[font color = blue]>>most Nader voters had no effect whatsoever Those in Florida, perhaps<<[/font]
And that's all it took.
Officially, Bush beat Gore by 537 votes in Florida. Nader got 97,488 votes in Florida. {1}
Even accepting Nader’s dubious claims that,
"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."
that still means a net of 13%, or 12,665, more votes would have gone to Gore than to Bush. {2}
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 many reasons Bush beat Gore -- all of them were essential to Bush's victory -- if even one of these elements had been missing, Bush would have lost),
e.g. Kathleen Harris purging the voting lists of supposed felons, Gore running a poor campaign, 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.
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