On Wed, 12 Jul 2000, Gordon Fitch wrote:
> The effect of a single vote in a national election is vanishingly
> small -- so small as to have, obviously, _no_ practical value.
> The only way you can make a vote "count" at all
> is to vote for highly marginal candidates and run their tallies
> up to the point where someone may notice -- but even this is
> rather dubious.
There is another way to make your vote count, which is what folks do on this list continually. Announce it ahead of time and thereby induce others to do the same by exhortation and example. This is what endorsements are all about- a person other people respect announces their vote for a candidate, therby encouraging others to follow their example.
It is true that merely silently skulking into the ballot box and voting for a Dem makes little difference, which is why I am so loud and vociferous in my tactical preferences, since by the very nature of my tactical preferences it only makes sense that I argue for them publicly. What irritates me most, along these lines, are the large numbers of progressives who publicly grouse about the the Democrats, then vote Dem anyways. This is the worst of all possible approaches since it combines the marginal voting results you mention with the negative alienation of some less tactical folks from probably voting at all.
But the idea that voting "makes no difference" except as a protest is the most appalling intellectual and antisocial approach to democracy that I can think of. Announcing one's voting preferences, whether through speeches, lawn signs, bumper stickers or t-shirts is a profoundly social enterprise that can help determine elections. Unfortunately, the solipsistic approach to voting you describe - trying to run up the marginal protest totals in media reporting - has grown over the years among progressives. It's become a substitute for the actual hard work of walking precincts and working phone banks.
I think there is also an attraction to protest candidates like Nader for intellectuals for this very reason. Since the actual vote totals are merely symbolic, the real action in such a candidacy is "interpreting" its meaning and promoting its "message" - the prefect work for hired or volunteer wordsmiths. In a normal campaign, the "message" is getting 50% of the vote and getting into office, so there is less prestige and power in being in the intellectual cadre of the campaign. In fact, such normal campaigns might actually ask the intellectuals to pick up a phone or walk a precinct as their best contribution to the campaign - horrors.
And since the point of the campaign is to put what is usually a non-intellectual into a power position, that just further devalues the status of the wordsmiths and intellectuals within the campaign. The sad fact for most intellectuals is that their relative power within any movement is greater the less power that movement has within the broader society.
I remember that polling back in 1996 showed in California that Nader's support came overwhelmingly from more educated and whiter parts of the population, just as Bradley's semi-protest campaign did this Spring. I have no doubt that the same is likely to be true this year.
-- Nathan Newman