Did Nader
Spoil Gore in 2000?
Probably the
#1 concern I hear about voting 3
rd party is the potential for a
spoiler. A spoiler
effect is the phenomenon whereby voting for a 3
rd party candidate on
one end of the left-right spectrum splits the vote and hands the election to the
mainstream candidate on the opposite end of the spectrum. For years people
said the odds are low enough to dismiss. Then came the 2000 U.S. Presidential Election.
This is a
topic that gets some people very upset and emotional, but let’s look at it as
pragmatically as possible. Let’s start with the facts everyone agrees on.
The 2000
presidential election was an extremely tight race, with Gore winning the
popular vote 48.4% to 47.9% and Bush ultimately winning the electoral vote 271
to 266. The deciding factor came down to Florida where results were so close
that Gore called for a hand recount, which dragged on from Nov 8 to Dec 12. A
5-4 US Supreme Court decision would ultimately call off the recount with Bush
winning by 537 votes, a margin of only 0.009%.
The Green
Party, represented by Ralph Nader, had carried 97,488 votes in Florida, more
than enough to have given Gore the win if the Green Party hadn’t been on the
ballot.
But wait!
You can’t just assume that everyone who voted for the Green Party would have
voted for the Democratic Party had the Green Party not been an option. The overlap between the Democrat and Green Party base has been frequently overestimated by left-leaning commentators. The bias is easy to explain: a Democrat is more likely to
know a fellow Democrat who “jumped ship” to the Green Party, than a former
Republican who made the same leap.
But wait!
The number of Floridian surveyed who voted for Nader and also gave a valid “second choice” was only 264 people. That’s an
awfully small sample size! Speaking of which, a
frequently-cited
CNN exit poll showed Nader supporters preferring Bush, but if you
check
out the raw data yourself, you’ll notice the poll’s sample size of Nader
voters is… 30. All the “Greens-were-conservatives” defenses I’ve found swirling
about the internet are based on survey answers from these 30 people out of
almost 100,000. To call that a representative sample size is more than misleading, it's unethical. So then, isn’t it possible that we just don't have enough polling
data to draw conclusions?
“How do our
results stack up against conventional wisdom, which holds that Ralph Nader
spoiled the 2000 presidential election for Gore? We find that this common
belief is justified, but our results show clearly that Nader spoiled Gore’s
presidency only because the 2000 presidential race in Florida was unusually
tight.”
At this
point, the case is pretty much closed, but let’s go ahead and examine that last
conditional statement, “…only because the 2000 presidential race in Florida was
unusually tight.” So, it would be extremely unlikely for a similar spoiler
effect to show up in multiple states, right?
Well, though
it certainly got far less media coverage, Florida wasn’t the only state to see
a 3
rd party spoiler effect in the 2000 race.
New
Hampshire, which also could have swung the election in Gore’s favor, saw the
Democrats losing by 7,211, a gap that could have been closed by the Green
Party’s 22,198 votes. And, of course, right-leaning 3
rd parties
can have the same effect on the Republican side. In New Mexico,
Pat
Buchanan’s Reform party spoiled Bush. Gore won by only 366 votes, even less than the difference in Florida! It didn’t get widely reported
because New Mexico’s 5 electoral votes wouldn’t have altered the outcome of the
election.
So spoiler
effects can’t just be dismissed as exceedingly rare flukes - especially since
modern U.S. presidential elections have shown a tendency to be relatively tight. (The widest spread in the national popular vote in the last six elections was 7.2%.) This is, in part, a
well-documented consequence of
winner-takes-all 2-party systems. And the chance of a spoiler goes up (until you approach a 3-party equilibrium), when the 3
rd
parties has a larger vote share, as they do in the current 2016 election.
But anyway,
overwhelming evidence suggests that if the Green Party hadn’t run a candidate
for president in 2000, Gore would have won the election.
That’s
enough to satisfy me that any responsible voter MUST consider the
non-negligible possibility of a spoiler effect when choosing to vote 3rd
party.
I’d be happy
to stop right there.
But that
isn’t enough for many people.
They also
have to know, “Was Nader responsible?”
I warn you, down that path lies madness. But if you want, while we’re already
on this topic, read on.
The Blame
Game
In defenses
of Nader the same central argument appears
again
and
again
and
again:
Nader can’t be blamed for Bush winning the 2000 election because other factors
could've just as easily or more easily changed the outcome in Florida. The
margin was so narrow! It is a logical fallacy to claim Nader didn’t cause a
spoiler effect based on this reasoning, but on a moral or philosophical level, deciding
whether Nader
deserves to be blamed
or whether it makes more sense to spread the blame around, is actually kind of
a fascinating question.
So let’s
explore some of the other targets that we could also blame. But before we even get
started, I want to say that I think there is absolutely some validity to all of
these. So for those of you who just really need to hear that Nader was not the
only one to blame, you can save yourself some reading.
1) Gore
lost the election for himself
The “Gore is
to blame” argument is a compelling one, and fits with my own sense of justice.
The election was Gore’s to win or lose. His policy and campaign issues were his
own. His performance on TV, in rallies, during speeches and in debates were his
own. He clearly gave it an honest shot, but he made mistakes.
In the man’s
defense, unless someone can send me a citation to prove otherwise, Gore never
blamed Nader. In
his
rather classy concession speech he said he accepted his responsibility and
would move on. And it’s worth pointing out that
he did.
But let’s not underplay the fact the Gore actually won the popular vote. More Americans
wanted Gore to be the president than any other candidate, including Bush. And,
though
we
will likely never know for sure, many studies demonstrate persuasive
evidence that Gore rightfully should have won.
2) Miscounted
ballots, confusing ballots and computer errors robbed Gore
As for
miscounted ballots,
this
New York Times piece exhaustively (and exhaustion is the operative word),
covers the balloting mess. It’s pretty boring, so I’ll summarize:
Bush would
have won even if Gore had gotten his original demand: a hand recount of the
votes in 4 of Florida’s 67 counties under existing ballot classification. Gore
could have won with a complete Florida recount. Gore almost certainly would
have won if they’d applied the “intent of the voter” standard, accepting
undervotes (the voter marked their preference but in a way the machine failed
to read - remember hanging chads?) and/or overvotes (the voter marked Gore and
also wrote his name down as a write-in).
One thing
that remains a mystery to me is why ballots from voters who chose Gore were
disproportionately among those uncounted. Were the ballot-counting machines
used in Democrat-leaning poorer counties older, cheaper and more prone to
error?
Finally, you
really have to want this one, but there were allegedly
some suspicious
computer anomalies that night: a faulty memory card uploaded 16,022
negative votes for Gore in a county with 600 voters. Sounds a little conspiracy
theory-esque for my taste, but when computer errors and human error team up,
you never know.
Interestingly,
the
Supreme
Court decision, which I’m coming to next, notes that about 2% of votes (2.1
million) go uncounted each year “for whatever reason.”
3) A Supreme
Court ruling robbed Gore
On the
evening of November 8, 2000 the Florida polls closed with Bush having a
margin of 1,784. The margin was narrow enough to trigger an automatic machine
recount, and
although
at least 5 counties never did, the margin shrank to 327. Gore then
requested a hand recount in 4 counties, which Florida election law permits.
Pressured by
her party, Florida’s Republican Secretary of State Katherine Harris moved,
entirely within the law, to certify the original results before the recounts
could finish. Gore took her to the Florida Supreme Court, which ordered, 4-3, a
statewide hand recount. Only a day later the U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 split
we’ll see again shortly, halted the recount while it deliberated the now
infamous Gore vs. Bush case.
Bush’s
lawyer, Theodore Olsen (
who was
rewarded with the position of Solicitor General for his work), argued that the recount was
unconstitutional because there was no single standard for assessing the
validity of ballots, theoretically violating the Equal Protection Clause in the
14
th amendment. Gore’s lawyer, David Boies, argued that the single
standard was simply the “intent of the voter.”
In a 7-2
decision, the Supreme Court agreed that this was not enough. (In
Judge Steven’s
dissent he would argue that “intent of the voter” was no less sufficient
than the “beyond a reasonable doubt” clause in trial decisions.)
The decision
was widely criticized. According to Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan, “A court
that believes that the real problem in Florida was the disparities in the
manual recount standards, rather than the disparities in a voter's overall
chance of casting a ballot that is actually counted, has strained at a gnat
only to ignore an elephant.” Or, in other words, the court caused the uncounted
ballots to be treated equally by simply throwing them all out.
Once more
returning to Steven’s dissent, “Although we may never know with complete
certainty the identity of the winner of this year’s Presidential election, the
identity of the loser is perfectly clear. It is the Nation’s confidence in the
judge as an impartial guardian of the rule of law.” You can also read
Breyer’s dissent
and
Souter’s.
A few people have risen to the Court’s defense on the grounds that they felt pressed for time and were clearly worried that dragging things out would undermine the legitimacy of the eventual
winner. But in their
combined
dissent, Stevens argued quite the reverse, “Preventing the recount from
being completed will inevitably cast a cloud on the legitimacy of the election.”
4) Democrats who voted Republican are to blame
Florida is a closed primary, meaning that in the primary a person can
only vote for the party with whom they are registered, so many
independents and tactical voters register for a party not aligned with their
actual politics. Also, Florida leaves it up to the voter to send in paperwork if
they want to change their official party, which many people will never bother
to do.
I am not, by
any means, suggesting this accounts for all 308,000, but I do think the number
misrepresents the degree to which Democrats “betrayed the party.”
As for self-described liberals, who knows what they were thinking? I don't have a defense for them, but I will note that
significantly more "self-described conservatives" voted for Gore. Crossing the party line is relatively common, and healthy in an open-minded society, and it worked in Gore's favor overall.
But I do think these voters
should be blamed. If people give them a free pass, I assumed it's because, ballot
confusion aside, those voters got what they wanted from their vote.
5) People
who didn’t vote are to blame
But since
I’m going to give everyone a fair defense, I will point out that we have no way
to know which way these non-voters would have cast their ballots. Even if they
had all voted, Gore might not have won.
6) Why not blame any of
the 7 other 3rd parties, all of whom got more than 537 votes?
Any one of
the seven other 3rd parties got enough votes to swing Florida,
technically. They were, in order, the Reform, Libertarian, Natural Law*,
Workers World*, Constitution, Socialist* and Socialist Workers* parties. Of
those, the four with asterisks almost certainly drew heavily from the left.
I’m not sure
why they weren’t blamed other than that Nader was just by far the most prominent
example. He had more than 42 times as many votes as the next highest
left-leaning party, the now defunct
Natural Law
party, best known (unfairly) for advocating transcendental meditation to
solve national problems.
7) Ralph
Nader actually is at fault
If you’ve
made it this far you might have come to the conclusion that I don’t like Nader.
However he is, in truth, one of my favorite activists and one of the first to
truly inspire me. I’m a fan of Nader’s platform, his consumer advocacy and his
books. His central thesis, that corporation pose perhaps the greatest threat to democracy today, is one I still agree with. A part of me admires Nader's determination, zealotry and idealism, even at their most self-destructive and megalomaniac.
But in the final days of his campaign he
chose to focus on
battleground states like Florida and Pennsylvania. Nader would later claim
he only wanted to hit the 5% mark to secure federal campaign matching funds, so
then why visit states where the odds of prying loose votes were especially
unfavorable? His unsatisfactory response has been that he wanted to follow the other candidates into every state.
Along the
campaign trail, Nader’s rhetoric against Gore became increasingly harsh. Nader
called him
a
coward, whose supporters had “a servile mentality.” Nader attacked Gore and
his
RFK
Human Rights Award winning book
Earth
in the Balance,
in
the following diatribe documented in letters Nader sent to the
Sierra Club environmental organization, “
Earth
in the Balance, Gore's script for his reemergence as a national politician was
an advertisement for his calculated strategy and availability as an
environmental poseur, prepared to attract, barter and mollify environmental
support for corporate cash. As a broker of environmental voters on corporate
terms, Gore is the prototype for the bankable, Green corporate politician.”
I think it’s
fair to suggest that Gore’s contribution to environmentalism is comparable to
Nader’s, not that it should have been a competition. My point being, these guys had way more in common than not!
Nader ran as
an independent in 2004 and saw
an
84% drop off in votes compared to the previous election cycle. There are a
lot of factors why that might be, but, whether fair or not, the backlash from
his 2000 spoiler was likely among them.
Nader has
done
a lot to change the
world for the better. I know you are probably linked-out by now, so let me
remind you: the Clean Air and Water Acts, Wholesome Meat and Poultry Acts,
OSHA, the Freedom of Information Act, Whistleblower Protection Act, Consumer
Product Safety Act, National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act, Nuclear
Power Safety, Safe Drinking Water Act. The act that created the EPA. Founding Public Citizen. Nutrition
labels. Warnings on cigarettes and pharmaceuticals. Crash testing. Air bags!
Seatbelts alone
have
saved
hundreds of thousands of lives. I would comfortably argue that Nader has
done more good than many presidents.
But Nader
never won an election, never even hit his goal of 5% of the popular vote (or
even 3%), failed to get the Democratic Party to change its platform and widely
confirmed the American public’s worst fears about a spoiler effect. So it’s
worth asking, might there have been a more productive way to further his agenda
than running a 3rd party campaign?
Epilogue
Probably the
weather that day in Florida, or the traffic in some counties, or the locations
of the polling stations, and what was on TV could also have swung an election
that close. So where does that leave us?
I think all
of culprits highlighted above are responsible on some level. We are all responsible for our
country and each other, but we live in a society where the idea of taking responsibility,
especially in such a complicated and often indirect sense, is considered
academic at best and political suicide at worst.
If you want
to get even more philosophical consider this: because George W. Bush won the
election, he went on to lead the U.S. into the Iraq War based on the false
contention that they had WMDs.
Hundreds
of thousands died. Do we blame Nader for that, too? Or just stick with the
obvious target, Bush? But wait, Bush was relying on bad intelligence that someone fed
him, so that guy’s really the one to blame, right? And so on down the rabbit
hole...
I will end
this post with an excerpt from Jeffrey Toobin’s book “
Too
Close to Call,” in which Gore calls Bush at 2:30 a.m. the night of the fateful
election to do something that had never been done in U.S. history:
Gore: Circumstances
have changed dramatically since I first called you.
Bush: Are
you saying what I think you’re saying? Let me make sure that I understand.
You’re calling back to retract that concession?
Gore: You
don’t have to get snippy about it.
George Bush
then told Gore that his brother Jeb Bush had assured him that he had won
Florida.
Gore: Let me
explain something: your little brother is
not the ultimate authority on this.
And of
course, neither am I, but I hope gathering all this info in one place has been
useful to you!
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