Don’t Blame Nader
In “Bali Low” [Dec. 20, 2007], Alan Bisbort asserts that “Ralph Nader… threw the [2000] election to Bush.” I would like to challenge the premise of his assertion on several statistical and electoral grounds. These arguments are essential, going into the 2008 election, because they get at the core problems with the American election system as it now stands.
Both exit polling data and actual election returns indicate that Nader’s effect on Gore’s “defeat” was negligible. Looking at the highly-contested state of Florida only—the state that most claim lost Gore the election, even though he won the majority of votes there—it is evident that it was not Nader who cost Gore the election, but Gore himself.
First of all, every one of the “third parties” on the Florida ballot (eight in total) drew more than the number of votes by which Gore lost the state (543 votes); by this reckoning, the Workers' World Party or the Socialist Workers' Party cost Gore the vote just as much as Nader did. Furthermore, according to the “2001 Statistics of the Presidential and Congressional Election of November 7, 2000” compiled by the Federal Elections Commission, approximately 12 percent of Florida Democrats voted for George Bush. That’s over 200,000 votes that Gore himself lost to the Republicans; if less than one-half of 1 percent of those votes had stayed Democrat, Gore would have won the state.
Additionally, as Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council points out, “The assertion that Nader’s marginal vote hurt Gore is not borne out by polling data. When exit pollers asked voters how they would have voted in a two-way race, Bush actually won by a point. That was better than he did with Nader in the race.” This seemingly paradoxical claim derives from the fact that at least 1 percent of the electoral turnout nationwide indicated that they would not have voted if their only choices were Gore or Bush. In response to exit polling of voters who were asked how they would vote in a two-way-only race, Gore would have obtained 48 percent and Bush 49 percent. Of course, the usefulness of this particular datum is rendered negligible by that ludicrous, archaic, and undemocratic institution called the Electoral College.
Finally, the claim that Gore would have won without Nader in the race is predicated on the assumption that all Nader’s votes would have gone to Gore in such a situation. As we have seen, this is not entirely true. In fact, 23 percent of Nader voters indicated in exit polls that they would have voted for Bush; that’s over 663,000 votes. Gore would have picked up only about 46 percent, or less than half, of Nader’s votes in a two-way race.
All these statistical analyses provide concrete evidence for two principles fundamental to our representative, electoral democracy that are dangerously undercut by the presumption that a “third party” candidate can “cost” one of the larger parties’ candidates an election. The first is the right of each voter to cast his or her vote for the person they think to be the best candidate—not the lesser of two evils, not the most likely to win, not the one with the “right” letter (D or R) after his or her name.
Matteo Pangallo
Leverett
