The 2000 election is considered to have the closest margin of any presidential election in modern history. This election was so close that the deciding factor to see if Democrat Al Gore, or Republican George W. Bush would become the next President was the state Florida. Though throughout the nation the position of the third party candidate was not significant, in Florida the votes that went to the third party candidate took a major impact on the outcome of the election.
The significant third party candidate in the 2000 presidential election was Ralph Nader. He was a nominee of the Green Party and ran on the platform of “a crisis of democracy”. Since Nader did not have wide set support throughout the country his name appeared on only 43 states out of 50. Even though with this small percentage, he managed to secure 2,882,955 votes, or 2.74 percent of the popular vote. This small percentage allowed the Green Party to gain traction in new states for upcoming elections including Delaware and Maryland.…show more content… In Florida, Nadar received 97,421 popular votes, research has found that “25% of Nadar’s voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore”. Mathematically, Gore would have received over 12,665 additional votes over Bush. Bush only defeated Gore by 537 popular votes, winning Florida and ultimately the
