Political Memes

All the Democrats are too close to the center except for a handful of congress people. Honestly, I won't disagree with your earlier point there. But my point was that Gore out of all the Democratic candidates was pretty fuckin sensible in terms of seeing big problems and wanting to deal with them, instead of just having a big party for all the defense contractors and oil companies and Wall Street.

But yes, Nader was a factor, sure. Also: I actually know somebody that worked in politics for quite a while, and her take on the whole Florida debacle was very interesting to me -- basically that it was a failure of on-the-ground organizing by the Democrats; that they should have been able to pick up right away that people were at risk of getting confused by the ballots, and have someone at every polling station that could be able to give a little spiel (or cause the election workers to give a spiel) about how to mark your vote correctly. Like, it was rigged (on many different levels, including in my opinion deliberately making the ballot confusing in a way that would confuse a certain percent of Gore voters), but also every election is "rigged" somewhat, to whatever extent each side can get away with, and part of your job as a political organization is to watch close and be sharp and not let the other side get away with stuff.

IDK if I agree with her, but that was her take on it and she has a lot more firsthand experience than me.