HISTORY DEPT.

20 Years Before Jan. 6, Al Gore Stood Up to His Own Party. Mike Pence Was Watching.

The certification of the Electoral College vote was once seen as ceremonial. Two moments 20 years apart remind us how high the stakes really are.

Illustration by Barbara Gibson for POLITICO

By Michael Kruse

01/05/2025 04:00 PM EST

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Michael Kruse is a senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.

Last summer, in a private moment at the memorial service for ex-senator Joe Lieberman at the Washington Hebrew Congregation, two former vice presidents had a conversation.

Al Gore thanked Mike Pence, according to people close to both men, in an interaction that’s never been reported, for his actions at the Capitol the day it was attacked by a mob. Pence, on the opposite side of the political aisle but in the same set of pews, said something surprising in response. He suggested to Gore he had done what he’d done on Jan. 6, 2021, in part because of what he had seen as a newly sworn-in member of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001. He had witnessed a vice president like him stand up to pressure from his own party to defy the Constitution even though doing so by definition meant personal defeat.

“I never forgot it,” Pence said to Gore, in the recollection of a Pence ally.

“You don’t know how much that means,” Gore said, “coming from you.”

What Pence did and did not do four years back underscored the elementally high peril of what’s often considered all but a formality: the certification of the Electoral College vote. Obviously, there are no guarantees in modern political life that rules will be followed, that norms will be respected, that precedent will hold, and Pence knew this better and more viscerally than most. Because of Jan. 6, 2001, he knew on Jan. 6, 2021, that in a moment of rote ceremony there also was ample opportunity for destabilizing mischief: When the person in charge of this ministerial act has a much more personal stake, the bedrock of American self-governance is at once at its most visible and its most vulnerable.

Vice President Al Gore (left) leads the procession of senators to the House chamber in the U.S. Capitol for the certification of electoral votes, on Jan. 6, 2001. | Shawn Thew/AFP via Getty Images

On Monday, then, Kamala Harris will do what no one since Al Gore has done — preside over the process that makes official his or her own defeat for the presidency. Given the nature of the results of this past election — no serious allegations of fraud plus a clear loss of the popular vote — it’s unlikely there will be much if any pressure on Harris to do more than call out the count. But seen in the light of the chaos and physical violence of 2021, and the still-palpable bitterness from 2001, her adherence to this constitutional process carries its own weight.

“Not enough people think about this,” Mitchell Berger, a prominent South Florida attorney and longtime Gore confidant, told me. “Vice President Harris is going to do her duty in 2025. Mike Pence did his duty in 2021,” Berger said. “Gore did his duty in 2001.”

“He could have caused a lot of turmoil. He could have done some version of what Donald Trump did following 2020, but he chose not to — because he values the institutions of democracy and realizes that they need to be nurtured,” John Geer, a political scientist at Vanderbilt who’s married to Gore’s chief of staff, told me.

Vice President Mike Pence is evacuated from near the Senate chamber as rioters breach the U.S. Capitol, on Jan. 6, 2021. | Senate Television via AP

“Al Gore helped break a fever, and Donald Trump threw gasoline on a fire,” former Gore (and Joe Biden) speechwriter Jeff Nussbaum told me. “Two diametrically opposite reactions — and the irony, of course, is that Al Gore had far more right to be aggrieved.”

Aides to Gore and Pence did not respond to requests for the two men to talk in more detail about Jan. 6, 2001, or Jan. 6, 2021, or that encounter last summer at the synagogue. But it was clear to those close to them that this shared history meant a lot to both men. “The fact that the vice president discharged his duty that day despite the fact that many in his party believed he had won the election made an indelible impression on me,” Pence would later say of Gore, “about the resilience of our institutions when our leaders are willing to keep faith with the Constitution.”

“Mr. Vice President,” South Florida congressmember Peter Deutsch said early in the joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2001, “I make a point of order.”

“The gentleman,” said Gore, speaking in the stilted, scripted language practically mandated by his role in the task at hand, “will state his point of order.”

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