So vote Socialist. Then you’ll really punish those dumb ol’ Dems for accepting the radical notion that free markets, by and large, work just fine.
Seriously, man, if you want to change the Democrats, do it from within the damn party. 'Cause if you’re just gonna abandon the party altogether and turns the country over to the Republicans, I really couldn’t give a shit what direction you think the Democrats should move. Fair-weather friends are worse than outright enemies.
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And the more that Democratic activists scream shrilly at Green voters, the more they alienate Green voters.
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Good. Ain’t nobody gonna be winning any elections on the Green Party platform. Welcome to the margin, pal. Be sure and congratulate yourself on your political purity as the nation burns.
There were 3,803,381 registered democrats in Florida. 2,907,331 people voted for Gore. That leaves 896,050 registered Democrats who did not vote for Gore.
For the sake of argument, let’s say every Nader voter was a registered Democrat. According to the site, Nader received 96,698 votes. 896,050-96,698 = 799,352.
Now, there were some Dems who mistakenly voted for Buchanan. I’ll be generous here and let’s say that every Buchanan vote was actual from a registered Dem. Buchanan received 17,327. 799,352-17,327 = 782,025.
Ok, now I’ll be even more generous. Let’s say that of these registered dems, 90% didn’t vote because of voting irregularities,
overvotes, or maybe they died or something. 10% of 782,025
is 78,202.
So, where are these 78,202 voters? Did they vote for Bush
or were they just too lazy to vote? I don’t know, but either way, it the Democrats fault for losing Florida.
Ok, so maybe this isn’t a good way to estimate, but it seems to me there were 3.8 mil (or so) registered dems, but only 2.9 mil people cast their vote for Gore. To blame Nader for Gore losing Florida is, IMO, ridiculous, since Nader only got 96,000 votes.
If someone wants to double-check my calcs or correct my figures, please do. But I don’t think the results will be that much different.
What would you have them do? Embrace the wildly unpopular positions that drove the left-wing to the Green Party? It would be stupid in the extreme to try and recapture those votes when the price of doing so would be to alienate every swing vote in the country.
Wanna know why Nader got something like 3% nationally? Because people hate his politics.
Because that’s not the subject of this thread. I came here to argue about the moral responsibility of the people who voted for Nader and thereby threw the nation into the hands of Bush, not the missteps of the Gore campaign that prevented him from overcoming the high-minded vote-pissing of the Greens.
Yes, because the consequences of not doing so are far more important than the putative message of the protest vote. Welcome to politics, buckaroo.
And as I’ve said before, it was ultimately the people’s election to win or lose.
If I’m your pro-environment, anti-fundie, economically liberal voter (that probably characterizes most Green voters from 2000), and I send Gore and the Dems a message by voting for Nader rather than Gore, that makes about as much sense as my throwing a brick through my TV during Bush’s State of the Union address.
Either way, I’ve made my point against someone else by hurting me. And in the former case, millions of other Americans, too.
[sub]This assumes that I was living in a potential swing state, of course. If I’m in Texas or D.C., then however many votes Nader gets in my state, it’s not going to change the outcome, so the Nader vote is a free vote. [/sub]
I think you’re painting a picture that’s too black-and-white. I would have them at least try to make some sort of compromise that would swing Green voters too. I know a lot of people (myself included) who were planning to vote for Gore early on, and were later turned to Nader because of the Democrats’ inability to deal substantively with issues they cared about. They could have gained more votes than they lost, probably with only a little effort.
Or, perhaps, more people vote like you do. Apparently, people hated the politics of Buchanan, Browne, etc. more than they hated Nader’s politics. And obviously, that 3% you sneeze at now liked his politics well enough to vote their conscience, despite the fact that he was unlikely to win.
Fair enough. Perhaps a simple yes or no, then… do you or do you not think that the Democrats bear some brunt for alienating the Green voters in the first place? A simple yes or no will be fine here… I may start another thread if I have time (or do so yourself if you’re so inclined). For what it’s worth, the “moral responsibility” you’re talking about has as much to do with the Democrats pissing away the Green vote as it does with the Green voters themselves, but you say tomato, I say waffle…
Just consider for a moment… what if it wasn’t just a “protest vote”? What if it was a genuine reflection of that voter’s political stance? What if the agreed with Nader’s platform more than Gore’s? Would you still consider that “immoral?”
And I’ll be the first to say that politics sucks. It’s why the system should be changed, as I and others suggested earlier.
Interesting. I don’t think I’m a friend to the Democrats at all. I’ll vote my conscience, and if that means voting for a different party than the one I voted for last time, so be it. If that’s your problem – if you feel like I don’t got the Dems’ back – then you’re on the right track. I don’t ever have the Dems’ back. But if they look like good candidates to me, they’ll have my vote.
Given that position, I’m incapable of betraying the Dems. I’m not a fair-weather friend to them; I’m not a friend to them at all.
And I’ll tell you what: if I thought that a) the Socialists were running the best candidate, and b) voting Socialist would halt the Democrat’s swing to the right, I’d damn well vote Socialist.
It’s not about idealism. It’s about the pragmatic strategy of not letting Democrats take the left-wing vote for granted.
And if the best you can do is to say that the Democrats have accepted “the radical notion that free markets, by and large, work just fine,” then I’ll say you’re not paying attention. Because the sarcasm there is unjustified.
A lot of the problems that leftists have with the Democratic party stem from exactly that laissez-faire attitude. The WTO, NAFTA*, and welfare reform all passed under Clinton, and I think they were all terrible ideas. Every indication was that Gore would support more of the same; this is an abandonment of traditional Democratic values. And that’s an abandonment of the reasons I used to have for voting Democratic.
Now, it looks to me like we might be seeing some movement in the opposite direction. It looks to me like the double-whammy of the 2000 and 2002 elections have finally woken some Democrats up, that they might be paying more attention to the labor and environmental issues that move many on the left to the polls.
It sucks ass that it took losing in 2000 and 2002 to wake Democrats up to that. But if, in the long term, it means that the Democratic party pays attention to these issues, I’ll have to weigh that in my calculations against the immediate massive damage that Bush is causing.
As I said before, I’m not sure how those calculations turn out. But I definitely think that’s the way the scales are weighted.
Which issues? If you’re complaining about free trade and “living wages,” forget it. If, on the other hand, you’re talking about environmental issues, I agree with Sofa King that Gore absolutely should have run stronger on his environmental platform.
Yes. So? The fact that there are even less popular positions means what to the nation’s severe distaste for Nader?
So? Dude, are you seriously suggesting that 3% makes Nader “popular”? Hell, there are mass murderers with 3% approval ratings.
Certainly. Of course, Clinton’s embrace of centrist positions gained the party a hell of a lot more votes than it lost to you lot in 2000. To the extent that you are suggesting the Democratic Party must come to you to regain electoral majorities, well, that’s crazy talk.
Yes. The morality of one’s actions must be determined by reference to their likely consequences, not merely the purity of the actor’s motives.
You know, if the Dems want more votes I think they bloody well should try to make their platform appeal to more people, instead of demanding that people who don’t agree with their platform vote for them anyway.
And if changing the platform to make it more appealing isn’t reasonable (as you seem to suggest) then they need to spend more time advocating the platform they do have to try and change the minds of those extra voters.
But whichever the Dems decide to do, it’s their responsibility to do it. It’s the party’s job to make sure they get enough votes, not ours! And if they can’t, then yelling at the Naderites is just as silly as yelling at the Libertarians or for that matter the Republicans.
minty, by my imperfect recollection I agree with you on a lot of things but I just can’t agree with you and Sofa King and RTFirefly and whoever else on this one. Gore lost because he couldn’t get enough votes to come in first, and if he wanted the votes from the people who voted for Nader then it was his job to get them.
And to be honest, the idea of “blaming” anyone for the results of an election is ridiculous. (Well, assuming we’re not talking about things like hanging chads, which it seems we’re not.) The people spoke. Gore lost. That’s it.
Well, I thought the subject of this thread was whether Nader voters still thought Bush was no different from Gore, assuming they ever did. But we seem to have drifted further afield…
That was part of the problem. Gore had two faces during the campaign, knee-jerk and nice-guy. Knee-jerk was, as you say, a caricature. Nice-guy was him cowtowing to to conservatives. Neither of these has any appeal to most of the people I know who voted Green, including myself. I would have preferred to see him confront Bush directly on hard issues in a reasonable way. He just didn’t do it.
That’s an oversimplaification. Gore neglected many issues, one of which was the environment. I’ll agree with you that he pretty much established his creds there already, but I was disappointed (again) that he didn’t confront Bush more on it. To me, that’s one of Gore’s strong points, in which he can appeal to both sides, and he just didn’t do it.
However, another major issue for me was education, which Gore didn’t deal with very well either. In fact, Gore seemed to agree with Bush on the issue of a national standardized test for public schools, which I disagree with strongly. Nader was definitely more appealing than Gore on this issue, at least to me.
There were other issues which Nader and Gore had serious differences on, where Gore never established himself strongly in the 2000 campaign… you may say that Gore ran “too left,” but the issue for many Green voters was his position on specific issues, not his position on the political continuum.
Demonstrably false, especially if you’re going to claim that the Nader voters are culpable for losing Gore the election. If they had paid “more than sufficient attention” to Green voters during the campaign, then the vote would have turned out differently. Seems obvious to me that whatever attention the Democrats paid to the Greens (which was little, IMO) was rather insuffiecient.
And that’s part of the problem I’m talking about. While I’m sure that many Green voters in swing states are planning to vote Democrat in 2004, I would still say that it’s the responsibility of the party/candidate to win that vote. Votes are not given or owed, they are earned.
Why is it always assumed that a Nader vote is a “protest vote” or a “message?” Does it ever occur to you that Nader voters were simply voting for the candidate they preferred? In the final analysis, isn’t that what voting is about?
As it was in Washington, my state. So I guess I’m not sure why I’m arguing this point, except out of academic interest.
Daniel, I just don’t get it. You whine that the Democrats “take the left-wing vote for granted,” then turn around and claim that you don’t care what the Democrats do because all you care about is candidates.
Ya know what? If you don’t give a damn about the Democratic Party, don’t claim to be sending it a message by voting for Nader. Messages from people who “don’t ever have the Dems’ back” aren’t real likely to be returned.
minty slipped this in while I was composing my last post, and with it I think we have reached total conceptual disjunction.
(Okay, I just made that term up.)
The idea that the Democratic Party is not supposed to come to us to regain electoral majorities is crazy! We are the voters! The vote is an expression of our collective will, not the Democratic Party’s! And if the will of the Democratic Party doesn’t correspond with the will of the people, then tough cookies for the Democratic Party! It is not our job to go to them!!!
I’m going to walk away for a short while now, because I have clearly gotten far too excited…
Wrong. Gore won Washington 50/45/4, well within the margin of error for any poll. You cannot claim that Gore had Washington wrapped up before the election; you took a chance with your Nader vote, same as those 90,000 folks in Florida. You just got luckier with your vote than they did with theirs.
Yeah, whatever. The same silly principle applies to Pat Robertson voters, and we ain’t goin’ after them anytime soon. Come back to the fold, mate. You ain’t doing anyone any good out there on the margin.
The first part’s true: you don’t get it. Fortunately for the Democratic party, they’re starting to get it.
Here’s what you gotta get: there aren’t enough registered Democrats to win the election. You gotta appeal to some independents to do so.
If the Democrats aren’t willing to make the concessions necessary to get my vote, that’s their business. If they think that they can get the necessary votes elsewhere, that’s their business.
But if they decide to go elsewhere for votes and don’t put forward a candidate I can vote for, that’s my business.
Looks to me like leftist views were on the margin pre-2000; looks to me like they’re becoming less marginalized now, now that Democrats realize they can’t take leftist votes for granted.
shrugs OK. If you say so… however, Gore seemed to have it pretty well wrapped up here according to most polls before the 2000 election. And he did win… yours is a petulant quibble at best.
And that isn’t even really the point anyway. The point is that I voted my conscience and not the way the Democratic Party would have preferred. I’m sure lots of parties and candidates would like my vote, but to get it, they have to earn it. That’s what this whole thing comes down to, for me.
And hey, if your vote ends up handing the keys to the country to the Evil Bastard Party, that’s not your fault, is it? After all, you voted for the Party of Goodness and Light, even though they prevented the More or Less Acceptable Party from thwarting the Evil Bastards.
What is up with this giant disconnect between actions and conseqences? Sheesh.
I don’t agree with this. It seems there are plenty of registered Democrats who could have tilted Florida to Gore.
My perception (no figures to cite) is that the Republicans and Greens are much better about getting their voters to the polls than the Democrats. This is a serious problem for the Dems. But instead of choosing to address it, they would rather just yell at the Greens.
The Green party is far too-left for most Dems. Just take a look at their party plank. This is not the Dems core consituency. Their core constituency, unfortunately for them, chooses not to vote.
