The Post-Election confrontation over the results: learning lessons of Florida 2000

We have to assume at this point that after the vote, the Trump Administration, the Republican Party, and their private-militia allies will make attempts to stop the vote count. They will use legal means to stop the vote count. But if the 2000 Bush v. Gore fight is any indication, they will also rely on popular mobilization. Or at least mobilizing their activists, as in the infamous "Brooks Brothers Riot".

Jane McAlevey was an AFL-CIO staffer on the ground in Florida in the effort to defend against the Republican post-election strategy. In this excerpt from her 2014 book, Raising Expectations (and Raising Hell): My Decade Fighting for the Labor Movement, she describes how the Republicans used both popular mobilization and legal strategies, while the Gore campaign was insistent that even their labor allies should not counter with a public mobilization component, To Stop an Electoral Coup, Study What Went Wrong in the 2000 Florida Recount Jacobin 10/30/2020:

That was the Democratic Party. We were organized labor. We didn’t represent the candidate. We represented thousands of union workers whose votes were being stolen, and millions more who would suffer if the whole damn election was stolen. We knew how to mobilize and we had the resources to do it. We had the Florida voter lists. We had the computers. We had an army of smart people on the ground, ready to go.

And we had a base of literally millions of really angry people. We could have had buses of senior citizens chasing Katherine Harris, Florida’s secretary of state and the Bush campaign’s hatchet woman, all over the state — a Seniors Truth Commission of lovely, smart, appealing, telegenic elders lined up with their walkers outside every single meeting Harris was in and camped outside her house at night while she slept. “Don’t Let the Republicans Steal Votes from Your Grandparents.”

All they needed was a top-notch lead organizer and an experienced field team, a lawyer, a communications team: in short, exactly the big support we had on hand. They could have operated twenty-four/seven, like in a strike. Unions know how to do strikes, don’t they?

That moment, when we could have supported the Jesse Jackson rally [supporting the Democrats on the vote count issue] and didn’t, could have organized something of our own and didn’t, was the turning point, the moment when the Gore campaign and their unquestioning AFL-CIO cohort snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.

I have a great deal of admiration for Al Gore, who seems to have recognized after this experience that more pointed Democratic political strategies were necessary. He opposed the Iraq War, and he has provided an enormous political service by his efforts to raise efforts about the threat of climate change. And the Gore campaign was not the only people surprised by the Supreme Court's stunning, partisan-political intervention into the Presidential selection. That was the most dramatic at that time of extent to which Republican partisan radicalism had intensified. It's obviously gotten much worse since. 

McAlevey recalls:

The US Supreme Court stepped in and took the case out of the hands of the Florida court.

The Gore people were flipping out because, guess what, they hadn’t planned it this way. They’d imagined they were involved in a civilized legal proceeding, that they were going to “win the case” methodically by recounting the votes, that the law was going to keep the matter local, away from the Supreme Court where things didn’t look so good.

But the Democrats need to draw appropriate lessons for that. And establishment Democrats are generally uncomfortable with relying on or encouraging any kind of mass mobilizations. But they need to learn appropriate lessons from the 2000 experience.

Maria Stephan argues in Nonviolent Civic Action May Help Defend the Integrity of the Election Just Security 10/13/2020:

Various organizations are providing trainings in nonviolent action and violence de-escalation techniques, drawing on the history of Black-led protests during the Civil Rights movement, which faced both federal forces and Ku Klux Klan terrorists. They are showing how sequencing of a broad array of tactics, including petitions, vigils, boycotts, strikes, and stay-aways could be used effectively in the event of a contested election, executive power grab, or coup.

While a military seizure of power is unlikely in the United States, an autogolpe, or an attempt by those in authority to expand their power – as Viktor Orban has done in Hungary and Tayyip Erdogan has done in Turkey, is more likely. We would face such a scenario if the Trump administration declares victory while votes are being counted, tries to stop the vote count, or refuses to leave power in the event he loses.

Something similar happened in Serbia in 2000, Ukraine in 2004, and the Gambia in 2016, when incumbent presidents attempted to steal the elections and were confronted with mass nonviolent resistance involving large segments of the population, prompting the officials to accept the legitimate results and leave office. In the United States, grassroots groups and initiatives like Protect the Results, Choose Democracy, the Fight Back Table, and Hold the Line are preparing for those possibilities and strategizing on how to sustain pressure. That might include, if necessary — through labor strikes and consumer boycotts –ensuring that all legitimate votes are counted and the rightful winner is sworn in on Jan. 20. [my emphasis; links in original]