the people.
