This analysis does leave out the 300,000+ registered Florida Democrats who vote for Bush in 2000, which does seem, on first blush, to be more than 97,000 or even 538.
Jim Hightower must have been sniffing glue or something.
So then you have to think -- in order for Nader to remain at full fault -- that all of those registered Democrats, 191,000 of whom self-describe as 'liberal', just had some sort of brain cramp on Election Day 2000 and forgot to vote for Nader as the better liberal (don't think we were using 'progressive' much in 2000) option than Bush, and chose Dim Son instead.
Why, you'd have to disregard the SCOTUS decision, and also Gore's own ineptitude at losing Tennessee, his home state, or Arkansas (where Clinton was still popular despite that whole Monica deal) or New Hampshire or even West Virginia, which was reliably blue until 2000 and where Sen Robert Byrd (RIP) begged Gore to campaign (he ignored that advice). Winning any one of those four states would have made Florida -- and W -- moot.
But fuck that, Nader's an asshole for even running in the first place, you say.
Oh dear. You'd also have to skip over that whole Katherine Harris/Choicepoint/caged ex-felons thing -- tens of thousands of Democratic votes no matter how you slice it (or just consider Greg Palast a liar). You'd have to summarily dismiss Palm Beach County elections officer Theresa LePore's poorly designed butterfly ballot, where Gore lost over 6000 votes to Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, among its many other colossal "Murphy's Law" impacts.
Certainly those old and stupid Florida Dems should have figured this out. And who let fucking Pat Buchanan into this election anyway?!
Once you do all of that, you get to the sixth-best excuse for Gore having lost: Ralph Nader daring to run at all.
Yeah, Fuck Nader. It's all his fault.
Edit history
= new reply since forum marked as read