page_title: Al Gore
section_title: House and Senate
hierarchical_section_title: Al Gore / Congress (1977–1993) / House and Senate
caption_attribution_description: English: Portrait of Senator Albert Gore (later Vice President) of Tennessee
context_page_description: Albert Arnold Gore Jr. is an American politician and environmentalist who served as the 45th vice president of the United States from 1993 to 2001. Gore was Bill Clinton's running mate in their successful campaign in 1992, and the pair was re-elected in 1996. Near the end of Clinton's second term, Gore was selected as the Democratic nominee for the 2000 presidential election but lost the election in a very close race after a Florida recount. After his term as vice-president ended in 2001, Gore remained prominent as an author and environmental activist, whose work in climate change activism earned him the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.
  Gore was an elected official for 24 years. He was a representative from Tennessee and from 1985 to 1993 served as a senator from that state. He served as vice president during the Clinton administration from 1993 to 2001. The 2000 presidential election was one of the closest presidential races in history. Gore won the popular vote, but after a controversial election dispute over a Florida recount, he lost the election to Republican opponent George W. Bush in the Electoral College.
context_section_description: At the end of February 1976, U.S. Representative Joe L. Evins unexpectedly announced his retirement from Congress, making Tennessee's 4th congressional district seat, to which he had succeeded Albert Gore Sr. in 1953 open. Within hours after  The Tennessean publisher John Seigenthaler Sr. called him to tell him the announcement was forthcoming, Gore decided to quit law school and run for the House of Representatives:
  Gore's abrupt decision to run for the open seat surprised even himself; he later said that "I didn't realize myself I had been pulled back so much to it." The news came as a "bombshell" to his wife. Tipper Gore held a job in The Tennessean's photo lab and was working on a master's degree in psychology, but she joined in her husband's campaign (with assurance that she could get her job at The Tennessean back if he lost). By contrast, Gore asked his father to stay out of his campaign: "I must become my own man," he explained. "I must not be your candidate."
  Gore won the 1976 Democratic primary for the district with "32 percent of the vote, three percentage points more than his nearest rival", and was opposed only by an independent candidate in the election, recording 94 percent of the overall vote. He went on to win the next three elections, in 1978, 1980, and 1982, where "he was unopposed twice and won 79 percent of the vote the other time". In 1984, Gore successfully ran for a seat in the U.S. Senate, which had been vacated by Republican Senate Majority Leader Howard Baker. He was "unopposed in the Democratic Senatorial primary and won the general election going away", despite the fact that Republican President Ronald Reagan swept Tennessee in his reelection campaign the same year. Gore defeated Republican senatorial nominee Victor Ashe, subsequently the mayor of Knoxville, and the Republican-turned-Independent, Ed McAteer, founder of the Christian right Religious Roundtable organization that had worked to elect Reagan as president in 1980.
  During his time in Congress, Gore was considered a "moderate" (he once referred to himself as a "raging moderate") opposing federal funding of abortion, voting in favor of a bill which supported a moment in silence in schools, and voting against a ban on interstate sales of guns. In 1981, Gore was quoted as saying with regard to homosexuality, "I think it is wrong", and "I don't pretend to understand it, but it is not just another normal optional life style." In his 1984 Senate race, Gore said when discussing homosexuality, "I do not believe it is simply an acceptable alternative that society should affirm." He also said that he would not take campaign funds from gay rights groups. Although he maintained a position against homosexuality and gay marriage in the 1980s, Gore said in 2008 that he thinks "gay men and women ought to have the same rights as heterosexual men and women...to join together in marriage."  His position as a moderate (and on policies related to that label) shifted later in life after he became Vice President and ran for president in 2000.
  During his tenure in the House, Gore voted in favor of the bill establishing Martin Luther King Jr. Day as a federal holiday. While Gore initially did not vote on the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987 in January 1988, he voted to override President Reagan's veto the following March. Gore voted against the nomination of William Rehnquist as Chief Justice of the United States, as well as the nominations of Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas to the U.S. Supreme Court.
  During his time in the House, Gore sat on the Energy and Commerce and the Science and Technology committees, chairing the Science Committee's Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations for four years. He also sat on the House Intelligence Committee and, in 1982, introduced the Gore Plan for arms control, to "reduce chances of a nuclear first strike by cutting multiple warheads and deploying single-warhead mobile launchers." While in the Senate, he sat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, the Rules and Administration, and the Armed Services C
caption: Gore during his congressional years
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