Nader blabbering on MSNBC. Still not apologizing for Bush.

[Jim Lane]

143. Actually, we CAN predict it, with at least some confidence.

Nader himself had at one point posted exit poll data on his website. People who voted for Nader were asked how they would have voted if Nader hadn't been on the ballot.

The answers were all over the map: vote for Gore, vote for Bush, vote for whichever candidate was on the Green Party line, vote for another minor-party candidate, write in Nader, write in someone else, vote in downticket races but leave the presidential line blank, stay home entirely.

Everyone not in the first two categories was making themselves politically irrelevant so we may ignore their fine and noble statement (while they wait expectantly for their act to upend the political establishment). Only the people in the first two categories matter. I forget the exact numbers but what I do remember is that (percentage voting for Gore) minus (percentage voting for Bush) equaled about 13 percent.

Now, that's probably not an accurate figure. The Nader voters were ticked off at the Democrats who'd been denouncing Nader and trying to keep him off the ballot. If Nader had announced in 1999 that he wasn't running, then, by the time of the election, Gore's advantage among those voters would've been a lot more than 13 percent. But let's take 13 percent as the minimum figure.

That means that, if Nader had exercised his right to decide NOT to run, the effect would've been to give Gore a net gain equal to 13 percent of the actual Nader vote total. In Florida, where Nader got roughly 100,000 votes, such a gain for Gore would have swamped the officially reported Bush total, and would have put the state out of reach for cheating by Harris et al.

In New Hampshire, 13 percent would not have been enough to make a difference, but a Nader withdrawal might have made the difference anyway if, for the reasons I said, the 13 percent estimate is too low.

Conclusion: It is more likely than not that, but for Nader's candidacy, Al Gore would have become President.

Furthermore, this result was foreseeable, not some Election Day fluke. Nader was widely warned about it.

My bottom line: I used to admire Nader a great deal, but his bad choice in 2000 changed my opinion (not that he's losing any sleep over what I think).

Obligatory disclaimers to try to pre-empt the strawman arguments the Naderites always raise:
* Nader had a constitutional right to choose to run.
* Nader had a constitutional right to choose to say things about Al Gore that were uncomplimentary.
* Nader had a constitutional right to choose to say things about Al Gore that were downright stupid.
* Nader's voters had a constitutional right to vote for him.
* Katherine Harris engineered an illegal and politically motivated purge of about 50,000 likely Democratic voters. She should have gone to jail.
* There were numerous other problems with the Florida vote, including but not limited to butterfly ballots, the Brooks Brothers riot, and one of the worst decisions in the history of the Supreme Court.
* If various other things had been different, then Gore would have become President despite Nader's bad choice. (As an aside, it's a wonderment to me how Naderites seem not to recognize the concept that an event can have more than one cause. This is a staple of tort law, the field in which Nader first made his mark.)