Hello. Hello, Sam. How are you, Ron? I am reasonably good. I'm among the healthy and lucky.

Good. Good. Long time no talk. I miss you, friend. I miss you too. You are one of the reasons I wish I were still going places.

Hello. Hello. Is that Mara here? Hi.

Yes. So let me just wait. Let me get a pillow to put behind the mic. Hello.

So I'm so happy to be doing something with Ron. Normally they won't let us be on together. They distribute the old people around the show.

I resist. I resist that.

But it's undeniable. I can't do. What's you mean, Domenico will never be together.

Now, whether there's some function distribution, but it's I think I can't help but kind of feel that it's demographic a little bit.

And I don't know what other demographics we share. So that's kind of people who remember Jimmy Carter. How about that as a category?

Hey, y'all. You are listening to It's been a minute from NPR. I'm Sam Sanders. And for this episode, I invited two dear friends of mine from my days on NPR's politics desk.

NPR's Ron Elving and Mara Laiison. The election is just a week away. And all the anxiety and worry about early voting and mail-in voting and counting the votes and how long the election will take.

It's stressful, huh? You know, 2020 is unprecedented for so many reasons. But I have not been able to shake this idea that we've actually been here before. Or at least kind of been here before 20 years ago.

This is an ABC News special, the 2000 vote.

Election Day, the day to choose a new president for a new century.

The year was 2000 in one corner, vice president Al Gore and his running mates, Senator Joe Lieberman. In the other, Texas Governor George W. Bush and former Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney.

Might be hard to believe now, but before that fateful election night, it had been a fairly boring campaign season, especially by today's standards. You could even call it Clint.

But of course, that changed pretty quickly. Ron Elving was actually in the NPR Newsroom that night.

I remember being at a decision desk, as we called it, where we were handling 50 cards for the 50 states. And checking them off as they came in. And of course, before we got started, we could check off quite a number of states we thought were pretty obvious and still are in today's politics.

But we checked off a lot of states and then we were also going to be checking the Senate and checking gubernatorial cases and all the rest of it and the House seats.

So we had tons of all this stuff ready to do the reporting. And we knew which states we were interested in. We were interested in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Florida. Those were the three.

And very early on in the evening, there were some good indications for Gore from Pennsylvania and Michigan, which eventually he did carry.

But the real fascinating thing was that the exit polls were showing Florida going for Gore.

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