The Spoiler Candidate: #BernieOrBust and the 2000 Election

In the 2000 election a large number of people, disenchanted with the establishment Democrat Al Gore, voted for Nader. Nader quipped, at the time, that “Al Gore thinks we’re supposed to be helping him get elected. I’ve got news for Al Gore: If he can’t beat the bumbling Texas governor with that terrible record, he ought to go back to Tennessee.” He talked about Gore in terms that should be familiar to a lot of people, describing Gore to environmentalists as a “broker of environmental voters for corporate cash.”

Despite earlier talks about staying out of swing states, Nader focused heavily on states that wouldn’t help him get his 5% of votes, but would act as a spoiler in the election. Namely, he campaigned in Florida (among other places) in the final days of the election.

The electorate, meanwhile, didn’t see much of a difference between Bush and Gore. It was also part of Nader’s brand that there was little difference between Bush and Gore.

Which brings us to the outcome.

In Florida he received 97,488 votes (he received 2,882,955 across the entire country). The next highest was Pat Buchanan, who received 17,484. To compare to any other election year: In 2004 Nader received 465,151 votes across the entire country and 32,971 in Florida.

Florida was decided by 537 votes. Gore won the popular vote but lost the election by 5 electoral votes. Florida was worth 25. Really, even a swing in New Hampshire (where Nader pulled 22.2k votes) would have been enough to swing the election.

This is why multiple reports have concluded that, even though third party voting is not generally a problem and Nader may not have been deliberately trying to throw the election to Bush, it did alter the results in Florida, and thus changed the outcome of the 2000 election. Afterwards it was in Nader’s best interest to claim that he didn’t affect the election overmuch or try to talk about other factors (what about all of the democrats who voted for Bush? being a favorite… that there are other things that could have swung the election is not relevant to the question of whether Nader’s presence swung the election), but in the end it is hard to get away from the 537 vote result in Florida.

Whether he “should” have won more elsewhere (Tennessee, for example) is not relevant to that basic outcome.

So why am I talking about this?

Let’s look at the difference a single term of presidency would have made, only dipping our toe in the shallow end of the counterfactual discussion:

• No Iraq war. The Iraq war ended up costing $1.7 trillion in direct costs and may cost $6 trillion when interest is included, hundreds of thousands of deaths, and caused 36,710 US casualties (wounded+dead) (+2 more missing). We may still have had a hawkish policy (Joe Lieberman, after all, is pretty hawkish; as was Bill Clinton in a lot of ways), but even if we ended up in Afghanistan and in every other conflict during that time, we would have avoided Iraq. Even if Gore were “itching” to take out Sadam Hussein—unlikely, especially compared to Bush—it seems especially odd to assert we would have preempted the international inspectors or followed the same expensive route.
• Without the Iraq war, it is far less likely that money would have been allocated away from the levees in New Orleans. Without this change in budgeting, it isn’t much of a stretch to say that Hurricane Katrina — which was an engineering disaster, not a natural one — would have looked at least a little bit different, even if we had ended up losing the presidency after 2004.
• The Bush tax cuts, which were a disaster from the standpoint of budgeting or balancing the budget, something that Alan Greenspan ended up agreeing with as well.
• Environmental protection and policy in the US would have looked very, very different (start with we would have at least debated the Kyoto treaty, which even if you argue we shouldn’t have ratified it, “no interest” isn’t a place of starting discussion on a zone of possible agreement). Something that anyone paying attention today should be keenly aware of as a global issue.
• We are very unlikely to have engaged in torture and while we would have found something to do with the prisoners (assuming 9/11 even happened), it is unlikely we would have followed the same path as the Bush administration.

I’m sure there would have been things that Gore would have done that I would have found repulsive. I think privacy would have been eroded in truly objectionable ways still via the NSA and FISA courts, that we would have still had a hawkish foreign policy. That policy likely still would have had a lot of “stupid shit” in it.

It is difficult to know what would have happened in 2004 or 2008 in these sorts of counterfactual scenarios. It is hard to say if we would have seen Obama win the presidency at all. But if you were a Nader supporter back in 2000, it is as difficult to claim that your platform has been well served in the 16 years since by having Bush in the office from 2001–2004. There has been no revolution. The environmental platform, in particular, has been hurt worse than most and stands to be further undermined if the SCOTUS ends up shifting back despite being a fixture of Nader’s campaign.

This is for a presidential term that would likely have not changed the SCOTUS in any meaningful way. Meanwhile, we just got a 4–4 decision on unions in Friedrichs v. California Teachers Association, thus leaving the 1977 decision Abood v. Detroit Board of Education intact. If Scalia were alive collective bargaining agreements wouldn’t necessarily, but could very well have been broken. An appointment by Obama or an appointment by the next president (remember the age of Ginsburg and Breyer) could change this outcome or cement it and expand on it for another generation.

The whole Voting Rights kerfuffle that people have been talking about in several primary states is the direct result of the weakening of the Voting Rights Act by the SCOTUS.

Somehow, Reagan and George W. Bush both failed to usher in the Great Liberal Hope™. A President Trump or President Cruz will likely also fail to do this because, if nothing else, sitting in the backdrop are a few things that make it very, very hard for a third party to succeed structurally. Duverger’s Law is one of these. Arrow’s Paradox is another. Basically: Our voting structures do not generally allow for the success of third parties. The US simply isn’t likely to have a “great liberal awakening.”

In short: The “path to the revolution against the Establishment™” has already been paved in quite a bit of blood and elections are not a place to wave the flag of ideology when the stakes are so high and you have Arrow’s Paradox, Duverger’s Law, and a divided government in the backdrop. Especially not when your preferred candidate is losing in the popular vote and will be for the foreseeable future.

Don’t like it? Advocate for policies that get rid of gerrymandering. Advocate for Condorcet or Approval voting. Pay attention to the downticket. Finally, remember that the president is a Thing, not a Person.