Green Party candidate Ralph Nader won less than five percent of the popular vote but his candidacy appeared to have a huge impact on the 2000 presidential election, especially in Florida, where the results were awaiting a recount.
Though the long-time consumer advocate resisted the moniker of "spoiler" throughout his campaign, Nader could not escape that unavoidable conclusion as the race for the White House depends on a state where he drew nearly 100,000 votes.
According to Paul Begala, a former adviser to President Bill Clinton, the majority, "if not all," of the votes cast for Nader in the last five states -- decided in the early hours of November 8 -- would have gone to Gore, leading to a win.
"If Nader wasn't in the race, Gore would have picked up all those key states," Begala said in an interview on the cable news channel, MSNBC.
Florida's 25 electoral votes, which hold the key to the entire presidential election, were still up for grabs well into Wednesday morning. Since less than 0.5 percent of the vote separate the two candidates, state law mandates a recount.
Exit polling data from Florida showed that around three-quarters of the 92,000 voters who chose Nader would have chosen Gore had it been a two-party race, which would have delivered the presidential win to the Democrat, according to MSNBC.
In Wisconsin, the data were similar. Again the two major party candidates were in a statistical dead heat, at 48 percent, with Bush leading Gore by fewer than 10,000 votes. Nader, who had targeted the progressive city of Madison as a key turn-out area, won four percent of the votes -- around 82,000 -- in the dairy state.
Oregon, another of Nader's targeted states, gave the Green Party candidate just over 37,000 votes, which translated to four percent of the popular vote. Al Gore, who was predicted to win Oregon, trailed his Republican rival by 27,000 votes there, behind 46 percent to Bush's 49.
The 26,000 votes cast for Nader in Iowa, comprising two percent of the popular vote, could have helped Al Gore shore up his minuscule lead there, but the votes taken by Nader did not impede the Democrat from winning the state, declared early Wednesday.
Nader's stated campaign goal was not to win the presidential election but to win five percent of the popular vote, which would make the Green Party eligible for federal funding in the next electoral cycle.
Exit polls early Wednesday showed that Nader had won three percent of the popular vote nationwide, with just over two million votes cast in his favor, effectively failing in his mission and possibly contributing to Bush's win.
Polling data from states that Nader had heavily targeted showed that the progressive candidate had not made as big a dent in the election as he had hoped.
In California, a state won handily by Gore, Nader only managed four percent of the votes, a far cry from the expected eight or nine percent in earlier tracking polls.
Nader won four percent of the popular vote in Colorado, New Hampshire and Connecticut. Vermont gave Nader seven percent of its popular vote and Minnesota six percent to the Green Party candidate.
"The Green Party was well organized in a handful of states that did well for us," said Nader's assistant press secretary Tom Adkins. "But we need to expand nationally, to get the word out and compete in local races so that people, in the future, have no hesitation in pulling the Green Party lever."
The maverick Nader campaign -- which attracted diverse support that included Hollywood celebrities Susan Sarandon and Tim Robbins, documentary filmmaker Michael Moore and musicians Ani DeFranco and Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam -- raised six million dollars for his 2000 bid. Most of the candidate's money came from for-profit rallies that drew supporters in the tens of thousands.
"We wanted to set an example of what is necessary for real reform of our corrupt campaign system," Nader said in his election night speech at the National Press Club here.
"It took a commitment by people to no longer settle for the least of the worst or the lesser of two evils, where at the end of the day you're still stuck with worst and evil," he added.
Throughout the campaign, Nader has dismissed critics who painted him as a spoiler, pulling progressive voters away from the Democrats, insisting that he was building a "political reform movement for the long term."
"You can't spoil a system spoiled to the core," he said Tuesday. "That's what it's really all about, building a deep democracy, so we can really put some reality into this hollow phrase, 'a government of, by and for the people" -- WASHINGTON (AFP)
© 2000 Al Bawaba (www.albawaba.com)
