Votes for Gore also reduce the chance that the Greens will receive the necessary %5 for federal funding. John
The message the Dems took from '72 was to nominate Jimmy Carter. After every post-Humphrey election, the party centrists explained defeat or victory on the basis of the party being not centrist enough, or satisfactorily centrist, respectively. The media faithfully replicate this gospel and it becomes the official explanation. The purported suburban factor in polling analysis is also an artifact of this bias. The latter is criticized in the new Teixeira- Rogers book, and this criticism is reflected in Gore's replacement of Mark Penn with Stanley Greenberg. As I mentioned before, Gore is running left but gives little sign of not governing right. So a good Nader vote could exert a healthy influence. I'm not quite to the point where I think a GOP victory would be a good influence.
The ardent lesser-evil-ists among us have yet to explain how we get out of the box of choosing among bad alternatives indefinitely, except by reference to a bigger, badder labor movement of the future. So if we had ham, we could have ham and eggs, if we had eggs, as the saying goes.
mbs