I really don’t know.
As far as i can tell, there’s exactly ONE person in this thread (niblet_head) ho admits to voting for Nader specifically because he wanted to support a third-party candidate and encourage more “viable political parties.”
Most people who vote for third-party candidates DO vote on principle, but it’s not merely the principle of third parties; they vote because they support the PRINCIPLES espoused by their candidate, and feel that those principles are not reflected very well in either of the major parties.
Quite a different thing.
I’m complaining because I think voting for a third party candidate, whomever he or she may be, is a legitimate and defensible thing to do. I really don’t give a fuck about Nader, and posting nothing more than “if you voted for Nader, you’re nuts,” neither directly addresses the issue of the OP (which is about 3rd party candidates), nor does it really put forth any sort of argument on your part. You just wanted to shout names at people. So fuck you. You’re entitled to your opinion, but if you can’t communicate it any better than the way you did, I have no interest in holding an argument with you.
Well, being confident that a third party candidate will not be elected president, practical concerns about how much political clout the person has become irrelevant.
I want to second this distinction. Though the two are not mutually exclusive, I would not vote for a third party candidate in order to encourage a 3rd party system if I was not also more aligned with the the views of that candidate than those of any other candidate.
Maybe you’ll just have to take my word on it that I’ve come across others who vote similarly. I mean, there’s no need to accuse me of acting like a “mind-reader” when you don’t know who I’ve talked to. I haven’t said everyone who voted for Nader did so “on principle”, but there are a lot that do.
When I hear people say things like “The only reason I voted for Nader is because I assumed Gore had the race on lockdown” that tells me that they didn’t vote for Nader because they thought he was the best person running. They voted that way because they assumed everyone else was voting a certain way. Now tell me, does this way of thinking make any more sense than the person who pragmatically votes for the lesser of two evils? To me, it makes a lot less sense because if everyone went into the booth with same assumption, we could end up with a person in office who is not qualified, credible, or even liked very much.
I don’t see why people who faithfully vote Dem or Rep are any more slavish than someone who votes for the 3rd party person for “just because” reasons. All they have to do is show up and they’ll get votes? Yeah, it’s hard to take those voters seriously.
You have made an incorrect assumption-- that the people who voted for Nader because they thought Gore would win didn’t think Nader was the best person for the job. I don’t think you’re right in that assumption. People felt free to vote for the person they thought was best (Nader) because they assumed that the person they thought was worst (Bush) would lose to Gore. Thus, they could vote their conscience.
I don’t know anyone who votes third party “just because.” Everyone I know who votes that way does it either because they do not like or agree with the major party candidates, or they want to help advance the cause of third parties, or they really subscribe to the beliefs of a particular third party and support its candidate. Those are all valid reasons.
Do you need a hug? I mean if my movement was responsible for getting the worst US president in history elected, eroding our civil rights and getting 10s to hundreds of thousands of innocent people killed I’d be a shrill bitch too. But it’s okay, you voted your heart. Good for you! Your freedom of expression is more important than all those people living out their alloted spans.
I’m just saying there are consequences to your actions. If you protest in front of a hospital and ambulances can’t past the picket lines, people die. If you vote in a close race for a numbnut loon who has no chance to get elected, the guy with platform is most different from your favored candidate could win.
A lot of factors, yes. That Naderites are a key factor, yes.
I humbly await your shrieking reply. 
But they understand the facts of American politics. On the left you have a small amount of liberal DEMS. To the left of that, you have an even smaller number of Green party voters.
On the right, you have a small number of conservative Republicans. To the right of that you have an even smaller number of the the Taxpayers’ party, Constitutional Law party, etc.
Now, probably a full 50% of people are in the unclaimed middle who could care less about history, issues, politics, positions, or politicians, and therein lies the win or loss in the election. These votes will go to the party or the candidate that they feel addresses their immediate concerns or appeal to their emotional desires. So why would:
- The GOP give up that middle and tend to the 2 or 3 percent who might want to vote hard right
or
- The DEMS give up the middle and tend to the 2 or 3 percent who might want to vote hard left.
It is a numbers game and why the two-party system will always moderate instead of appealing the fringes…
Are you talking to the Republicans? Because they are the ones responsible for electing Bush, primarily. Blaming it on people who voted for Nader is just, well, stupid. Sorry.
But Nader predicated his campaign on the notion that the two parties were the same. They weren’t and they’re not, as George Bush has helpfully demonstrated.
Exacfuckingactly. If anyone seriously thinks 8 years of Gore would have gone the same way, they have no fucking idea. I think even Chomsky has admitted by this time that Gore would have been way goddamned better, regardless of what he thought in 2000.
Nader is a moron. And I fucking voted for him. What a dumb shit I was.
It’s that they weren’t different enough. And I still don’t think they are. By your logic, then didn’t it behoove Al Gore to demonstrate how different he was? But no, everyone is competing for that elusive moderate vote, so let’s just kiss each others’ asses in the debates and try to be as bland and centrist as possible. That was a mistake the Gore campaign made, not a mistake made by people who voted for Nader.
I do not remember how the numbers broke down state by state, but it is by no means stupid to “blame” Nader voters for electing Bush. In some states, it might have been true.
When you vote, you express your preference over an outcome. Sure, people talk about voting as a form of self-expression like getting a nose piercing or wearing a Yankees jersey at a Red Sox game. Whatever makes them happy. But for the rest of us for whom the sky is blue, we vote to try to influence an outcome. Most of the time, we have no influence whatsoever. But sometimes we really do. It is a shame when people throw this influence away.
We all have preference orderings over electoral outcomes. Gore voters typically preferred Gore to Bush, Gore to Nader, and typically Nader to Bush. Bush voters typically chose Bush as a condorcet winner, but preferred Gore to Nader.
What this means is that Nader voters cared more about expressing themselves or whatever to averting their least preferred alternative, Bush. Great, they expressed themselves, and we got stuck with the worst president of the 20th century. Nader voters were pivotal, because Bush voters were already voting for Bush and Gore voters were already voting for Gore, and it was goddamned close and everyone knew it. But if you voted for Nader, you valued your self-expression more than the actual outcome of the election. I have two explanations as to why this might be the case. Either you believed Nader’s complete and utter lie that the candidates were the same, or your personal values are so deformed that you care more about your self-expression than you do about real political outcomes that effect billions of people around the world.
If you voted for Nader in New York, California, or Texas, I am not talking about you. Vote for Mumia for all it makes a difference.
Justifying your vote based on the 5% vote share to get federal matching funds excuse is a great canard. Nader raises so little money that even giving him 500%, no, 5000% federal matching funds wouldn’t do a damn thing. Nader raised $680,000 for the 2000 elections, $40k of which he kicked in himself. That’s not enough cash to get a ten second spot on a public access channel during the Robin Byrd show. That’s the tire replacement costs on a M1A Abrams tank. That’s a rounding error in how much Barack Obama has raised in the last week. Get real.
I meant to send you some links ages ago, but this is by no means an unreasonable mistake to make. It’s the right move; Gore just fucked it up.
Since our electoral rule is plurality rule, this is baked into our system.
What a facile “analysis.”
Maybe Nader voters cared more about voting for someone who represented their actual political views, rather than voting for a Democratic candidate whom they felt had abandoned Democratic values and who was running a godawful campaign. Again, there’s this assumption that the two major parties are somehow the only reasonable custodians of the people’s votes, and that any vote for anyone else is, by definition, nothing more than masturbation. People who think this are idiots.
Quite an accomplishment, considering that not one single day of Bush’s presidency fell within the 20th century.
First, if Gore had run a vaguely competent campaign, it shouldn’t have been close at all.
Second, voter turnout in the 2000 election was about 55%. I’m always intrigued by morons who spend more time blaming a few thousand people who actually bothered to turn up and vote for their preferred candidate, rather than the millions of people who didn’t vote at all.
In Florida, voter turnout was about 57% of the Voting-Eigible Population. If we assume that the 43% who didn’t vote would have broken down about the same as the 57% who did (not an unreasonable assumption, i think), that leaves over 2 million actual Democratic supporters who couldn’t be bothered to get their asses to the polls. Source
And yet, in the puny minds of the “We own your votes” crowd in the two major parties, a few thousand Nader voters are to blame for Gore’s loss.
You are a drooling idiot.
I voted for Nader in CA in the hope that he’d get matching funds and make the next third party candidate viable (Green Party).
So, FUCK all of you sheep. Guess two parties are all that you deserve.
Have fun with all the special interests.
And voting for a third-party candidate for president once every four years is, in fact, the ultimate in masturbatory exercises. Even if you win, nothing happens.
As was pointed out above, you have two options at this point:
- Get together with 30 million of your friends and take over one of the existing parties. Then, after you’ve put in all that time and money to take over, you can be all noble and reform the system to break the two-party hegemony.
- Start a true grass-roots effort. Elect a Green Party councilman. Then a State Legislator (or 50), then a Congressman (or 150), then a few Senators (say 30 or so), then run for President.
Until you do one of the above, you are voting for a candidate who has no chance to win and no chance to govern effectively even if he/she somehow wins. You may consider that a noble effort, but frankly, I’d rather you stayed home and quit making the lines longer at the poll.
In other words, they cared more about expressing themselves than about the actual outcome of the election. You are welcome to change the verbiage any way you like, but it does not change the logic. Yet you call my analysis facile.
Your first identification of an “assumption” is misplaced. This has nothing whatsoever to do with which party is a reasonable custodian of the people’s votes. There is nothing normative whatsoever here. The only thing that matters is your preference over outcomes. What separates Nader voters from the rest of us is that the rest of us understand this intuitively while third party voters froth at the mouth about their self-expression.
Vid. supra. “Facile analysis”, “drooling idiot”. I had Nader pollstalkers tell me this right before election day, too. As smart as they must have been, we still ended up with Bush.
Your second point here is shocking. Yes, everyone knew that Gore ran a poor campaign. So what you are really saying is that Nader voters punished Gore for running a bad campaign. All of them (presumably) would have preferred Gore to Bush, but they voted for Nader because Gore ran a bad campaign. This tells me that they were either unable to predict the likelihood of a Bush victory, they did not face much disutility from a Bush presidency (very unlikely), or they cared more about their self-expression than about political outcomes. A bit of column A and a bit of column C.
Most Nader votes, like votes for anyone else, weren’t pivotal at all. I made this pretty clear. Vote for Cher in California if it makes you happy.
And people who didn’t vote don’t have strong preferences over outcomes. How can you be unhappy with them? They bore the consequences just like the rest of us. It is the people who do have strong preferences and screwed up are the ones who can be blamed.
This is an unreasonable assumption. The decision to vote or not to vote is not a normally distributed random variable. The 43% who couldn’t be bothered to vote is a mixture of people who did (wrongly) did not think their vote was pivotal and people who simple do not care enough about the political outcome to pay the opportunity costs of voting. There is no reason to believe that their support breaks down on similar lines as the voting population’s, especially if they are demographic, educational, racial, etc correlates in the nonvoting population.
I don’t know who you think you are replying to here, but it sure sounds like you are projecting.
On a personal level, I am not a drooling idiot by either objective measures nor at my success in life. So if you want to disagree with me, fantastic, you are a smart guy. Otherwise, keep your hackneyed insults to yourself.
I am not a card-carrying member of any “we own your votes” crowd. No one owns anyone’s votes. Most people can vote for whoever they damn please since their votes do not matter. But they are expressing preferences not just over the state of the two party system or whatever, but over the outcome of the election. If the winner of the election is voter i’s condorcet winner, then voter i backed the winner. If the election winner is voter i’s condorcet loser, then it sucks, but that’s democracy.
But if you have even a small opportunity to avert the election of your condorcet loser when you know your winner will not succeed and fail to, you are either suffering a lapse in strategic thinking or have deformed and highly self-centered priorities. This isn’t about the two parties “owning” anyone’s votes. Do you think I didn’t have to hold my nose to vote for Gore or Kerry? Do you think I would not have preferred a candidate who better fit my own parochial, personal political views? Of course I would have. But that is not the point, it never was the point, and it never will be the point. So even in New York, I voted for Gore and for Kerry because, amazingly enough, it is not about me.
Yeah, he’s just as responsible for electing Bush as you are, but he got what he wanted and you got the opposite of what you wanted. So that makes you a fucking idiot, for voting in a way that helps along the candidate you least want to see win.
Unless of course you wanted Bush to win, in which case I take back the whole “fucking idiot” thing.
Well, you said so; it must be true.
Exactly. And that’s dumb. Who the hell gets a president who actually represents their views? When you vote, you’re choosing the person who would be the best president in the real world. The world where 434 of the 435 members of the House are Democrats or Republicans, and the President does not have the ability to submit legislation.
No, the idiots are the people who honestly believe there is insufficient difference between Gore and Bush to suck it up and vote sensibly. Do you honestly believe that the past seven years under Gore would have seen arrests without warrant? Do you really think that we would have had extra territorial and extralegal detention facilities? You really feel that Gore would have thrown his hands up and completely abandoned Kyoto? Would pro-democracy groups around the world refuse money from the US State Department for fear of being associated with the United States? AL Gore would have emptied the treasury at precisely the point when domestic social spending was about to explode?
And this is because he ran “a lousy campaign”? What are Tim Russert? You’re not voting someone off the island, you’re choosing a president. The next time you’re bitching about Bush, just remember you had a chance to stop him, and you had other priorities.