I don't count on the AnybodyButBush crowd to come out. I already said that I wouldn't: <http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20041025/024552.html>. On LBO-talk, the ABB crowd are foolishly blaming voters, rather than themselves or their candidate for failing to pursue a pro-working class agenda and to win voters over to it.
I have a vision of the LBO-talk ABB platoon recommending votes for Hillary Rodham Clinton in 2008. :->
>Look, if people were quite unhappy with Bush and Kerry, they could
>still go with Nader or one of the others
No, many of them couldn't vote for Nader. The ABB brigade, mainly through pressures on the Green Party and the Democratic Party lawyers's legal assaults, made sure that Nader would be on much fewer ballots in 2004 than in 2000. The biggest blow was Nader's inability to get on the ballot in California, where he received the highest number of votes (418,707) in 2000 and his running mate Peter Camejo is best known. The Democratic Party lawyers succeeded in removing Nader from ballots in the majority of states where he received more than 100,000 votes in 2000 (see <http://ballot-access.org/2004/electoral.html> and <http://www.fec.gov/pubrec/2000presgeresults.htm>): Massachusetts (173,564 votes), Texas (137,994), Ohio (117,857), Illinois (103,759), and Pennsylvania (103,392). (Needless to say, other candidates on the left were on even fewer ballots than Nader and too obscure to attract any voters' attention.)
On top of objective obstacles, there were subjective ones. The ABB brigade was a small minority of the US electorate. When asked if "your vote for president was mostly for your candidate or against his opponent," only 25% answered "against his opponent." Kerry's share of the 25% of voters who said they voted against his opponent was 71%. That means the ABB brigade -- those who voted for Kerry only to remove Bush from the White House, rather than because they agreed with Kerry on key issues -- was roughly 18% of the popular vote.
The ABB brigade were mainly liberals and leftists who approved of many or all of the planks in Nader/Camejo's platform (many of them, like Doug, either voted for or wanted to vote for Nader/LaDuke but didn't have the courage to do so in 2000); they couldn't convince many voters to their right to vote against Bush by voting for Kerry (his one selling point of "not being Bush" in the literal sense was not enough), but they at least _convinced themselves_ that they should hate Nader more than Kerry and tried to persuade others to believe the same because they wrongly thought that Nader -- rather than Kerry's and the Democratic Party's own sorry record and platform, especially their agreement with Bush on the invasion of Iraq, tax cuts for the rich, privatized health care, the Patriot Act, etc. -- would be the chief hindrance in removing Bush; in addition, they probably managed to guilt-trip or at least wear down some voters to their left into reluctantly casting their votes for Kerry. After all, few Americans, unlike Nader himself, have the fortitude to shrug off incessant abuses, harassments, hostilities, etc.
Besides, objective and subjective obstacles mutually reinforced each other. Subjective obstacles made Nader's ballot access efforts very difficult, and the spectacle of tough ballot access battles, many of which ended in Nader's defeats in courts, became added subjective obstacles even in states where Nader clawed onto ballots.
Considering all the hurdles, I'm surprised that Nader managed to receive even 393,539 votes, about 15% of his votes in 2000.
>or stay home.
No doubt many of them stayed home (they weren't even seriously courted outside the swing states). *For the astonishing sum of money spent*, in the most expensive elections in US history, the turnout didn't rise very high, especially on the Democratic Party side:
* "President Bush, Democratic challenger John Kerry, the political parties, congressional campaigns and hundreds of little-regulated outside groups raised and spent well more than *$3 billion* in federal races, experts say" (emphasis added, Greg Gordon, "Money Spigots Opened Wider: $3 Billion Spent in Federal Races," <em>News & Observer</em>, <a href="http://newsobserver.com/news/story/1792890p-8090332c.html">November 3, 2004</a>).
* "Slightly more than 54 percent of voters, about 105.4 million, cast ballots in 2000, when Republican George W. Bush defeated Democrat Al Gore. This time, with 95 percent of precincts reporting, 110.8 million had cast ballots" (Siobhan McDonough/The Associated Press, "Estimated High Turnout Rival 1960," <a href="http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/news/archive/2004/11/03/politics0236EST0547.DTL">November 3, 2004</a>).
The turnout of lower-income working-class voters was not high. In Ohio:
White (86%) African-American (10%) Latino (3%) Asian (1%) Other (1%)
Under $15,000 (7%) $15-30,000 (16%) $30-50,000 (25%) $50-75,000 (22%) $75-100,000 (15%) $100-150,000 (9%) $150-200,000 (4%) $200,000 or More (2%)
Less Than $50,000 (48%) $50,000 or More (52%)
No College Degree (62%) College Graduate (38%) <http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/OH/P/00/epolls.0.html> (cf. <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/39000.html>)
In the USA:
White (77%) African-American (11%) Latino (8%) Asian (2%) Other (2%)
Under $15,000 (8%) $15-30,000 (15%) $30-50,000 (22%) $50-75,000 (23%) $75-100,000 (14%) $100-150,000 (11%) $150-200,000 (4%) $200,000 or More (3%)
Less Than $50,000 (45%) $50,000 or More (55%) <http://www.cnn.com/ELECTION/2004/pages/results/states/US/P/00/epolls.0.html> (cf. <http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html>)
Once again, the rich whites who have college degrees turned out disproportionately and outvoted the poor -- many of whom are people of color -- who have no college degrees.
Team Bush knew how to mobilize their base, using anti-gay ballot initiatives, for instance in Ohio. There was no comparable effort on the left to use ballot initiatives that have *as galvanizing effects* on voters on the left as anti-gay ballot initiatives were on voters on the right. Rather, rich liberals spent nearly 1.5 billion dollars convincing voters on the left that real issues like the disastrous war on Iraq and lack of single-payer universal health care shouldn't be seriously debated, that they can't compare Kerry's and Nader's platforms and put pressures on Kerry to move to the left and distinguish his party's platform sharply from Bush's , etc.
Doug wrote:
>Lots of people may be with us on the issues, but they don't vote
>that way. Their higher cerebral functions say they're for national
>health insurance and internationalism; their ids vote for Bush.
What the ABB brigade -- i.e., liberals and leftists -- ensured was that the issues on which the majority of Americans _are_ with us -- such as establishing national health insurance and bringing the troops home -- won't be debated and voted on, because they wanted to make it a matter of simply voting against Bush. Team Bush, however, succeeded in exploiting their anti-gay marriage rhetoric -- knowing that the majority of Americans are not yet with us on gay marriage -- to mobilize their base and to demagogically set us back on another of the issues -- civil unions and domestic partnership benefits -- on which the majority of Americans are actually already with us but may not know that they are. -- Yoshie
* Critical Montages: <http://montages.blogspot.com/> * Greens for Nader: <http://greensfornader.net/> * Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * OSU-GESO: <http://www.osu-geso.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>