Yeah, but if we conquer Iraq we won’t need ANWR, right?
Must…not…get…sucked…in…
[Orbifold gets sucked in. Oh well.]
The difference, as I see it, is that in your hypothetical meeting you had a chance to “make your case” and still influence the choice between the more popular alternatives. But until the U.S. implements runoff voting or some other alternative voting method, my hypothetical Naderite has only one chance to say anything at all.
In the meeting: support the better but unpopular alternative and influence the choice between the popular alternatives. In the vote: support Nader or influence the choice between Bush and Gore, but not both. Since the point of the vote is to express who you want to be President, not who you don’t want to be President, I have to go with the first option: support the candidate you actually favour. Anything else is undermining the purpose of the vote.
But I realize that you’re not the only person who disagrees with me on this issue, not to mention that I came to this particular issue about a year and a half too late, and it’s a hijack, so I’ll happily shut up now…
With advance apologies to Florida voters…
Somehow instant runoff voting might be beyond the intellectual capabilities of too much of the electorate. I can’t even imagine the hoo-hah as people complain that they “didn’t understand the system”.
On an entirely different note: I was surprised to see several posters put Nader and Brown (Libertarian) candidate in the same category. The only thing they seem to have in common is being a “3rd party” candidate. Their platforms seem incredibly different to me, but I’d welcome some enlightenment from those who see them as being similar. And I don’t count “thumbing your nose at the status quo” as a similarity.
Excuse my naivety (I’m fairly new to these boards) but what’s “a hijack”? I think I know what it is in a general sense, but would appreciate a more specific explanation.
Oh, and by the way, morally and idealistically I applaude your conscientiousness in “voting your conscience”. However, intellectually and realistically I believe in the philosophy of compromising within oneself and choosing the “lesser of…”
I’ve been avoiding this thread because I’ve unapologetically attacked Nader voters in the past for this exact outcome.
However, I notice few people (aside from a certain cynical mouthwashy type) have bothered to mention the tangible consequences of the handoff to the Bush administration. They are manyfold and profound.
I’ll come back tomorrow to see what’s happened here, but in the meantime I’ve got to ask you Nader voters this: aren’t you paying attention to what has already happened in two short years?
If you have to ask what’s happened, and you voted for Nader, then I can only throw my hands up in disgust and walk away.
Citations are left as an exercise for the Nader supporter.
Heh. I was called cynical yesterday by a guy who makes a living defending people on Texas death row.
Considering the source, I’d say that makes me perhaps the most cynical person on the planet. 
“Hijacking” a thread is another term for talking about something other than the topic of the original post. For example, talking about the merits of strategic voting when the original post was about whether any Naderites out there still think there’s no difference between Bush and Gore. In other words, taking the thread somewhere it wasn’t intended to go.
If I really, really wanted to keep debating the merits of strategic voting with RTFirefly, the polite thing for me to do would be to open another thread. But I’m not that desperate to debate the issue, so I won’t.
Thank you for replying. That’s what I figured, but was not sure. However, I can see where some digression, especially in lengthy “involved” discussions, would not only be inevitable but helpful. I guess as in all things it is a matter of degree. But, alas, I am committing the very sin of which I speak.
Thanks again.
I’m a Green who likes Dems. (Well, at least I like the good ones like Wellstone… R.I.P. 
… ) I never bought that snarky-Green “Better Republican, the more evil the better, than a Democrat” concept. It makes no sense to me.
I voted for Nader, but then I’m in ultra-Republican Virginia, for all the difference it makes. If it had been at all close, I would have voted for Gore. Of course, any idiot can see that Gore was incomparably better than Bush… not that Gore was all that great… but Bush was obviously all that bad. I like Ralph (I think…), but hope to God he sits the next one out. Liberating America from the Bush gang is the only thing that matters.
“any idiot can see that Gore was incomparably better than Bush”
Now I realize that Gore got the “popular vote”, but it was pretty close. For all practical purposes, it was 50/50, so are you saying that 50% of Americans are “idiots” or is it only that they are idiots because they don’t agree with you?
"so are you saying that 50% of Americans are “idiots” or is it only that they are idiots because they don’t agree with you?
"
Not to be a smartass, but b/c I really do think it’s pertinent here: let’s not forget that 50% of Americans didn’t vote at all: not for Bush, not for Gore, not for anyone.
The pitcher who blew the save in game 6 of the '86 World Series.
A Cowboys offense that got stopped cold on 4th and inches.
The Democrats that are in the white house, the Florida Supreme Court, and a presidential candidate who refuses to raise any kind of fuss for what he won.
What do they all have in common? They all have escaped any and all censure simply because they were lucky enough to have a convenient scapegoat handy.
Look, Gore won the freaking election. And no matter how evil Bush is (and granted, that much is unmistakable), even he couldn’t have gotten away with so much insanity…tax cuts, the repeal of the death tax, more abortion restrictions, the full frontal assault on accused suspects’ rights, the Ashcroft nomination, etc. etc…if the other folks in charge didn’t let him.
I mean, geez, how the hell can I raise my ire at a compassionate, conscientious, intelligent man who had no effect whatsoever on who got elected (um, I did mention that Gore won the friggin’ thing…don’t forget that “butterfly ballot” fiasco, too), when our own legislature is actively SUPPORTING each and every goddam piece of Republican tripe Bush comes up with?
Yeah, Gore would be different…he’d make a big show about how much it hurts before green-lighting the Department of Homeland Security.
(Gawd, this is just too depressing…I can’t believe I bothered to respond to this thread… :()
I said I was sorry…:o
That’s just insane, you know. How can you possibly assert that Nader “had no effect” on the election when–news flash–that margin of Bush’s stolen “victory” in Florida was only 900 bloody votes, while Nader siphoned off something like 97,000? I mean, I know a lot of Green Party types whose grasp on reality is tenuous at best, but that claim is just silly.
And hey, how about the 22,000 Nader votes in New Hampshire, where Gore lost by 12,000? Thanks for swinging that one and making the Florida debacle matter, Ralphie boy, and ya came awful damn close to blowing up Iowa (4,000 vote Gore win, with Nader burning 29,000 votes), Oregon (6,000 vote Gore win, with 77,000 for Nader), Wisconsin (5,000 vote Gore win, 93,000 for Nader) and New Mexico (300 vote Gore win, with 21,000 Greenies registering their satisfaction with Bush).
And by the way, didn’t some apologist above claim that Gore never had a chance in Ohio, so a Nader vote there didn’t hurt anything? Nonsense. Bush beat Gore 2,294,167 to 2,117,741. Nader killed 114,482. Even if you toss all of those votes into the Gore column, Bush still wins–but it’s awful close either way.
Complete presidential election returns here.
Hey, do me a favor. Run over to Google and figure out which party runs both wings of the Capitol. Last I checked, it was (gasp!) the Republicans. Imagine that, Republicans supporting Republican causes . . .
Homeland Security is a good idea, originally championed by the Democrats in Congress and opposed until very late in the game by Bush the Usurper. The devil, of course, is in the details of said Department, and I am quite confident that many of the most objectionable details would never have gotten past Gore’s signature. YMMV.
That “apologist” would be me.
And like you yourself said, Gore still wouldn’t have won Ohio had all Nader voters voted for him.
So it was close?
So? Close didn’t count!
vanilla, an Ohio native who voted Green.
I don’t have easy answers on this question; I’m conflicted on it.
On the one hand, W is a horrific president; I realize that, and I suspected it even as I voted for Nader.
But Gore didn’t stand a chance of winning in North Carolina. My vote would be a message vote, whether I voted for Gore or for Nader; my only question was, what message should I send?
But North Carolina, in its happy fuckeduppedness, decided not to tally Nader votes.
But if Nader was close to 5% in his national returns, I figured his campaign might sue NC to force a vote-count here.
In the end, I voted for Nader. I think that had I lived in Oregon, or Florida, or somewhere else with a close election, I would’ve held my nose and voted for Gore. But I’m not sure.
Here’s my big question: given the 2000 election, how is the Democratic party likely to treat leftist issues in 2004? I can see two main responses:
- Those fuckers cost us the 2000 election – no way are we gonna listen to them now!
- We lost the 2000 election because we alienated so many potential voters. Let’s look at their issues this time around, see if we can’t prevent a repeat of the 2000 election.
I’m obviously hoping for #2: I’m hoping that the Democratic party will be terrified of repeating the 2000 election, and will pay more attention to retaining the energy of its left-wing constituents this go-round. But I don’t know whether that’ll be the outcome.
Daniel
Mand: yeah, yeah, yeah, so substitute “those who voted” for “American” in my earlier post. Any statitistician, though will tell you the % who voted is a “significant sample”.
DKW: I’m probably an idiot for even responding to your post, but you gotta let go of this “Gore won the election” crap. Every major news outfit went down to FL and did their own recount, and THEY ALL affirmed that Bush would’ve gotten more votes had there been time to recount.
Back to the OP, I do remember telling all my Democratic friends that they should vote for Nader. I figured that was worth more than my vote for Bush.
Actually, Snopes is your friend. According to them it is undetermined whether this ever happened, in their words:
Actually, I was referring (now that I’ve reviewed who said what) to black455, who claimed “I live in Ohio, and . . . [t]here was no way in hell Gore was gonna win my state.” This is clearly false. Ohio was close even with Nader in the race, and would have been very close indeed without Nader. Ohio was a very competitive race, and it’s nonsence to claim otherwise.
I don’t remember Gore ever explicitly saying “A vote for Nader being a vote for Bush”, himself. The most noteworthy aspect of Gore’s campaign against Nader was the absence of it–he barely even acknowledged that Nader was in the race. He was campaigning for himself all day, every day for months, so it wouldn’t have hurt him to take a little time out of telling us why we should vote for him instead of Bush to tell us why we should vote for him instead of Nader. The message I was left with was that we didn’t need a reason.
He ignored the challenge, and the message from the Democratic side (which is only nominally distinguishable from the Gore campaign) was that, in fact, a vote for Nader was a vote for Bush. I think that if he had engaged Nader, he might have won some respect and gotten some of those votes back. Instead, he chose to keep from giving people the idea that Nader was a legitimate candidate. He took a gamble, and he lost.
Dr. J