How Florida Democrats Lost Florida in 2000, hint: It wasn't Nader

This article is from 2000 that's destroys a lot of the anti 3rd party talking points coming from the DNC Lately

After pointing all all the bullshit with the uncounted votes and the courts which clear was the deciding factor;

{ The media pontificates about whether the new president can be considered "legitimate" after the counts, recounts, non-counts and court cases in Florida. But there is a deeper question of legitimacy than that posed by a few hundred votes. Neither Bush nor Gore can claim to be the people's choice, for the only clear finding of this election is that Americans didn't want either of them. The close popular and electoral votes were not a reflection of evenly divided support, but of which guy people would vote to throw off the island first. Both "won" this negative contest. Let's do the math:

• 52 percent of eligible voters either did not vote or voted for third-party candidates.

• Among the 48 percent of Americans who cast ballots for Bush or Gore, there was an even split, giving each roughly 24 percent of eligible voters.

• But wait -- a good half of these voters were not actually choosing the candidate they checked on their ballots, but rather voting against the other guy.

This means that neither Bush nor Gore could muster the support of more than 12 percent of the electorate. This is the real crisis for our democracy.

How is the Democratic Party establishment dealing with this crisis of legitimacy and its own declining numbers? By blaming Ralph Nader. Partisans wail that Nader denied Gore the few hundred votes he needed to prevail on election night. Indeed, Nader polled some 95,000 votes in Florida, which prompted New York socialite and Hillary Clinton moneyman Harry Evans to blurt angrily, "I want to kill Ralph Nader."

(...)

1. Seniors. By a 51-47 percent margin, Gore lost the over-65 vote in Florida. Bush got 67,000 more senior votes than Gore did, even after all the Democratic scare talk about vanishing Social Security benefits. Had Gore simply broken even with this constituency, he would have won.

2. White Women. This group typically votes Democratic in Florida, or splits evenly. Gore lost them to Bush by 53-44 percent. Had he gotten 50 percent of these votes, he'd have added 65,000 votes to his total -- plenty enough to have put the state in his column election night.

Now it gets really ugly for the Gore campaign, for there are two other Florida constituencies that cost them more votes than Nader did. First, Democrats. Yes, Democrats! Nader only drew 24,000 Democrats to his cause, yet 308,000 Democrats voted for Bush. Hello. If Gore had taken even 1 percent of these Democrats from Bush, Nader's votes wouldn't have mattered. Second, liberals. Sheesh. Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader.

Why would Democrats and liberals vote for (gag) Bush? Some Democrats may have been so appalled by Clinton's personal behavior and Gore's fundraising escapades that they flipped all the way to Bush, while others found no defining economic difference between Gore and Bush, so they voted on the basis of George W.'s (false) claim to be the integrity candidate. Some liberals noted that Bush actually has proposed less of an increase in the Pentagon's already-bloated budget than Gore did, and some were so angered by the vice president's atrocious record of selling out working families, environmentalists and farmers that they wanted to give him the double-whammy of taking a vote from him and giving it to Bush. In any event, Gore failed to close the deal with these voters -- a fact that has nothing to do with Nader. }