3rd (minor) parties in 2004: Any effect?

[Beet]

Good point, Nym. I didn't notice that until you pointed it out; Nader's margins in Florida and New Hampshire were large enough to allow Gore to overcome any would-be Buchanan pull-out.

Also if you think that a lot of Democrats went over to Wallace in 1968 as a protest vote, you can see that he decided that election and it might have been a landslide for Humphrey otherwise.

[Beet]

The thing is, while you meticulously (and liberally) dissect the Green voters, you assume that all of the  Libertarian voters and Buchanan voters (some of whom were actually Gore voters who punched the card too early!) would have voted for Bush. But, unlike with the Green party, you have no polls as to how many of them would have stayed home. Also you're assuming the Natural Law party, which is not even listed on Dave's list of candidates (it might be in ther "other" category, amassing a total of 0.2%) gains a significant number of votes.

There is good reason to believe a lot of the Libertarian voters would have voted for GORE on social issues, because both candidates were campaigning as pro-market candidates. There is more reason to believe that the majority of the rest would have stayed home, because libertarianism is truly a belief system to its own. Ditto for the Buchanan voters; especially in the swing states, if they really cared about Bush they would have voted for him. Any defection from those parties would more than offset any defection from the Nader vote; together they captured only 0.8% of the total vote compared to Nader's 2.7%.