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.
Furthermore, Karl Rove and the Republican Party knew this, and so they nurtured and crucially assisted Nader's campaigns, both in 2000 and in 2004. On 27 October 2000, the AP's Laura Meckler headlined "GOP Group To Air Pro-Nader TV Ads." She opened: "Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president [Mr. Gore]. ... 'Al Gore is suffering from election year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of,' Nader says [in the commercial]. An announcer interjects: 'What's Al Gore's real record?' Nader says: 'Eight years of principles betrayed and promises broken.'" Meckler's report continued: "A spokeswoman for the Green Party nominee said that his campaign had no control over what other organizations do with Nader's speeches."
Bush's people - the group sponsoring this particular ad happened to be the Republican Leadership Council - knew exactly what they were doing, even though the liberal suckers who voted so carelessly for Ralph Nader obviously did not. Anyone who drives a car the way those liberal fools voted, faces charges of criminal negligence, at the very least. But this time, the entire nation crashed as a result; not merely a single car.
Furthermore, it seems that during the closing days of the 2000 political contest, Ralph Nader was choosing to campaign not in states where polls showed that he had a chance to win (of which states there were none), but instead in states where Gore and Bush were virtually tied and Nader's constant appeals to "the left" would be the likeliest to throw those states into Bush's column. One political columnist noted this fact: On 26 October 2000, Eric Alterman posted online for the
Nation, "Not One Vote!" in which he observed with trepidation, that during the crucial final days of the campaign, "Nader has been campaigning aggressively in Florida [get that - in Florida!], Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. If Gore loses even a few of those states, then Hello, President Bush." This was prophetic - but also knowable in advance. Nader wasn't stupid; his voters were, but he certainly was not.