This means that neither Bush nor Gore could muster the support of more than 12 percent of the electorate. This is the real crisis for our democracy.

How is the Democratic Party establishment dealing with this crisis of legitimacy and its own declining numbers? By blaming Ralph Nader. Partisans wail that Nader denied Gore the few hundred votes he needed to prevail on election night. Indeed, Nader polled some 95,000 votes in Florida, which prompted New York socialite and Hillary Clinton moneyman Harry Evans to blurt angrily, "I want to kill Ralph Nader."

Hold your horses, please. Ralph's not the message -- he's only the messenger. Again, the politicos and pundits are ignoring another set of election statistics in Florida that are way more revealing about the core weakness of the corporate Democrats. I'm grateful to Tim Wise, a Nashville writer and activist who dug into the Florida tallies and exit polls to find some stunning results that refute the "Ralph did it" assault. Wise's full report will appear in a forthcoming issue of Z magazine, but the essence of it is that Gore was the problem, not Nader. Start with two constituent groups that Democratic nominees usually win in the Sunshine State:

1) Seniors. By a 51-47 percent margin, Gore lost the over-65 vote in Florida. Bush got 67,000 more senior votes than Gore did, even after all the Democratic scare talk about vanishing Social Security benefits. Had Gore simply broken even with this constituency, he would have won.

2) White Women. This group typically votes Democratic in Florida, or splits evenly. Gore lost them to Bush by 53-44 percent. Had he gotten 50 percent of these votes, he'd have added 65,000 votes to his total -- plenty enough to have put the state in his column election night.

Now it gets really ugly for the Gore campaign, for there are two other Florida constituencies that cost them more votes than Nader did. First, Democrats. Yes, Democrats! Nader only drew 24,000 Democrats to his cause, yet 308,000 Democrats voted for Bush. Hello. If Gore had taken even 1 percent of these Democrats from Bush, Nader's votes wouldn't have mattered. Second, liberals. Sheesh. Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader.

Why would Democrats and liberals vote for (gag) Bush? Some Democrats may have been so appalled by Clinton's personal behavior and Gore's fundraising escapades that they flipped all the way to Bush, while others found no defining economic difference between Gore and Bush, so they voted on the basis of George W.'s (false) claim to be the integrity candidate. Some liberals noted that Bush actually has proposed less of an increase in the Pentagon's already-bloated budget than Gore did, and some were so angered by the vice president's atrocious record of selling out working families, environmentalists and farmers that they wanted to give him the double-whammy of taking a vote from him and giving it to Bush. In any event, Gore failed to close the deal with these voters -- a fact that has nothing to do with Nader.

There are plenty of other points that can be made about Gore's loss, including the fact that if he'd carried his own state of Tennessee (where Nader was not a factor), all of this would be moot. But the real need is for progressives (whether Gore-backers, Naderites or neither) to get beyond this presidential election and get down to the real business of building a long-term, grass-roots movement that taps into the latent power of more than 100 million discarded voters. If we succeed at that, we can produce a historic political realignment, creating both politics that people can be proud of and a country with a bright, democratic future.