he Green Party faithful were defiant yesterday in the face of swelling criticism that their standard-bearer, Ralph Nader, mortally wounded Al Gore in Florida and is partially to blame for the almost surreal closeness of the presidential contest.
Nader drained enough votes from Gore in New Hampshire to give the state to George W. Bush, according to polling data, and Nader appears to have hurt Gore critically in Florida and Oregon as well. Had Gore sealed those states Tuesday night, he would be president-elect now.
''There just isn't much difference between the two,'' said Doug Bogen, 43, of Portsmouth, N.H., a Nader volunteer who said he had no remorse about his vote. ''I'm concerned about the future of our planet, if where I live will be underwater in 50 years. ... Those outweigh more immediate concerns.''
Nationally, Nader garnered 3 percent of the popular vote, making him a far less decisive factor than the 20th century's major third-party challengers Theodore Roosevelt, George Wallace, John B. Anderson, and Ross Perot.
For much of the campaign, he was a nonfactor. But he gained steam after being barred from the presidential debates, with his followers taking to the streets and turning out en masse at his rallies. In the homestretch, Democrats warned that a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush, a theoretical threat now close to becoming a reality.
Nader, speaking yesterday in Washington, was unapologetic for his role in the election, saying Gore was too beholden to corporate interests and had betrayed the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. He even joked of the election results: ''I do think that Al Gore costme the election, especially in Florida.''
His assertion that he had roped in disenfranchised voters rings somewhat true. National exit-poll data show that 30 percent of his voters would have skipped the election if he was not on the ballot.
But that data also show that 47 percent of Nader voters said they would have supported Gore had Nader not been in the race. In make-or-break Florida, this translates into Nader siphoning about 45,500 votes from Gore.
In New Hampshire, Nader appears to have drawn more than 10,000 votes from Gore, according to polling data. Bush won that state by 7,282 votes.
And in Oregon, another tossup state, Nader appears to have sucked away about 26,000 votes from the vice president. That state yesterday was too close to call, but Bush was leading by just over 23,342 votes.
There is a slight wrinkle in this calculus: 21 percent of Nader voters said they would have voted for Bush with Nader absent, and it is unclear how this would have played out.
Democrats yesterday were fuming that Nader may have cost Gore the presidency by his arguing, in dozens of high-profile speeches, that there was no difference between Gore and Bush.
''Ralph Nader purposely tried to blur the differences between the parties in order to promote himself,'' said Ramsay McLauchlan, an offical with the Democratic Party of New Hampshire.
In New Hampshire, McLauchlan said, the environment was a key issue and Nader's tactics may have helped elect a president who favors oil drilling in Alaska's Artic National Wildlife Refuge instead of the man who wrote ''Earth in the Balance.''
But Naderites yesterday rejected such criticism.
''Everyone is blaming the victim here, and we don't know whether to laugh or cry,'' said Alma Shissler, a 58-year-old volunteer in the Miami offices of the Nader campaign, where she said media calls were coming in from Barcelona, Germany, and elsewhere around the world. ''They play dirty, and don't let us in the debates, and we're supposed to fall to our knees to him and say, `Please, Al, is this the year we may run?'''
Nader appears to have touched a nerve among old-style liberals who felt alienated by Bill Clinton's more centrist - and winning - approach to politics. They felt especially betrayed by Clinton's advocacy of the NAFTA and GATT free-trade agreements and his championing of changes to the welfare system that led to a reduction in assistance to the poor. And they appear to view Gore as a chip off the president's block.
Many Nader supporters said their man's role in Campaign 2000 will make Democrats think twice before following the Clinton model of politics again.
''Democrats must now either find their progressive roots or watch the party gradually wither away,'' Nader told a boisterous group of supporters yesterday. ''If Democrats are disappointed with the returns, they need to take a long, close look at their party and the empty campaign waged by Al Gore.''
Nader and the Green Party failed to reach 5 percent of the popular vote so they will not qualify for the millions of federal dollars in campaign assistance during the 2004 presidential race. The Green Party did break 5 percent in Colorado, Washington, D.C., Hawaii, Maine, Minnesota, Montana, and Oregon, as well as in Rhode Island, Vermont, and Massachusetts.
Not all of Nader's voters rallied fervently behind him. In Massachusetts, where Nader polled 6 percent, the Green Party was bouyed by those who knew Gore would carry the state but wanted to make a statement.
''I like some of the things he's been saying, and I think we should have that in the debate,'' said Todd Rhodes, a consultant with Arthur D. Little Inc. who voted for Nader but wouldn't want him to be president. ''But if I'd been in Florida and I made that vote, I would be unhappy.''
New Hampshire's Guy Chichester, who in 1990 became one of the nation's first Green Party candidates for governor, said that Gore should in fact be grateful to Nader. He said Nader was the only reason that many alienated voters were paying attention to the campaign, and that many of these people, faced with the prospect of a Bush administration, went with Gore in such states as Florida.
''Then our votes started to go to Gore in the last two days of the campaign,'' Chichester said. ''It's not a question of Nader the spoiler. We saved his bacon.''
