Nader's Numbers

By Evan Derkacz, AlterNet. Posted May 31, 2004.

It has been said lately, perhaps a bit prematurely, that President George W. Bush is in a heap of trouble and that the November election is John Kerry's to lose. Though polls and recent events do support this conclusion, let's add a different possibility: It may actually be Ralph Nader's to lose.

Nader has been repeatedly claiming that he'll pull more votes from Bush than from Kerry. But now comes a new study that ought to put those arguments to rest.

In light of its findings, the organization that did the study, DontVoteRalph.net, asks a poignant question: "Nader's continued use of the claim that he'll help beat Bush would now call into question the very foundation of Nader's remarkable career in public life: his honesty. It's one thing to engage in wishful thinking, or even in the inevitable exaggerations of advocacy. But when do exaggerations become deceit?"

Back in 2000, Nader ran on the alluring premise that there was no real difference between the Democrat and Republican presidential candidates whom he dubbed "Tweedledum and Tweedledee." Pointing to unsavory connections between campaign donors and the sweetheart policies that followed as standard operating procedure within both parties, Nader successfully made his case to nearly 2.9 million voters -- or 2.7 per cent of all votes cast.

But the smallish number is deceptive. As clearly evidenced by Gore's loss of the election -- despite his victory in the popular vote -- it's the states that determine the outcome. At the very least, Nader's numbers helped give Florida to Bush in an election so close that any single state would have handed Gore the White House.

After nearly four years of Bush, Nader can't make the Tweedledum v. Tweedledee argument, so he has opted for a different, and decidedly murkier, strategy.

Nader's rationale is now two-pronged. On the one hand, he claims his presence will pull the Democratic Party to the left, lighting up and lassoing in an otherwise uninspired liberal and progressive bloc to vote for a new and improved Kerry. Why this crowd wouldn't just vote for Nader, or whether an equal number of center-leaning voters wouldn't abandon Kerry, is left unanswered. On the other hand sits Nader's assertion that he's not a "spoiler" because he will attract "conservative voters who are furious at Bush." And even this: "Very few of my votes will come from Democrats."

Empirically speaking, this is utter nonsense.

The DontVoteRalph.net study looked at every poll — since Nader entered the race this time — that measured Bush and Kerry head-to-head as well as a three-way race with Bush, Kerry and Nader. Of the 37 such polls, Nader pulls votes directly from Kerry in 32 and four show no difference. Only one, a Fox News poll, shows Nader pulling votes from Bush by 1%. These results also happen to be consistent with exit polls from 2000 which showed that Nader voters would have voted for Gore twice as often as for Bush.

There is a certain "duh" factor to the study. Who seriously believes that Nader has any strong appeal to conservatives? Sure, his platform includes positions some fiscal conservatives might support; but his Green Party background, lack of Christian credentials, liberal social agenda, anti-corporate themes and reputation as a "tree hugger" all render him an unlikely choice for conservatives. Angry at Bush or not, the idea that conservatives will storm the polls for Nader is about as silly as the idea that Democrats will defect to, say, Pat Buchanan, because he opposed the Iraq war. In any case, intuitive arguments are just that; the poll numbers speak for themselves.

Democrats and Nader have argued for nearly four years whether Nader "lost the election" in 2000 or not. They are both half-right. There are a number of reasons why Gore lost the election -- from illegal tampering in the Florida election to the press's pack mentality to Gore's Republican-lite platform -- but one of them is undeniably Nader. In fact, Nader's argument isn't that his presence wasn't responsible for tipping the election to Bush, it's that it wasn't the only thing that did: "Gore slipped on a dozen banana peels in 2000; I was only one of them."

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