>Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> >No, many of them couldn't vote for Nader.
>But according to Ralph himself, about half of all voters could.
It makes a difference where those half of all voters are. It's one thing not getting on the ballot in Oklahoma -- it's another thing not getting on the ballot in California.
>They stayed away in droves.
That's one of the main points of my message to which you are replying.
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. -- 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/>