All polling studies that were done, for both the 2000 and the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections, indicated that Nader drained at least 2 to 5 times as many voters from the Democratic candidate as he did from the Republican Bush. (This isn’t even considering throw-away Nader voters who would have stayed home and not voted if Nader had not been in the race; they didn’t count in these calculations at all.) Nader’s 97,488 Florida votes contained vastly more than enough to have overcome the official Jeb Bush / Katherine Harris / count, of a 537-vote Florida “victory” for G.W. Bush. In their 24 April 2006 detailed statistical analysis of the 2000 Florida vote, “Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency?” (available on the internet), Michael C. Herron of Dartmouth and Jeffrey B. Lewis of UCLA stated flatly, “We find that ... Nader was a spoiler for Gore.” David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer, headlined on 27 July 2004, “Nader to Crash Dems Party?” and he wrote: “In 2000, Voter News Service exit polling showed that 47 percent of Nader’s Florida supporters would have voted for Gore, and 21 percent for Mr. Bush, easily covering the margin of Gore’s loss.” Nationwide, Harvard’s Barry C. Burden, in his 2001 paper at the American Political Science Association, “Did Ralph Nader Elect George W. Bush?” (also on the internet) presented “Table 3: Self-Reported Effects of Removing Minor Party Candidates,” showing that in the VNS exit polls, 47.7% of Nader’s voters said they would have voted instead for Gore, 21.9% said they would have voted instead for Bush, and 30.5% said they wouldn’t have voted in the Presidential race, if Nader were had not been on the ballot. (This same table also showed that the far tinier nationwide vote for Patrick Buchanan would have split almost evenly between Bush and Gore if Buchanan hadn’t been in the race: Buchanan was not a decisive factor in the outcome.) The Florida sub-sample of Nader voters was actually too small to draw such precise figures, but Herron and Lewis concluded that approximately 60% of Florida’s Nader voters would have been Gore voters if the 2000 race hadn’t included Nader. Clearly, Ralph Nader drew far more votes from Gore than he did from Bush, and on this account alone was an enormous Republican asset in 2000.
