Where Men Win Glory: The Odyssey of Pat Tillman

by Jon Krakauer

More than a little of the postelection anguish (on the part of Democrats, at any rate) derived from the fact that 97,421 Floridians had voted for the third-party candidate Ralph Nader. Throughout his campaign, Nader had labeled Bush and Gore “Tweedledum and Tweedledee,” insisting there was no real distinction between their positions. At a press conference in September 2000 Nader had proclaimed, “It doesn’t matter who is in the White House, Gore or Bush.” Now it appeared that enough voters had believed him to skew the outcome of the election. Exit polls indicated that had he not been in the race, 38 percent of his voters would have voted for Gore, 25 percent would have voted for Bush, and the remaining 37 percent wouldn’t have bothered to vote at all. In other words, without Nader on the ballot, Gore would have beaten Bush by nearly thirteen thousand votes and become president of the United States by a comfortable margin.