Regardless of whether Al Gore or Ralph Nader was to blame for "losing" the 2000 election...

[The Second Stone]

73. Ross Perot absolutely ran to spoil the race of GHW Bush and throw it to Clinton

and did a much better job of it than Ralph Nader. But Nader did his spoiler job well enough. He betrayed everybody he ever worked with to do it. And if you read his statements from the time, which I remember well, he specifically stated that there was no difference between Democrats and Republicans except that Republicans would make things worse more quickly. He knew what he was doing.

And I believe that Ross Perot also knew exactly what he was doing. He ran to spite GHW Bush and then pulled out, and then made accusations that GHW Bush was going to ruin his daughter's wedding (probably was) and got right back in, to spite Bush. And he succeeded.

John Anderson did the same thing to Clinton in 1980. I don't know whether he knew it was going to be a spoiler effect, but it sure had that effect.

George Wallace did the same thing the Hubert Humphrey (and would have against Bobby Kennedy) for Nixon in 1968.

Strom Thurmond did the same spoiler attempt in 1948, unsuccessfully to Harry Truman.

Theodore Roosevelt spoiled William Howard Taft's reelection in 1912 by splitting the Republican vote. It was quite intentional.

You claim to remember, but haven't studied history.

In 2001, the Republicans controlled a number of dirty gambits to steal the election, virtually all of them worked. If any one of them had failed, no Iraq war and disaster in the middle east. If even the weakest one of those efforts had failed, Gore would have been elected. Ralph Nader was the weakest of those efforts, the most traitorous, and damaging third party candidacy in American history. And he knew it at the time. He knew he had no chance of winning. But he did know that he had a chance to tip the balance in close states, and he did tip the balance in two states, Florida and New Hampshire, both essential to Bush getting elected. Bush needed both those states to beat Gore.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-zuesse/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065.html

Nader is and was a traitor to liberalism and progressivism and so are the people that voted for him. Yeah, they got to vote their "consciences", but their inability to compromise their "consciences" and insisting on voting for a man who would never come close to carrying a single state absolutely ensured the election of George W. Bush and the worst presidency in American History. We will be cleaning up after the PNAC/Iraq fiasco for the next hundred years.

The suggestion that Nader was some pure innocent is delusional. He is the Kim Philby of liberal causes. His followers and apologists are dupes. Nader and his followers are not Democrats, they elect Republicans and refuse to admit it.