WASHINGTON -- Among those Democrats who openly despise President Bush, there is perhaps no man besides the president who elicits more grumbling and ill-will than independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader.

Though it has been more than three years since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Bush had won the 2000 election, many Democrats are still seething about the outcome. And even though Nader repeatedly points out that some 8 million Democrats voted for Bush in 2000 and that many more stayed home, many Democrats still say Nader is responsible for Al Gore losing the election.

Nader's run this year has touched off a struggle in some states between Democrats and the Nader campaign. The battle promises to make it harder for Nader to have as much effect in 2004 as he did in 2000.

As his campaign volunteers and paid staff gather the thousands of signatures required to get him on the ballot in more than 40 states, some Democrats are moving just as quickly to challenge those efforts.

Between now and Nov. 2, Nader, the renowned consumer advocate and founder of the group Public Citizen, must clear a series of hurdles in a climate that is decidedly more hostile to his candidacy than in 2000.

"[Nader] doesn't have sugar daddy behind him; he doesn't have any of the things a third party needs to be that successful," said L. Sandy Maisel, chairman of the Government Department at Colby College in Waterville, Maine, and co-author of a book on third parties titled "Two Parties -- or More?"

"Getting on the ballot in a lot of states requires a serious organization or serious money, and I don't think he has either of them," Maisel said.

Harvard government professor Barry C. Burden, who studied Nader's effect on the 2000 race, believes Nader will manage to get on almost as many ballots this year as he did in 2000. But Burden, like many political analysts, does not think Nader can win as much support as he did four years ago.

"In 2000, very few people were aware of the Electoral College or how it worked," Burden said. "This time around people are aware and angry and feel like more is at stake."

"He's polling at 3, 4, 5, 6 percent, which is just astounding," Burden said. "But my guess is that when the gut check kicks in in October and the same people are asked: 'Are you still going to vote for Nader,' a lot of them are going to say, 'You know, I care enough about the outcome and I'm upset enough about what Bush is doing that I'm not going to do it."

For now Nader's campaign is racing to gather enough signatures before deadlines as soon as next week in some states. The threshold for an independent presidential candidate to get on the ballot varies in each state from as little as 1,000 signatures and a fee, to a state like Texas where the candidate must gather more than 64,000 valid signatures from registered voters who did not vote in the primaries.

When Nader ran as a Green Party candidate in 2000, the party gave him access to ballots in 10 states and its volunteers gathered signatures for him in others.

But in a close vote last month, the Green Party chose to back its former general counsel, David Cobb. Though many Greens may still vote for Nader, he no longer has the party's apparatus behind him.

Nader was bolstered by the decision of the Reform Party, founded by Ross Perot, to endorse him. Its support will put him on the ballot in Colorado, Florida, Kansas, Michigan, Mississippi, Montana and South Carolina.

But the signature-gathering process in other states has been complicated by the animosity toward Nader's candidacy among many supporters of the presumptive Democratic candidate, John F. Kerry. It is clear that Democrats will continue to challenge Nader all over the country.

Democrats won their first battle in Arizona on July 2, when party members had filed lawsuits alleging that a majority of the Nader's 22,000 signatures were gathered from unregistered voters, felons or other ineligible parties.

Party officials said they were trying to maintain the purity of the election. And Nader's campaign conceded after the secretary of state's office determined that the campaign had 550 less valid signatures than it needed.

Nader is also waging his own legal battles. The campaign has sued the state of Texas, where they argue the law is unconstitutional and discriminatory. State officials are verifying the more than 77,000 signatures Nader submitted in May.

Though most expect Nader to win less support this time, few Kerry supporters are dismissive of what even a sliver of a Nader vote could do in narrowly divided states.

The Nader campaign has made it clear this time that it will not shy away from battleground states and that could spell major trouble for Kerry's campaign.

In Florida, where Bush beat Gore by 537 votes, nearly 97,488 voters supported Nader. In Wisconsin, where the difference between Bush and Gore was 5,700 votes, Nader again netted more than 90,000 votes.

The pattern is similar in other swing states, and that is why Sarah A. Newman, who voted for Nader in 2000 and 1996, is working to persuade other Green Party members to vote for Kerry.

"It's really from a pragmatic standpoint that I think Greens and Nader supporters should be voting for Kerry," said Newman, 29, who founded the political action committee Greens for Kerry though she still believes in most of what Nader stands for.

"Nader has a right to run, I just hope that people in swing states who want to vote for Nader will realize that if we want to implement any of the reforms that he is talking about, we need to get Bush out of office."

The 70-year old Nader says he is more likely to draw Republicans who are disenchanted with Bush, but many political analysts are skeptical of that claim given Nader's criticism of the Iraq war, his call to cut the defense budget in half and the fact that his running mate, Peter Camejo, is a former leader of the Socialist Worker's Party.

Nader has repeatedly said he is engaged in a long-term struggle to raise the profile of third parties. Even if he nets fewer than the 3 million votes he won in 2000, he said his conclusion would be that he has not "fought hard enough" to make people support third parties and that he needed to find "new ways to reach the people."

"We're building beyond November," he said. "An oak tree always starts with an acorn."

Though he has backed away somewhat from his assertion in the last election that there was little difference between the Republican and Democratic tickets, he still argues that Kerry and Bush agree more than they differ and that his voice is needed in the debate.

"I can give you a hundred similarities," particularly focusing on the Iraq war and characterizing both Bush and Kerry as "pro-war."

"We have 30 major issues astride the globe that affect health, safety and the future of the world that the two parties -- as proxies of giant multi-national corporations -- are against," Nader said.

But the debate over Nader's motives is still a running controversy among Democrats.

In 2000, some believed that Nader's primary focus was winning enough of the votes to guarantee funds for the Green Party and to gain more publicity for its causes.

But there is even a small clutch of Democrats who argue that Nader intentionally tried to throw the race to Bush.

Burden, who analyzed that hypothesis at Harvard, found no evidence that Nader was trying do that, or that he was primarily focused on winning battleground states in the final days of the campaign in an attempt to hurt Gore, as has been alleged.

But Nader's support from several Republican groups this year -- both in the form of donations and signature gathering -- and his refusal to disavow their help has fed the conspiracy theories.

Some of Nader's admirers are also befuddled by his alliance with the Reform Party, which backed Pat Buchanan in 2000.

The chairman of the Reform Party, Shawn O'Hara, voted for Bush in 2000 and says if Nader were to tilt the election one way or another, he would prefer if Bush is re-elected.

While O'Hara says Bush "has lied to the American public" about what he calls the "illegal war in Iraq," he is far more dismissive of Kerry.

"I'm not a George Bush fan anymore. My man's Ralph Nader," O'Hara said. But, he added, "I'm doing everything I can to make sure John Kerry never gets around the White House."

In the longer term, some Nader admirers have argued that he is risking his life's work.

"I grew up in politics as a Nader devotee," said Colby College's Maisel. "I don't know anybody who was an environmentalist or consumerist ... who didn't think Ralph Nader walked on water.

"He got things accomplished that nobody else accomplished, but I think he really stands a very serious chance of ruining his legacy."

But for young Nader supporters like Michael J. Teasdale, a 28-year old student who has been volunteering for the campaign, Nader continues to be an inspiration and the only voice for the issues they feel most strongly about.

"Just take three issues," said Teasdale, of Solomons, Md. "If you are against the Iraqi war, if you are against the Patriot Act, if you are for gay marriage, those are three issues that Kerry's not for. So if I voted for Kerry to stop Bush getting in, I'd be voting for the war, for the Patriot Act and against gay marriage."

"It's about choice," he said.