WASHINGTON, Oct 31 (AFP) - Independent candidate Ralph Nader may emerge once again as the "spoiler" for the Democrats in a closely contested US presidential election and hurt Senator John Kerry's chances of entering the White House, analysts said.
The 70-year-old consumer crusader also ran in the 2000 election and siphoned off enough crucial votes from Democrat Al Gore to help Republican George W. Bush win the presidency by a slim margin.
Fearing a similar scenario, several prominent Democrats have sought to persuade Nader to withdraw from Tuesday's election after months of legal fights.
Nader remains in the race and is on the ballot in 30 of the 50 states, including eight of the 10 battleground states where President Bush and Kerry are in a dead heat -- Colorado, Florida, Iowa, Minnesota, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico and Wisconsin.
Although national polls show Nader may get as little as one percent of the vote -- he received 2.7 percent or three million of the votes cast in the last election -- his vote-getting power in some battleground states is higher.
That may be enough to tip the election one way or another in some of the 10 battleground states, analysts said.
"I think there is the potential for Ralph Nader to cost John Kerry one or two of the battleground states and if that happens, that could well be the election," said Patrick Basham, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute, naming Florida and Iowa.
He said Nader could this time get "one half or one third" of the votes he got in 2000 "but the important thing is that he is on the ballot in every one of the swing battleground states" with the exception of Pennsylvania and Ohio.
"In some of the states, his poll numbers are higher than his national number is -- he might be getting, let's say, four or five percent rather then one or two percent nationally," said Basham, a specialist on US elections.
"I always thought that it could have a serious impact and I think the Democrats always thought that," he said.
"In 2004 we know better and this is our last chance to show we will not be duped again," said an anti-Nader group TheNaderFactor.com, trying to raise funds to put out anti-Nader TV advertisements at the last minute in swing states.
"I think people had begun to assume that Kerry was on safe ground and Nader wasn't a factor," said Larry Jacobs, director of the 2004 Elections Project at the University of Minnesota's Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs.
The institute's poll found Nader was the choice of five percent of those surveyed in the presidential race. When respondents were asked to choose between Bush and Kerry, Bush's percentage rose a point, from 47 percent to 48 percent, while Kerry's went up from 44 percent to 47 percent.
"This is a survey that really puts up red flags to the assumption that Nader was dead in Minnesota," Jacobs was quoted as saying in local news reports.
Nader rejects any notion that he is dampening only Kerry's chances.
"We are taking votes from Bush," he said at a press conference in Washington. "We are building opposition to Bush," he added, calling the incumbent "a chicken hawk and messianic militarist."
Some analysts wonder why Nader is even running for president as he has no hopes of winning any states. Some speculate that he may be attempting to display enough strength to show the Democrats that their party needs to lean further to the left.
Nader's followers say he is a good counterweight to the two-party system in the United States, which he calls an "electoral dictatorship" and accuse Bush and Kerry of being beholden to corporations for financing their campaigns.
"When corporations hear that a third-party movement is gaining ground, they hear the rumble of the people," Nader said. "Washington isn't hearing that rumble."

10/31/2004 02:27 GMT - AFP