The following is from https://democraticunderground.com/100216793000#post32
which has several more posts from people trying unsuccessfully to argue that Nader's candidacy didn't affect the outcome (besides #32, #34, #35, #57, #73)
First, note that officially, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes in Florida. Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. {1}
I have heard and read Nader make the dubious claim:
"In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all." {2}
Well, that still means a net of 13%, or 12,665, more votes would have gone to Gore than to Bush {2}. That's overwhelming more than the 537 vote Bush victory margin.
This one has 21% would have voted for Bush, and 47% would have voted for Gore, for a 26% gap, or 25,347 more votes for Gore than Bush {3}
{1} http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0876793.html
{2} http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ralph_Nader_presidential_campaign,_2000
{3} http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html
` http://www.cbsnews.com/news/nader-to-crash-dems-party/
Yes, yes, I know there were a number of reasons Bush officially beat Gore -- ALL of them were essential to Bush's victory -- IF EVEN ONE of these elements had been missing, Bush would have officially lost,
e.g. besides Nader’s candidacy, Kathleen Harris purging the voting lists of supposed felons, Gore running a poor campaign (in so so many ways), media dubbing Gore a serial liar (Love Story and all that), the butterfly ballots giving Gore's votes to Buchanan, the U.S. Supreme Court stopping the recount -- yada.
But it doesn't wipe out the fact that even with all that, Gore would have won if not for Nader drawing thousands more votes away from Gore than from Bush.
As for the Supreme Court -- if the vote count on election night and the days and weeks after the election had put Gore ahead by 12,000 or 25,000 votes instead of down by 500 or 600, it would unlikely have gone to the Supreme Court; and even less likely that they would have declared the 12,000 or 25,000 vote count loser to be the winner of Florida's electoral votes.
And Nader broke his pledge (made when getting petition signatures to get on the ballot in several states) to not campaign in swing states, and instead did his utmost to defeat Gore. And yet Michael Moore supported him all the way.
And Nader trashing the Democrats as being as bad as the Republicans no doubt also affected some voters to not vote for a president or to stay home - things not captured in the election statistics.
The purge did it, not ralphie boy.
It was a combination. I don't doubt that there were many factors larger than Nader being on the ballot that caused the official Bush win and Gore loss, including, many times over, the voter purges. But had any element mentioned in the above post been absent, Gore would have been inaugurated.
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