No, Ralph Nader Did Not Spoil the 2000 Election

Did Nader play the role of spoiler? In my first video collaboration with my friend Will from Political Junkie, I provide evidence why Ralph Nader absolutely did not spoil the presidential election of 2000. If anyone did, it's probably George W. Bush.

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Ok, I commonly hear the myth that Ralph Nader, the legendary consumer protection activist, spoiled the election of 2000 by “stealing” votes that would have gone to Al Gore, the Democratic nominee. Well, that’s crap. Ralph Nader did not spoil the election, and here is why.

At the heart of the argument is what happened in Florida. There, just a few hundred votes separated the winner, George Walker Bush, from the runner up, Al Arnold Gore. It was so close it took five weeks to sort out, and many demanded a recount. In Florida, as in nearly all other states, it’s “winner takes all,” and so Bush got all the electoral votes there despite a very narrow victory, therefore winning the entire election. Instead of voters blaming, I don’t know, Al Gore, for losing in Florida, they blamed Nader.

It’s easy to see why they did. Nader got around 95,000 votes in Florida.

However, once you dig deeper and begin to critically think, it’s not so simple. As it turns out, only around 24,000 registered Democrats voted for Nader in Florida, compared with the 308,000 registered Democrats (or 13 percent of all Democrats in Florida) who voted for George W. Bush. It seems to me that the 308,000 Democrats who voted Republican in 2000 hurt the Democratic Party much more than the 24,000 Democrats that voted for Nader. Oh! So, as it turns out, Bush spoiled the election for himself there.

But people speculate. What if Nader wasn’t in the race? In 2006, UCLA published a study which analyzed 46 million decisions that people who cast ballots in Florida made in the election, and found that just about 60% of Nader voters would have supported Gore if Nader wasn’t in the race. They also found that Nader voters often voted for Republican candidates in other elections on the same ballots, and that Pat Buchanan voters often voted for Democratic candidates in other elections on the same ballots. In other words, they found solid evidence that there were people who leaned to the right who voted for Gore and people who leaned to the left who voted for Bush. In addition, 76% of Nader voters in 2000 were not Democrats- in fact, they were mostly independents.

Previous studies, which looked at Ross Perot’s runs in 1992 and 1996 also found that Perot took votes away from both major party political candidates, not just one side or the other.

Writers like Bill Scher look at the same studies, including the 2006 UCLA one, and say “see, if it was only Bush and Gore in the race, more people who would have voted for Nader would vote for Gore instead!” The major flaw with this argument is that that didn’t happen. Nader was actually in the race. We could also pretend that Santa Claus was running for President, but that really wouldn’t change what really happened. Nader really ran, and people voted for him, or against the other two. I hate the “what if” game. What if, what if, what if- QUIET, IT DIDN’T HAPPEN. According to recent research, people are increasingly more motivated to vote against a candidate or party than for one. If this is true, we might assume that Nader voters were actually voting against both Bush and Gore. According to an exit poll in Florida by CNN, half of Nader voters would have stayed home if he wasn’t in the race.

But here’s another crazy fact- there were ten different candidates that got more votes in Florida the the number of votes, 537, that separated Bush and Gore. Why does Nader get the blame when seven others could also be blamed?