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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Dennis O'Bell who wrote (165156)	7/1/2005 5:43:53 PM
From: Lazarus_Long	Respond to of 281500

Ummmm..... These guys say Bush would have won ib=n 2000 anyway had Nader not run. gp.org How about Green Party Presidential Candidate Ralph Nader did not work for the Florida Secretary of State, the Palm Beach County Election Commission, the Al Gore campaign committee, or the United States Supreme Court. Yet, he has become a scapegoat among many Democrats for Al Gore’s loss of the 2000 election, and, beyond the election, the person to blame for the resulting policies of George Bush. These diehard Democrats are averse to looking at the failings of their candidate, and they are not blaming voters for failing to vote at all. Instead, they are upset that Ralph Nader did not acquiesce to dropping out of the race as many urged him to do. As a side note, if Al Gore had won his home state of Tennessee, he would have had the necessary Electoral College votes to have won the election and the Florida results would have been irrelevant. The facts are compelling and undeniable that Ralph Nader is not the reason, and should not be blamed, for George Bush’s victory in the 2000 presidential election. cagreens.org or So, where does Nader fit into this picture? The complaint is that Nader took Democratic and independent votes away from Gore. This claim, while logical, is undermined by conflicting and unconvincing data from election polls. Most exit polls found that approximately 20% of Nader's votes came from Republicans, 40% from Democrats, and the rest from individuals who would have voted neither for Gore nor Bush. Even Democratic exit polls discovered these same trends, upholding the conclusion that Nader's support base represented a wide range of people, and did not overly take away votes from Democrats. For example, in New Hampshire, about twice as many Republicans as Democrats voted for Nader. However, in close states, even small changes in voter behavior can make a huge difference, and many Democrats have applied this claim to the loss of Florida. Even if we do assume that Nader "took away" votes from Gore, there were a variety of factors that enabled Bush to win. Addressing any of these other factors would have allowed the Democrats to win the election. Instead, they spent their time running an inflexible campaign that, instead of appealing to new voters, simply devoted too much energy to worrying and complaining about Nader. A far better strategy would have been to either attempt to reach a compromise with Nader's campaign or appeal to his likely voters. If Gore had either truly offered a bold, refreshing alternative to interest group-dominated politics rather than trying to blur distinctions between the parties, offered Nader and Green Party members government positions, or brought more liberal issues into his campaign, he could have appealed to Nader's base. Instead, he paralleled Bush in too many ways and failed to draw many groups into his campaign. princeton.edu Know something? in the year 3000, we'll probably still be arguing about who won the 2000 election.