Ralph Nader's presidential campaigns

Ralph Nader
Personal details
Born	(1934-02-27)February 27, 1934 Winsted, Connecticut United States
Political party	Independent Green Party (For 1996 & 2000 Presidential campaigns)
Occupation	Attorney and Political Activist
Website	http://www.nader.org

Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader ran for the office of President of the United States four times. In 1992, Nader was a write-in candidate in the New Hampshire primary; in 1996 and 2000, he ran as the Green Party candidate; and in 2004, he ran as an independent. It has been argued that his greatest impact was on the election of 2000, as his supporters may have otherwise been supporters of Al Gore and shifted the outcome of the election. In part based on his role in this election, the Atlantic Monthly ranked Nader 96 on its list of the "100 most influential Americans": "He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president."

1972

Ralph Nader's name began appearing in the press in 1971 as a potential candidate for president. Nader was offered the opportunity to run as the Presidential candidate for the New Party, a progressive split-off from the Democratic Party in 1972. Chief among his advocates was author Gore Vidal, who touted a 1972 Nader presidential campaign in a front-page article in Esquire magazine in 1971. Nader declined the offer to run that year; the New Party ultimately joined with the People's Party in running Benjamin Spock in the 1972 Presidential election.

1990

Nader considered launching a third party around issues of citizen empowerment and consumer rights. He stated that the Democratic Party had become "so bankrupt, it doesn't matter if it wins any elections." He suggested a serious third party could address needs such as campaign-finance reform, worker and whistle-blower rights, government-sanctioned watchdog groups to oversee banks and insurance agencies, and class-action lawsuit reforms.

1992

Nader stood in as a write-in for "none of the above" in the 1992 New Hampshire Democratic Primary and received about 6,300 votes. He was also a write-in candidate in the 1992 Massachusetts Democratic Primary, where he defeated both Senator Tom Harkin and Senator Bob Kerrey.

1996

Nader was drafted as a candidate for President of the United States on the Green Party ticket during the 1996 presidential election. He was not formally nominated by the Green Party USA, which was, at the time, the largest national Green group; instead he was nominated independently by various state Green parties (in some areas, he appeared on the ballot as an independent). However, many activists in the Green Party USA worked actively to campaign for Nader that year. Nader qualified for ballot status in 22 states [3], garnering 685,297 votes 0.71% of the popular vote [4], although the effort did make significant organizational gains for the party. He refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign, presumably to avoid meeting the threshold for Federal Elections Commission reporting requirements; the unofficial Draft Nader committee could (and did) spend more than that, but was legally prevented from coordinating in any way with Nader himself.

In 1996 Nader received some criticism from progressives and gay rights supporters for calling gay rights "gonad politics" and stating that he was not interested in dealing with such matters [5].

2000

Nader ran actively in 2000 as the candidate of the Green Party of the United States, which had been formed in the wake of his 1996 campaign. That year, Nader appeared on 44 ballot lines up from 22 in 1996 [6], he received 2.74 percent of the popular vote, missing the 5 percent needed to qualify the Green Party for federally distributed public funding in the next election.

Nader campaigned against the pervasiveness of corporate power and spoke on the need for campaign finance reform, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education including college, workers' rights, legalization of commercial hemp, and a shift in taxes to place the burden more heavily on corporations than on the middle and lower classes. He opposed pollution credits and giveaways of publicly owned assets. Nader and his supporters believed that the Democratic Party had drifted too far to the right. "We want to punish the Democrats, we want to hurt them, wound them," Nader's closest advisor said.

Nader's vice presidential running mate was Winona LaDuke, an environmental activist, and member of the Ojibwe tribe of Minnesota.

The "spolier" controversy"

The extremely close race between the Democratic and Republican presidential candidates, Al Gore and George W. Bush, helped to create some additional controversy around the 2000 campaign. Many Democrats claimed that Nader had no realistic chance of winning in the close election. They felt that those who supported Nader should have instead voted for Gore, and that a victory for Gore would have been preferable to a victory for George W. Bush [7]. Many prominent liberal politicians, activists, and celebrities campaigned for Nader [8]; others made the argument of prominent Democrats to voters in swing states, sometimes using the catch phrase "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush." The Republican Leadership Council ran pro-Nader ads in a few states in a likely effort to split the "left" vote, a tactic the Nader campaign disassociated itself from. Nader and many of his supporters, including filmmaker Michael Moore, responded with their own catch phrase, "a vote for Gore is a vote for Bush." The Nader campaign proclaimed that while Gore was perhaps marginally preferable to Bush, the differences between the two were not great enough to merit support of Gore.

It has been argued that his greatest impact was on the election of 2000, due to the contention of Gore supporters that Nader voters may have otherwise voted for Al Gore, especially in closely contested states such as Florida, and shifted the outcome of the election. In part based on his role in this election, the Atlantic Monthly ranked Nader 96 on its list of the "100 most influential Americans": "He made the cars we drive safer; thirty years later, he made George W. Bush the president".

The "a vote for Nader is a vote for Bush" slogan, which supporters of Gore used against the Nader campaign, was designed to invoke the so-called spoiler effect phenomenon. This phenomenon is held to occur in an election where two candidates are running and it is feared that the presence of one or more candidates with purportedly similar views will split the vote that is cast "against" another candidate, who becomes the beneficiary of the split vote. Such claims have often been made against third-party or independent candidates, especially those perceived as likely to draw most of their support from demographics who would otherwise support one or the other candidate. Gore supporters tried to persuade voters who preferred Nader to vote for Gore in order to prevent the election of the "greater evil" (referring to Bush). Some Democrats attempted to convert those who supported Nader by claiming that doing so made them "dupes" of the Republican party. Wrote Medea Benjamin, the Green Party candidate for senate in California in 2000, "... maybe it's time for the people who voted for Bush in 2000, the people who didn't vote at all in 2000, and yes, people like myself who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000, to admit our mistakes. I'll say mine -- I had no idea that George Bush would be such a disastrous president. Had I known then what I know now, and had I lived in a swing state, I would have voted for Gore instead of Ralph Nader."

When challenged with complaints that he was "taking away" votes from Al Gore, Nader replied that the voters who preferred Nader did not "belong" to Gore, and that it would be more accurate to say that Gore was trying to take away votes from Nader, by scaring voters into voting for the lesser of two evils. When Nader argued that he would hold the Democrats' "feet to the fire," he was suggesting that he wanted to move the Democratic Party in a more progressive direction.

However, at other moments Nader said that, because the Democratic Party had slid so low and had become so beholden to corporate power in his opinion, the Democratic Party deserved to go the way of the Whigs. Running as the Green Party's nominee in 2000, Nader, consistent with being the head of the party, indicated that he would support Green candidates against even the most progressive candidates of different parties.

A 2005 study by Harvard professor Barry C. Burden found that the locations of Nader's campaign stops were primarily chosen to maximize his vote towards the goal of obtaining the threshold 5% vote total needed for the Green Party to obtain ballot status, and was separate from how close Bush and Gore were running in certain states. The study also looked at where Nader spent money on advertising, and got the same results. Burden concluded that there was no evidence for the claim that Nader was deliberately campaigning as a "spoiler," a contention Burden identified (p.678) as emanating from both the political Left and the mainstream media, and which he concluded was inaccurate:

The spoiler thesis is apparently the result of journalists looking to sensationalize the campaign, Democrats looking for a scapegoat, or a simple misreading of the campaign record.(p. 694)

Some commentators, nevertheless, stated that Nader's strategy seemed better suited to hurting Gore than helping himself. According to a Slate Magazine article, instead of campaigning in states where the outcome seemed clear, Nader campaigned primarily in tight races, where he was less likely to gain votes - states where liberals would be more reluctant to vote for him, for fear of enabling a Bush victory. These findings are in direct contraposition with other sources, including another Harvard analyst interviewed in "An Unreasonable Man."

Anticipating the type of close election that in fact happened in Florida in 2000, some voters attempted to minimize the spoiler problem by engaging in strategic "vote-pairing," or so-called Nader trading, in which Nader-inclined voters in swing states would agree to vote for Gore in exchange for Gore-inclined voters in safe Bush states to vote for Nader. This strategic idea, which was championed by law professor Jamin Raskin, was based on the observation that, under the electoral college system, individual votes for a losing presidential candidate within a given state (or individual "surplus" votes for the winner within a state) are necessarily wasted. Even though "Nader trading" had the theoretical potential to allow Al Gore to win the election and at the same time to earn the Green Party the 5% that would lead to a possible award of FEC party convention funding, Nader himself declined to endorse the "vote-trading" idea in 2000, explaining that they were running in every state and that they were encouraging voters to vote according to conscience.

Result

Ralph Nader speaks out against the presidential debates at Washington University in St. Louis from which he was excluded on Oct 17, 2000.

As it turned out, the number of votes Nader received in Florida exceeded the number of votes by which Bush defeated Gore in Florida by some 89,000, leading some to speculate as to whether or not Nader and/or his supporters "cost Gore the presidency." Nader, both in his book Crashing the Party, and on his website, states: "In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all." Nader also noted that in Florida approximately 250,000 self-identified Democrats voted for Bush -- over twice the number of Florida voters he attracted.

Nader supporters countered that, instead of blaming Nader, Gore should accept responsibility because his own failure to win his home state of Tennessee was a "but-for cause" of Gore's loss. Nader supporters also maintained that the Democrats should handily have won the election against Bush (whom Nader referred to during the campaign as "a giant corporation masquerading as a human being") with a better campaign or with a better candidate than Gore. Nader supporters and many Democrats note that Gore's campaign themes were largely a creature of the "centrist" and corporate-supported Democratic Leadership Council, which had once been chaired by then-Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton. The U.S. presidential election, 2000 was hounded by the Florida situation, and some Nader supporters suggested that the Democrats should blame the Supreme Court for calling a halt to the Florida recount, thereby effectively declaring Bush the winner.

In a post-election analysis, Al From, the ounder and CEO of the Democratic Leadership Council, that the contention that Nader's vote totals hurt Gore wasn't borne out by polling data. From wrote that the polls indicated that in a two-way race minus Nader, Bush would have won by a percentage point.

Although for many years Ralph Nader did not back off from his original statement that there was no practical difference between Al Gore and George W. Bush, he did eventually make a concession in 2007 that many consider the first of its kind for Nader. During an interview on Midweek Politics, host David Pakman asked Nader if he still completely stood by that statement, and Nader conceded that while on a plurality of issues, Bush and Gore have positions that do not differ greatly, only George W. Bush would have created a situation in Iraq like the one the U.S. is in, and certainly there would have been a difference in those terms had Al Gore been selected as president in 2000 by the U.S. Supreme Court.

2004

Main article: Ralph Nader presidential campaign, 2004

Ralph Nader (right) with Dennis Kucinich.

Nader announced on December 24, 2003 that he would not run for president in 2004 on the Green Party ticket; however, he did not rule out running as an independent. On February 22, 2004, Nader announced on NBC's Meet the Press that he would indeed run for president as an independent, saying, "There's too much power and wealth in too few hands." Because of the controversies over vote-splitting in 2000, many Democrats urged Nader to abandon his candidacy. The Chairman of the Democratic National Committee, Terry McAuliffe argued that Nader had a "distinguished career, fighting for working families" and he (McAuliffe) "would hate to see part of his legacy being that he got us eight years of George Bush."

On May 19, 2004, Nader met with John Kerry in Washington D.C. for a private session, concerning Nader's factor in the 2004 election. Nader refused to withdraw from the race, citing specifically the importance to him of the removal of troops from Iraq. The meeting itself ended in disagreement. On the same day, two Democratic leaning groups, the National Progress Fund and the Democracy Action Team, were formed. They both sought to reduce the effect of Nader upon Democratic voters that might be persuaded to vote for him. The following day, the Democracy Action Team's Stop Nader campaign announced they would air TV commercials in key battleground states.

On June 21, 2004, Nader announced that Peter Camejo, a former two-time gubernatorial candidate of the California Green Party, would be his vice presidential running mate. Shortly thereafter, Nader announced that he would accept (although he was not actively seeking) the endorsement, but not nomination, of the Greens as their presidential candidate. Later in June, however, the national convention of the Green Party of the United States rejected Nader, whose supporters were voting for "nobody" (a.k.a. Ralph Nader), as a candidate in favor of David Cobb, an attorney and Green Party activist. Nader's failure to take the Green Party's nomination meant that he could not take advantage of the Green Party's ballot access in 22 states, and that he would have to achieve ballot access in those states on his own. Despite having chosen to run outside of the Green Party, Nader professed outrage at the Green Party's "strange" choice, terming the party a "cabal."

Nader while running as an independent did receive the endorsement of the Reform Party. While the endorsement generated publicity for Nader and the Reform Party, the party was only able to provide Nader with seven ballot lines [9].

(During a press conference in support of Peter Camejo for California Governor, pranksters hit Nader in the face with a pie as Camejo looked on.)

Ballot access

The Nader campaign failed to gain a spot on a number of state ballots, and faced legal challenges to its efforts in a number of states. In some cases, state officials found large numbers of submitted voter petitions invalid. While Nader campaign officials blamed legal challenges by the Democratic Party for their difficulties in getting Nader's name on the ballot, the difficulties faced by petition-gatherers were also a significant factor - there were far fewer people in 2004 eager to sign petitions for Ralph Nader, and petition-gatherers complained that they often received verbal abuse from people they solicited. One of Nader's California organizers observed that "paid signature gatherers did not work for more than a week or two. They all quit. They said it was too abusive."

On April 5, 2004, Nader failed in an attempt to get on the Oregon ballot. "Unwritten rules" disqualified over 700 valid voter signatures, all of which had already been verified by county elections officers, who themselves signed and dated every sheet with an affidavit of authenticity (often with a county seal as well). This subtraction left Nader 218 short of the 15,306 needed. He vowed to gather the necessary signatures in a petition drive. Secretary of State Bill Bradbury disqualified many of his signatures as fraudulent; the Marion County Circuit Court ruled that this action was unconstitutional as the criteria for Bradbury's disqualifications were based upon "unwritten rules" not found in electoral code, but the state Supreme Court ultimately reversed this ruling. Nader appealed this decision to the US Supreme Court, but a decision did not arrive before the 2004 election.

Nader failed to gain a place on the Massachusetts ballot, though his efforts to do so faced no Democratic legal challenges (Kerry's ability to win his home state was never in doubt). Nader fell some 1500 signatures short of the state's 10,000 signature requirement, and his campaign blasted the state's electoral requirements as "arcane."

Nader also failed to gather the requisite 153,035 signatures to place on the California ballot. The campaign submitted an estimated 83,000 signatures. The Nader campaign briefly flirted with the idea of convincing the California Green Party to nominate Nader instead of David Cobb. This proved infeasible, however.

On August 19, 2004, the Illinois State Board of Elections ruled that Nader lacked enough valid signatures to qualify for access on the state ballot. Nader appealed the ruling, claiming that Illinois's requirement of 25,000 valid signatures was an onerous burden on third-party candidates, and that the petition deadline was too early in the year. This suit was rejected by U.S. District Judge Matthew Kennelly, who found that "Illinois' petition deadline and signature requirements... did not impose a severe burden on persons like Nader seeking to pursue an independent presidential candidacy." The Seventh U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed this decision on September 22, 2004. The court, headed by Judge Richard Posner pointedly noted that Nader could have filed his suit in February, just after declaring his candidacy, and contended that, given Illinois's population of 12 million, a signature requirement of 25,000 was not onerous.

On September 18, 2004, the Florida Supreme Court ordered that Nader be included on the 2004 ballot in Florida as the Reform Party candidate. The court rejected the arguments that the Reform Party did not meet the requirements of the Florida election code for access to the ballot — that the party must be a "national party" and that it must have nominated its candidate in a "national convention" — and therefore Nader should have attempted to file as an independent candidate. Specifically, the court ruled that the term "national party" must be interpreted as broadly as possible. The Reform Party has a ballot line in only some U.S. states.

Nader faced an uphill battle to achieve ballot access in Pennsylvania. Although his campaign claimed to have turned in over 50,000 signatures by the August deadline, the Democratic Party launched legal challenges. A series of Commonwealth Court decisions in the fall of 2004 came to a final conclusion on September 2, 2004. On that day, the state's highest Court ruled that Nader could not appear on Pennsylvania's ballot as an Independent candidate, as he was seeking the Reform Party's nomination elsewhere. When the Nader campaign moved to block the examination of its signatures, Pennsylvania Judge James Garner Collins rejected it, declaring that the campaign's plea "tortured the law." Pennsylvania brought the Nader campaign another black eye: Nader was sued by a lawyer representing homeless people in the state who claimed that they had been hired to gather signatures, but not paid for their efforts.

Nader also fell short of gaining the 3,711 signatures necessary to appear on the ballot in Hawaii. More than half of the 7,000 signatures submitted by the campaign were determined to be invalid or incomplete by state officials.

In the general election, Nader appeared on the ballot in thirty-four states and the District of Columbia, notably fewer than his Libertarian counterpart, Michael Badnarik. Ballot access ultimately became one of the most significant issues of the Nader campaign; in his concession speech, Nader characterized ballot access as a "civil liberties issue" and noted that Democratic attempts to challenge his ballot access were rejected in the "overwhelming majority" of state courts.

Results

Nader received many fewer votes than he had in 2000, dropping from about 2.9 million votes (2.74% of the popular vote) to 405,623 (about 0.35%). Nader's vote total placed him only slightly more than 63,000 votes ahead of the fourth-place candidate, Michael Badnarik of the Libertarian Party, who appeared on 49 ballots. Fears that Nader would play a "spoiler" role that would harm the Democrats proved unfounded — unlike 2000, Kerry's margins of loss in states won by Bush were all substantially larger than the percentage of votes gathered by Nader.

2008

On December 31, 2007, Nader gave an interview in Iowa in which he indicated his support for presidential candidate John Edwards. Saying Edwards was a "glimmer of hope," he added, "Edwards is at least highlighting day after day that the issue is who controls our country: big business or the people?" In a measure of how little regard the Democratic Party has for Nader , however, the Edwards campaign did not publicize the support. Noted former Nader Raider Walter Shapiro, "Nothing better illustrates the double-edged nature of Nader's support than the silence from its recipient. The Edwards campaign has not mentioned the anointment in a single press release."

Effect on other candidates

Each time that Ralph Nader has run for President, his campaign has sparked a larger discussion about the role of independent and political parties not Democratic or Republican within the United States of America electoral process. The "winner takes all" process benefits Democrats and Republicans 99% of the time; however, the 1% of the time when it hurts them they describe the phenomenon as a "spoiler" effect and castigate the "other" candidate [10]. This was especially the case in 2000 and 2004 where many progressives and Democratic Party activists believed, rightly or wrongly, that Nader's campaign was helping the Republican Party—which in a "winner take all" process is the most common way it is perceived by the "major" party on the losing end [11].

In 2004, critics of Nader running for President pointed out to the fact that Republican Party activists were helping Nader get on the election ballot. A Republican organization in Michigan, for example, worked to gather petition signatures to place Nader on the Michigan ballot after Democratic Party lawyers defeated Nader's effort to appear on the Michigan ballot as the Reform Party's nominee.

In Arizona, according to an article by Max Blumenthal that appeared in The American Prospect and on AlterNet, a company called Voters Outreach of America, headed by a former executive director of the Arizona Republican Party, Nathan Sproul, had been involved in gathering Nader signatures Mr. Blumenthal's article was based this on interviews with petition-gatherers in Arizona, notably Michael Arno and Derek Lee. Arno, co-owner of a Republican consulting firm, told Blumenthal that he had declined repeated requests by Nader to petition for him, referring Nader instead to Jenny Breslyn, who was simultaneously gathering petitions for Protect America Now - a petition to restrict the availability of public benefits to undocumented immigrants. Lee had heard from several peers that petition-gatherers were simultaneously seeking signatures for Nader and signatures for the anti-immigrant initiative. News of the seeming collusion of Nader and right-wing anti-immigrant advocates incensed many Democratic Party activists.

Many progressives and Democratic Party supporters urged voters to worry about the spoiler effect. Organizations such as "Up for Victory", were formed specifically to dissuade people from voting for Nader and to knock him off the ballot in as many states as possible. These groups, as well as some journalists, pointed to FEC filings showing that the Nader campaign had accepted campaign contributions from several individual donors who were also contributing to Bush's campaign, including a donation from one individual who had helped to fund televised advertisements by Swift Boat Veterans for Truth that attacked Kerry's military service record in the Vietnam War and Kerry's subsequent activity in the 1970s as a leader of the antiwar group Vietnam Veterans Against the War. Nader's campaign countered that John Kerry had received far more money in 2004 from individual Republican donors than Nader had, and that Nader was in fact not accepting organized Republican help.

In Florida and several other states, Nader's ballot access came because of his nomination by the Reform Party. The Reform Party nominee in 2000 had been conservative Pat Buchanan; some anti-Nader Democrats took this, on top of the case of Nader's Arizona petitions, as evidence that Nader was, contrary to his avowed progressive beliefs, courting voters from the far right.

A group of Nader's supporters from 2000 endorsed "Vote to Stop Bush", a statement urging voters in swing states to vote for Kerry, in order to prevent a second term for President George W. Bush. Even Nader's running mate in 1996 and 2000, Winona LaDuke, endorsed Kerry, as did filmmaker Michael Moore, who had championed Nader in the 2000 campaign. Another approach was taken by (the now offline) "RalphPlease.org", which gathered conditional contributions, pledges to donate to Public Citizen if Nader would withdraw from the race.

The Nader campaign contended that the donations it received were given by "people who agree with him on the issues and want him to get his message out to the public." Nader also responded to such claims by pointing out that Democratic opponent John Kerry received $10.7 million from donors who also contributed to Bush or to some other Republican candidate - nearly 100 times that of the $111,700 Nader received.

Electoral system

A significant number of progressives criticized Mr. Nader for trying to change the electoral system through an impractical presidential campaign, pointing out that independent or third-party presidential candidates are highly unlikely to win an election under the current system. Supporters of Ralph Nader often countered that an alternative presidential bid can be extremely valuable regardless of the ultimate number of votes the candidate receives. For example, such a bid can raise important issues and improve political dialogue.

Some Democrats, including Howard Dean, argued that Nader should not run for president but should instead concentrate on promoting fairer ballot access laws, campaign finance reform, and alternative voting methods [12], [13]. Nader's supporters thought that such pleas were insincere and off the mark. For several decades, Nader has been a leading advocate of fairer ballot access, campaign finance reform, and more representative election systems. Nader's first published law review article, "Do Third Parties Have A Chance?" (co-authored with Theodore Jacobs and published in the Harvard Law Record, October 9, 1958) was on ballot access reform, and Nader has founded several important organizations (including Public Citizen) dedicated to election law reform. Nader has also been one of the champions of including the so-called "NOTA" (none of the above) option on election ballots, to increase voter choice; a 1994 "In the Public Interest" piece by Nader laid out the case for NOTA.

Democrats respond that Nader is in a position to commit his extensive personal wealth and status among independent and minor party supporters behind the major election law reform interest groups such as Fair Vote and Ballot Access News, or even use a state's Initiative & Referendum process to push for fairer ballot access laws, instant runoff voting or proportional representation. Democrats argue that Nader's success with consumer advocacy, versus election law reform suggests that Nader is only tenuously interested in such reforms and prefers running vanity campaigns.

External links

• The Nader Page (not campaign-related)
• Nader/Camejo 2004
• Greens for Nader 2008 (a 2008 presidential draft site)
• Ballot access details
• Democracy Rising: Anti-war news, commentary and activism
• Common Dreams: News and Commentary for the Progressive Community
• Salon.com Citizen Nader
• 2004 Vote Profile: Ralph Nader
• Digital History Ralph Nader
• Interview with Ralph Nader for Princeton Report on Knowledge about the spin of information.