Yep. Nader just announced his candidacy as an independent for '04.
Why? Why, Ralph?
You tried this before and you put that douchebag in the White House… this time you’re going to keep him there if you aren’t careful.
If you want to make yourself heard, get a gun and take some hostages or something, but please don’t fuck up another election…
Huh? AP News says he’s not announced yet, but that signs point toward him making such an announcement on Sunday
Don’t hatchet the cunt before he can chicken.
Daniel
[sub]who would normally never call anyone a cunt but who couldn’t get the bad pun to work any other way[/sub]
:eek:
That wasn’t so much wordplay as it was fowl play.
That’s a pretty [sic] pun. 
I’m sending him a $50 check and all my best wishes. 
Oh I hope he runs, I’ve been waiting for that for months. At least nnow you know how conservatives feel about Perot.
Nader didn’t put Bush in the White House. The Electoral College and the Supreme Court did. Here are the officially tabulated returns from the Presidential election of 2000. You’ll note the following numbers:
Gore - 50,999,897 (48.38% of the total vote)
Bush - 50,456,002 (47.87% of the total vote)
…and this is with maybe only 2/3 of the total eligible voting population going out and doing so. Had the presidential election been a direct vote, Gore would have won with or without Nader’s candidacy. Personally, I’d rather see a larger number of third-party candidate campaigning for office; the more I read about what the Democrats want for the next four years, the more I want other people out there saying “Hey, these two parties really aren’t our only alternatives.”
Olentzero, normally I chalk your opinions up to be just plain old different from mine. But in this case, third parties are not what we need to “fix” whatever problem you see; we have a two party system because they are a natural consequence of first-past-the-post voting systems. Unless we switch to approval voting, minority parties are Not Good.
Hopefully, most will take it as a non event and ignore him.
Unless led by Pat Buchannon or Ross Perot.
I get the feeling most Nader supporters will be saying, “Ralph, we love ya, guy, but this time we’re voting for the Dems. We can’t take any chances…”
It’s not easy to get on the ballot as an independent candidate and very expensive. It cost Ross Perot between 5 and 10 million just get on the ballots.
Does Nader have that kind of money?
Does he have the time?
Elaborate on the “natural consequence” bit for me, would you? Secondly, given the dismal voter turnout in the last election (has it been almost four years already??), it would seem that a lot of people are looking for a third, or fourth, or whatever, party. I fail to see how minority parties are Not Good if there is almost 50% of the voting populace to be won.
Firstly, let me debunk your “majority vote” thesis. You cannot predict how the election would have turned out if we didn’t have the EC in place. The campaign would have been different and unless you are going to claim that campaigns don’t influence voters, then this whole “Gore would have won” is a pretty useless hypothetical.
The 50% of the folks who don’t vote are most likely apathetic and lazy. I haven’t seen any evidence that a significant number of people who don’t vote choose not to because they can’t find the right candidate.
Third party candidates are almost never viable. Perot won 19% of the total vote, but didn’t win a single state. George Wallace won 5 states in 1968, and Nixon still won the Whitehouse (I’m assuming that most of those states would’ve gone to Nixon had Wallace not run).
It’s hard to make a case that 3rd party candidates do anything but “spoil” the election. I put that in quotes only because I still think it’s unreasonable to expect 3rd party candidates not to run, and it’s undemocratic to use that term in the sense that “those guys shouldn’t run because they’re spoilers.”
Nader didn’t spoil the presidential race, Gore did. he paradoxically tried to present himself as being more liberal, while at the same time strongarming the Nader voters. That just made the Nader voters more stubborn. Only when Gore rediscovered Clinton did he regain some of the ground he should have had in the first place.
Hopefully Kerry learns from Gore’s mistakes.
Nader was only a factor in 2000 because the race was the closest election in 100 years. He’ll be less of a factor this time. He’s running as an independent so he’ll be on a lot fewer ballots. The anti-Bush vote is more galvanized now. And the 2004 election will not be as close as the 2000 one was.
the correct factor to look at would be the specific vote Gore/Bush/Nadar in Florida. Since if Florida had gone to Gore, he’d been in the White House. The vote in Florida was very very very close. Check out how many votes Nadar got there and then try and claim he wasn’t a major force in the 2000 election (even if we do not assume that all Nadar voters would have voted/and for Gore)
Minority parties are good in systems that aren’t our own. However, voting in a first-past-the-post system involves the rather democratic concept of “compromise”. A person doesn’t necessarily vote for the candidate they like the most, but the one they feel is most likely to win. To do otherwise aids opponents (unless they are doing the same thing, in which case I suppose the whole thing could be considered a wash… I don’t see any historical evidence of this, though).
Check out wikipedia’s entry on first-past-the-post voting, tactical voting, and Duverger’s Law. Interesting stuff.
If we used approval voting we’d definitely avoid the problem, and be able to vote for all the candidates we like. It, shall we say, has my vote.
There’s no question that Gore could have run a better campaign. Neither is there a question that without Nader, Gore would have had more votes, enough to win, even if only some of Nader’s voters went to Gore.
Hopefully Kerry can learn from Gore’s mistakes, yes. Hopefully, Nader voters will learn from theirs, as well.
Maybe not, but Bush supporters do.