The popular vote tallies certainly support this analysis. Nader, the Green Party nominee, won 2.8 million votes, many of which would have gone to Gore. Buchanan received fewer than 450,000 votes, which might otherwise have gone to Bush.
But like seemingly everything this year, the closer one looks, the more confusing the voting picture becomes. In fact, were it not for Buchanan, Bush might have spent the last month making Cabinet appointments rather than awaiting court verdicts.
As Americans have been forcefully reminded this year, the state-by-state tallies, and the electoral votes that go with them, are what determine who becomes president, not the popular vote. So the key question is which states were so close that third-party voters could have made the difference, had they voted for Bush or Gore instead.
There were eight states in which no candidate received a majority of votes. In two of them, Maine and Minnesota, Gore won fairly comfortably. Without third-party candidates, he would have lost only in the unlikely event that most Nader voters had chosen Bush. So for the purposes of determining the biggest spoiler, Maine and Minnesota are moot.
In two other states, Bush won, but by fewer votes than Nader received. One of the states is Florida, of course, and many Democrats have bitterly said that all of the recent chad counting and judicial jousting would have been unnecessary if Nader had heeded their October pleas and quit the race. Gore would then probably have picked up Florida's 25 electoral votes, and maybe New Hampshire's four, to boot, giving him the presidency.
But that leaves four states that badly muddy the situation, said John Cavanagh, director of the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal research group in Washington D.C. In Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon and Wisconsin, Gore won by narrow margins, ranging from 500 to 6,500 votes. In each case, Buchanan's vote total exceeded the difference between Gore and Bush. Combined, these four states account for 30 electoral votes, or one more than Florida and New Hampshire.
In other words, if Buchanan, running on the Reform Party ticket, had dropped out of the race and his supporters had switched to Bush, the Texas governor would not have needed Florida to become president. He would have won 276 electoral votes, six more than needed, even without Florida.