WHO'S SUPPORTING NADER: It's Not Just Liberals Could Nader Supporters Defect to Bush's Campaign?
Micah Sifry <mailto:msifry at publicampaign.org> is the author of a forthcoming book on third parties. It will be published next year by Routledge.
A vote taken away from Ralph Nader is not necessarily a vote for Al Gore.
Liberal Democrats who have turned their disappointment at Al Gore's trailing showing in the polls into fury at Ralph Nader's presidential campaign ought to rethink their priorities. Their vociferous attacks on the Green Party candidate, if successful at reducing Nader's percentage of the vote, may have the perverse effect of helping George W. Bush and dashing the Democratic Party's prospects of retaking the House and Senate. There are three reasons for this counter-intuitive effect: young voters, Perot voters and new voters.
No one can deny that Nader's outside-the-box campaign has inspired and energized many young people. Indeed, according to a new poll by the Pew Center for the People and the Press, among eighteen to twenty-four year olds, Nader is currently drawing 8 percent of the vote, while Gore is getting 43 percent, and Bush 42 percent. Pew did not ask that same sample how they would vote if it were a two-way race, but most other surveys give Bush a sizable advantage among the young. For example, a TIPP poll for the Christian Science Monitor and Investor's Business Daily found Bush leading Gore 51 to 41 percent among eighteen to thirty-four year olds. Convincing young people supporting Nader that their's is a wasted vote may cause a slender majority to switch to Bush over Gore. Sounds outlandish? Not when you consider that many young people who are attracted to Nader like him for his honesty, his freshness and his devotion to reform and changing the status quo -- all traits that Bush is claiming for himself, as well.
Then there are the Perot voters, 8 million of whom voted for the tiny Texan in 1996, when it was clear he had no chance to win. It's safe to say that very few of them are voting for Pat Buchanan, who is seen as having hijacked Perot's party and turned into a vehicle for his far-right views. Data given to me by the Pew Center shows Buchanan getting only 3 percent of the Perot ’96 voters. Nader, again, is doing disproportionately well among this group, getting 13 percent of them. The remainder, however, do not divide evenly. Even before Perot announced his endorsement of Bush, the Texas governor was getting the support of just over one-half while Gore is only getting one-quarter of the Perot ‘96ers. Without Nader in the race, Bush's advantage over Gore with this wild card group would likely be even larger, as most Perot voters tend to be anti-incumbents. Again, it's no coincidence that Bush is playing up his promises to transcend partisan bickering and reform government. These are messages tailored to attract Perot independents.
The same trend may well hold for independent voters overall. The latest New York Times/CBS poll shows Bush and Gore tied at 45 percent each, with Nader at 4 and Pat Buchanan at 2 percent. But in the direct two-way match-up, Bush edges ahead, 48 to 47 percent. What gives? Nader is getting 1 percent of the vote of Republicans, 3 percent of Democrats, and a healthy 9 percent of independents. Without Nader -- and assuming that his Democratic and Republican supporters go back home -- most of those independent voters must be tilting to Bush rather than Gore. Nader's presence in the race is giving those people an independent place to go -- and stealing some support that otherwise would flow to Bush. (In Michigan, which has a large Arab-American population, this is undoubtedly the case.)
Finally, there are the new voters Nader is attracting into the process. No one knows for sure how many of these there are, since all the national polls filter out "unlikely voters" in their screening process. If you are someone who didn't vote at all in 1996 or 1998, then your views aren't reflected at all in today's tracking polls. Those surveys do tell us that about one-quarter of Nader's voters say they wouldn't vote for anyone else if his name wasn't on the ballot. I would estimate that when you include unlikely voters in Nader's support base, as many as half wouldn't vote otherwise. We're talking about as many as two to three million additional voters coming to the polls because Nader's campaign has brought them there.
What will those extra two or three million Nader voters do once they have pulled the Green Party lever for president? One person who may well know the answer is House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, who is hoping to become Speaker if the Democrats retake the House. In all the cacophony of attacks on Nader coming from Democrats and their allies in recent days, Gephardt's voice has been conspicuously absent. He undoubtedly knows that the Greens are running very few congressional candidates, and that therefore the Nader vote will help Democrats down-ballot. The same may be true in close Senate races in Washington, Minnesota, Michigan and Montana.
Certainly veteran Congress-watcher Charles Cook, agrees with this view. "A lot of these are new people, they're young people, below 35-40 years of age, who I'm not sure they would be voting if it weren't for Nader," he said earlier this week on CNN's Inside Politics. "It's kind of like the Perot phenomenon of 1992. And with these people, they -- Ralph Nader may pull them out, but I think the danger for Republicans in the House and Senate races is they may come in to vote for Nader, but down-ballot they're going to be voting for Democrats. In a place like Washington state, with Slade Gorton and Maria Cantwell in that very close Senate race, that could make a difference and really hurt Republicans."
Of course, none of these arguments may cause anti-Nader Democrats to temper their bombast. They are understandably upset to see their candidate floundering and searching for a scapegoat for Gore's troubles. They ought to start asking themselves why so many people who voted for Clinton-Gore in 1996 are now turning to Bush. Gore is only holding onto 77 percent of the people who voted Democratic in 1996, while Bush is holding 92 percent of the Dole vote. A striking 15 percent of Clinton-Gore 1996 voters say they are supporting Bush, according to the Pew Center poll. Just 4 percent of them are supporting Nader, the same proportion as in the overall population. If anti-Nader Democrats want to help their candidate win, they might think about some positive strategies to take votes back from Bush -- rather than inadvertently add to his total.