2000 United States elections
overview of elections in the United States of America in the year of 2000

Elections were held in the United States on November 7, 2000. Republican governor George W. Bush of Texas defeated Democratic Vice President Al Gore of Tennessee in the presidential election. Republicans retained control of both houses of Congress, giving the party unified control of Congress and the presidency for the first time since the 1954 elections.
With Democratic president Bill Clinton term-limited, Gore won his party's nomination by defeating Senator Bill Bradley in the Democratic primaries. Bush defeated Senator John McCain in the Republican primaries to win his party's presidential nomination. Bush took 271 of the 538 electoral votes, winning the decisive state of Florida by a margin of 537 votes after a recount was halted by the Supreme Court in the case of Bush v. Gore. Bush was the first winning presidential candidate to lose the popular vote since the 1888 presidential election. This marked the first time since 1992 where the winning presidential candidate's party failed to have any coattails in either house of Congress, and the first time since 1988 where this happened with the winning Republican candidate; Bush's father George H. W. was elected president that year.
Democrats picked up a net of four seats in the Senate, tying Republicans, but Dick Cheney provided the tie-breaking vote as Vice President of the United States.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “2000 United States elections” is overview of elections in the United States of America in the year of 2000. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through United, States and elections, not as a finished interpretation.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 15, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7892455. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2000, 1954, 1888 and 1992.
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This entry incorporates text from “2000 United States elections” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.