i would like nothing more to believe that gore was the winner in florida and im not suggesting that the recounting was exactly a brilliant strategy, but all the studies you want wont reverse that now.

this argument is getting a little long in the tooth, so my final statement will be that the nader (spoiler) effect exists weather or not it determined the winner in florida or what it says about the viability of anything more than a 2 party system.

First things first: Gore won the statewide balloting by a half million votes (http://presidentelect.org/e2000.html). I’m not aware of any honest study of the 2000 election that doesn’t end up declaring Gore winner. It was because Gore was greedy and demanded a recount only in the counties he thought he’d win that the Supreme Court ultimately had the legal basis to stop the recount. If he had simply asked for a statewide recount, he’d have been President instead of Nobel Laureate Gore.

Now, let’s say your numbers are correct, and that Bush won by 537 votes. Gore should have mopped the floor with Bush. The economy was great, it was before 9/11 and Bush seemed confused and dumb and not particularly qualified to be president. But Gore ran a silly, cowardly campaign. He didn’t even win his own state, or Arkansas, home of his still wildly popular boss. Winning either state would have thrown it for him. Even Walter Mondale won his own state!

There are any number of fringe candidates who had more votes than the plurality you claim Bush had in Florida. David McReynolds, East Village legend and perennial War Resisters League/Socialist Party candidate got 327 votes in Florida, the Socialist Workers Party candidate got 551 votes, and Workers World candidate Monica Moorhead got 1,728 votes (source: Nation e-mails). Were they, too, spoilers?

Now, to the civics: Having a “lesser of two evils” election (Gore isn’t and wasn’t a liberal) is barely distinguishable from having an election where there’s only one candidate. Worse, having both of these candidates come through thoroughly undemocratic, monolithic political parties (which are really just big corporations themselves) yields even less difference between the candidates, and even less actual democratic choice.

Do we really want, then, to take your argument to its logical extreme, and drive all third party candidates out of the process and leave the process to the two pro-war, pro-corporate power parties? Even if we only did this when the elections were close, could we still, without shame, call ourselves a representative democracy?

also, the numbers get even worse in states like New Hampshire.

heres the other way to look at it.

You have a close race between the liberal and conservative parties. The conservative candidate gets all the conservative votes. the liberal party has two candidates that the vote is split between.

who wins?

But here’s the short of it:

Bush won Florida by 537 Votes (no, thats not a typo).
Ralph Nader got 97,421 votes in Florida.
Ralph Nader was the farthest left of the candidates.

And i dont have to remind anyone that as went Florida, so went the election.

Its not a matter of looking for blame as most will happily admit that Ross Perot had the opposite effect in the 80’s.