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Lay Off Ralph NaderThird-party candidates are people, too.

By Timothy Noah
Posted Monday, March 3, 2008, at 7:32 PM ET
Ralph Nader. Click image to expand.

I have never understood why people get upset whenever Ralph Nader runs for president.

The principal indictment is that Nader cost Al Gore the 2000 election by drawing votes from Gore in Florida. Gore lost Florida to George W. Bush by 537 votes. Nader received 97,488 votes. National exit polls indicated that had Nader not been on the ballot, 47 percent of Nader voters would have voted for Gore, 21 percent would have voted for Bush, and 32 percent would have stayed home. Therefore, if Nader hadn't run, then Gore would have won.

Well, sure. But in an election this preposterously close, you can blame the outcome on almost anything. In a Feb. 24 appearance on NBC's Meet the Press, Nader pointed out that seven other third-party candidates on the Florida ballot outpolled Bush's 537-vote margin, too. These included James Harris of the Socialist Workers Party (563), David McReynolds of the Socialist Party (622), and Monica Moorehead of the Workers World Party (1,804). Granted, we don't have exit poll numbers on these candidates, who stood much further left of the mainstream than Nader. But it's doubtful their supporters would have defaulted to the GOP. Should we vilify them for costing Gore the election, too?

Nationwide, Nader won 2.9 million votes in 2000. Four years later, he won only 466,000 (PDF), which, as Steve Kornacki pointed out in the Feb. 25 New York Observer ("Who's Afraid of Ralph Nader?") is much closer to the 685,000 he won in his little-remembered 1996 bid and is probably a truer expression of his natural level of support. (In 2000, Kornacki argues, Nader got an unusual boost from independent voters stranded by the defeats of Bill Bradley and John McCain in the primaries.) Nobody particularly objected to Nader's 1996 bid, because he didn't get very many votes. In 2000, though, Nader was condemned, in effect, for being too popular. He was, the liberal consensus pronounced, on an "ego trip." (The word/phrase combination Nader, ego trip, and president yields 3,200 hits on Google.) He was tarnishing his legacy as a champion of government and corporate accountability. That criticism has stuck, even though Nader has once again reverted to being a fringe candidate who poses no apparent threat to the Democratic nominee. He's damned if he wins too many votes, and he's damned if he wins too few.

I've never cast a presidential vote for Nader, and I never will. Nor do I agree with Nader that the similarities between the Republican and Democratic parties render superfluous any choice between the two. But as someone who has observed (and admired) Nader all my life, I don't doubt for a second that Nader sincerely believes that. He's never remained satisfied with Democratic politicians, even those with whom he enjoyed a warm working relationship before they entered politics. (The only possible exception is Mark Green, who may have maintained Nader's affections by losing a series of bids for high office: the House, the Senate, the New York mayoralty.) Nader doesn't believe in compromise, and, yes, that would be a problem if he ever really did become president. But his stubbornness has been only an asset in his long career as an advocate, and I'm not so sure it's a liability in his newer career as a perpetual candidate. In the current election, Nader is the sole presidential candidate you're likely to hear about (now that Dennis Kucinich has dropped out) who stands forthrightly for adopting a single-payer solution to the health-care crisis, a stance universally regarded as politically impractical. But single payer is the only solution of much practical value in the real world, as evidenced by the experience of nearly all advanced democracies. If Nader does no more in the 2008 election than oblige major-party candidates to consider that stubborn reality for five minutes, he'll have done us all a big favor.

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Timothy Noah is a senior writer at Slate.
Photograph of Ralph Nader by Brendan Smialowski/Getty Images.
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Comments from the Fray

One other thing that the media fails to note in their analysis of Nader: In 2000 he was running with the Green Party and in 2004, he was not. The Greens' organization may have helped significantly in 2000.

--smorzando

(To reply, click here)

…I don't blame him for Gore's loss... but I do think Nader is fundamentally and dangerously wrong when he asserts that there's no significant difference between the two parties. There's plenty of liberals, many more liberal than Nader, working within the Democratic Party. It takes mental fortitude to work within a party, knowing you won't get everything you want. It's too easy for any of us to say because this party or that party doesn't do exactly what I think they should, they're worthless. Cop out. I'm not impressed with his indulgent, Quixotian presidential bids. Maybe if Nader had been actively campaigning for Gore, that umpteen percent of Nader's supporters that, as you said, would have just stayed home if not for Nader, would have been convinced to get out and support Gore... and then we would almost certainly not been in Iraq right now, and the world would look like a different place (better or worse depending on your politics), so how could you then begin to make the argument that the candidate you pick, if they're called a Democrat or a Republican, doesn't make a difference?

--GavinA

(To reply, click here)

Nader was an admirable person who achieved a great deal, and will probably still be remembered 100 years from now for more than the 2000 election. But most lives and careers don't end well, and Nader's doesn't appear to be an exception. When Nader ran in 2000 he claimed he was doing so because he was trying to introduce issues that were being ignored by the big parties. But unlike some serious 3rd party runs in the past, such as Perot in 1992 or Thurmond in 1948 (they don't all have to be admirable), I really don't know what he stood for in 2000, what big issues he was introducing other than corporations and the 2 main parties are terrible. But his run in 2004 and his upcoming campaign seem to be designed either to pretend like he wasn't a spoiler in 2000 or as ego trips, possibly both since by 2004 anyone could see that there was a clear difference between the Democrats and the Republicans and the best thing in the short-term for progressives was to stop Bush.

--guscat

(To reply, click here)

If he really wants to make a difference and be part of the political process, why doesn't he run for an office he can win? I bet you even as late as 2004 Oregon or Vermont would have sent him to the Senate, and many communities would send him to the House. His running this perennial hopeless campaign makes me question his real commitment to social change and his motives in participating in the political process.

--kalaresh

(To reply, click here)

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