Gore, who had taken the lead in the popular vote in the early hours of Wednesday morning, had phoned Bush to tell him he planned to concede. But he called the Texas governor back and said, "It's too close. I want to retract" my concession.

"If George Bush carries Florida his first call has to be to Ralph Nader to thank him," Lawrence O'Donnell said on MSNBC. Still undecided at 5:30 a.m. EST were Oregon and Wisconsin, states where Nader was running strong. But Wisconsin slipped into the Gore column around 6 a.m., giving Gore a 260-to-246 electoral vote lead.

The late Mel Carnahan was elected to the U.S. Senate from Missouri, defeating incumbent Sen. John Ashcroft. His widow, Jean, will probably assume the seat. Carnahan was killed in a plane crash during the campaign. Ashcroft conceded Wednesday. "I hope the outcome of this election is a comfort to Mrs. Carnahan," he said.

Hillary Rodham Clinton won a decisive victory in the New York Senate race against opponent Rep. Rick Lazio, becoming the first first lady to be elected to office.

Early results were discouraging to the GOP. "It's getting more and more difficult for the Bush team to put together a winning combination," said former Reagan aide Ed Rollins to Chris Matthews on MSNBC after Pennsylvania went into the Gore column.

Pundits had already begun the postmortems on the flagging Bush campaign. But the news that Florida was back in the tossup column tilted the momentum back toward the Texas governor.

Some Republicans had been insisting since early in the evening that the networks were wrong. "I'm going to go out on a limb ... The state's gonna flip," said Mary Matalin, referring to Florida, where half a million absentee ballots had yet to be counted. About an hour later, the networks began putting the state back in the undecided column.

Bush himself predicted late Tuesday evening he'd ultimately carry Florida and Pennsylvania. "The networks called this awfully early, but the votes coming in are telling a different story," he told reporters who visited him in the governor's mansion in Austin, Texas. "I don't believe they've got enough evidence to call these states ... I think America ought to wait until all the votes are counted."

The Florida flip-flop was embarrassing for the networks. CNN pundits were busy defending the network's methodology from the Bush campaign's charges when the news came in that Florida was being put back in the undecided column -- the first time. Over on MSNBC, Brian Williams was explaining why his network was staying with Gore when a decision was made to move Florida out of the vice president's column.

Network officials began blaming a "data problem" for the Florida flip-flop.

Gore had earlier won the key swing states of Michigan and Pennsylvania. Labor was getting early credit for Gore's Michigan victory. The United Auto Workers got Election Day off in its last contract, and some pundits thought that may have given the vice president the edge. High black turnout in Pennsylvania -- the Rev. Jesse Jackson made a last-minute visit Tuesday -- was thought to have boosted the Democrats' totals in the Keystone State.

As momentum seemed to shift back to Gore, things got surreal on the networks. "Alice in Wonderland" was a favorite motif. "I hope history teachers and civic teachers are up at this hour; every teacher in the country should tell every child in the country that every vote counts," said Dan Rather. "You can't just say, 'Well, I'm too busy.' When the going gets weird, anchormen punt," Rather concluded.

The networks are girding themselves for criticism of the decision to call individual races, and the presidential election, before accurate results were in. "I think it's time for the networks to stop calling the election on the basis of exit polls and sample precinct analysis," Curtis Gans of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate told CNN Wednesday morning.

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