All eyes are on Florida, but this election might well have been settled in George Bush's favor on Nov. 7 had Republicans and their allies taken the environmental fight to Michigan's union voters the way they did to West Virginia's rank and file.

Here in battleground Michigan, the one industry most threatened by a Gore administration is largely responsible for providing the vice president his margin of victory.

A whopping 23 percent of voters here Tuesday were members of a union, a disproportionately large showing in a state where organized labor represents 13 percent of the voting-age population. And Gore captured more than two-thirds of that union vote.

Labor's strength at the polls was greatly enhanced by a clause in the United Auto Workers national contract that treats Election Day as a paid holiday for 407,000 employees of General Motors Corp., Ford Motor Co. and DaimlerChrysler AG.

Thus freed from the shop floor, union members flocked to the polls in record numbers. And thousands more were available to work the phone banks and drive shuttles in behalf of the Democratic Party...a campaign advantage angrily characterized by Michigan's Republican Gov. John Engler as "the biggest corporate contribution in American political history."

From a strategic standpoint, the Election Day holiday would appear to be a mind-boggling misstep by the Big Three. Mr. Gore obviously is no friend of the industry, laying the blame for all manner of environmental catastrophe on Americans' automotive "dependence." A chunk of his regulatory platform, in fact, is dedicated to eliminating the internal combustion engine.

But Michigan Republicans, in general, and automakers in particular remained unaccountably silent about the Gore threat throughout the campaign. Ford Chairman Bill Ford, in fact, virtually endorsed the vice president last week, when he insisted that Gore's policies would not hurt the industry.

By contrast, George Bush went into West Virginia, home of the United Mine Workers union, and pounded Gore on his environmental views. As a result, Bush carried a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans 2-to-1. And despite the UMW's endorsement of Gore, West Virginia union members went for Bush 50-48, according to CNN exit polls.

"West Virginians voted on guns and coal," says Dan Page, press secretary to Gov. Cecil Underwood.

But Michiganders typically vote on guns and cars. So why did only West Virginia's blue collars go for Bush?

Part of the explanation is economics. Gore's environmental policies on clean air, and a 1999 federal court order to halt so-called mountain-top mining in the south of the state, have idled thousands of West Virginia workers. Michigan, by contrast, has enjoyed a decade of record profits in the auto industry despite Gore's demonization of the automobile as "the greatest mortal threat to mankind."

Dick Kimbler, president of UMW Local 2935 in Danville, is one of hundreds of miners laid off in late-1999. "He'll shut down West Virginia if he becomes president," Kimbler told the Charleston Daily Mail. "You're not going to get any coal mines. No one's getting any permits in West Virginia ... and we've got Democrats in Washington now who are not doing anything."

Union members like Kimbler noisily protested Gore's visit to Charleston on October 27 and hundreds more marched on Washington late last year to protest the loss of coal jobs. Richard Butler Jr., a mine electrician, carried a sign that read, "Remember Kyoto." And he told reporters that Gore's book, "Earth in the Balance" proves that he intends "in no uncertain terms" to shut down the coal industry.

"Bush got in here early and made the state a priority," says Hana Maurice, editorial page editor of The Charleston Daily Mail. "He made it clear that Gore was the enemy of fossil fuels"

And unlike Ford and other auto executives, coal industry leaders was outspoken in their contempt for Gore's policies.

Ben Greene, chief lobbyist for the West Virginia Mining and Reclamation Association, for example, told the Charleston Gazette that "Gore's book made it clear that the vice president opposes coal. He may come in and say, 'I'm with Sen. (Robert) Byrd on money for clean coal technology, and we've got to protect our miners,'" Greene continued. "But if you look at Kyoto and you look at the book and you look at the Environmental Protection Agency in the last eight years, I don't take much comfort in any of that."

Michigan automakers have steered away from such confrontation, hoping instead that compromise will win the industry political favor. The Big Three, for example, have committed billions of dollars to developing alternative-fuel cars under the Clinton/Gore administration's so-called Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles in hopes of forestalling more stringent regulatory controls... the very strictures that candidate Gore trumpeted in his campaign.

In a similar vein, Big Three executives may have believed they could buy a bit of labor peace by declaring Election Day a holiday. But should Gore ultimately triumph nationwide as he did in Michigan, automakers may soon regret their appeasement of labor.