What Went Wrong for Ralph?

Two-point-seven percent.

What happened? Why didn't Ralph Nader get the five percent that polls suggested lay in reach, as late as the weekend before the election? And regardless of the final vote, what did his campaign accomplish? Where did it fall short?

Based on comprehensive interviews with Nader and much of his core campaign staff, along with an array of Green activists and others who intersected with the campaign over the last year, some early conclusions can be drawn.

First, what the Nader campaign accomplished, on its own terms: "We got on 44 state ballots [including Washington, D.C.], raised almost $8 million, mobilized 150,000 volunteers, started 500 local Green groups and 900 campus chapters, and brought in one million new voters," said Theresa Amato, Nader's campaign manager. "Ralph raised his agenda for a working democracy in fifty states, and we were the only campaign talking about issues like the death penalty, fair trade, campaign finance reform, universal health care, and media concentration. We trained a new generation of activists to follow through on the Seattle movement, gave great visibility to the Green Party and highlighted some of its local candidates. And we raised awareness of the corrupt Commission on Presidential Debates, filed two lawsuits against it, and also brought nine lawsuits seeking to open up state ballot access."

It's an honorable list. Nader ran a serious campaign that carried forward the torch of reform lit earlier in the year by Republican John McCain, adding his own distinct anti-corporate critique and challenging many Americans to consider their stake in fostering a "deep democracy."

While many Democrats and their liberal interest group allies are consumed with vitriol for Nader's renegade campaign, a few calmer heads have recognized his impact on the election and the future. After all, he did get more than 5 percent of the vote in 11 states (and D.C.) and more than 4 percent in 7 others -- giving him the potential to be a swing vote in perhaps 100 Congressional districts.

"We are witnessing the birth pangs of a reform movement in America intent on ending the corruption of our democratic system by money," former Clinton Labor Secretary Robert Reich observed in the current issue of the American Prospect, adding that "this is the hour for reform, not recrimination."

From the right, historian Kevin Phillips noted in the Los Angeles Times that the combined vote for Al Gore and Ralph Nader was 52 percent, the highest since LBJ's 1964 landslide. "Nader and his voters may now be what George C. Wallace was after in 1968: a pivotal force to be courted," wrote Phillips.

But while the first draft of history is still being written, it's worth taking a close look at the course of Nader's campaign. It may be that nothing could have been done differently or that external conditions beyond the campaign's control mattered more than anything else. Certainly, no one could have predicted that Patrick Buchanan would put in such a weak performance -- especially after polls last year showed him drawing into the low double-digits as a third-party candidate. (Though, ironically, it appears that Buchanan "cost" Bush more states -- Iowa, New Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin -- than Nader did Gore, assuming for the sake of argument that every one of their voters would have gone to the major party candidate.)

Had there been a genuine four-way race, with a four-way debate, Nader might have avoided the ugly endgame with the Democrats which dominated his campaign's final weeks. And, certainly, no one thought the race between Gore and Bush would be so close -- another factor that ultimately depressed Nader's vote totals.

"The most disappointing thing to me," Nader said during an hour-long conversation just before Thanksgiving, "was the way the polls shrank. They gave every indication to me of holding, going into the last weekend before election day, even surging in some places." He sighed. "There's this psychology among voters not to stray from the major parties."