[54] During his campaign, Bush criticized his Democratic opponent, incumbent Vice President Al Gore, over gun control and taxation.[77]
When the election returns were tallied on November 7, Bush had won 29 states, including Florida. The closeness of the Florida outcome led to a recount.[54] The initial recount also went to Bush, but the outcome was tied up in lower courts for a month until eventually reaching the U.S. Supreme Court.[78] On December 9, in the controversial Bush v. Gore ruling,[79] the Court reversed a Florida Supreme Court decision that had ordered a third count, and stopped an ordered statewide hand recount based on the argument that the use of different standards among Florida's counties violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.[54] The machine recount showed that Bush had won the Florida vote by a margin of 537 votes out of six million casts.[80] Although he had received 543,895 fewer individual nationwide votes than Gore, Bush won the election, receiving 271 electoral votes to Gore's 266 (Gore had actually been awarded 267 votes by the states pledged to him plus the District of Columbia, but one D.C. elector abstained). 