Elián González Defeated Al Gore

Was the decisive factor in last year's presidential election the U.S. Supreme Court, the Clinton scandals, the debates, or a little shipwrecked boy who was seized from his Miami relatives one year ago by federal agents?

Approved by the Clinton Administration's Justice Department, the raid on April 22, 2000, to take custody of Elián González was emotional and dramatic—and so was its impact on Cuban-American voters. In the view of Miami-based pollster Sergio Bendixen, "It was humiliating to Cuban-Americans, and the 2000 election was payback."

They called it el voto castigo, or "the punishment vote." Whom did Cuban-American voters punish? Democratic nominee Al Gore and his fellow Democrats. "The Democrats first lost tremendous support among Cuban-Americans in the 1960s because of the Bay of Pigs," Bendixen noted. "But since the middle 1980s, the Democratic Party had been gaining with Cuban-American voters, from the teens [in terms of percentage of the Cuban-American vote] to the low 20s to the mid-30s. The Elián González saga reversed that pattern in a dramatic way."