The Nader Effect

Ralph Nader last had a significant impact on an election way back in 2000. The key numbers, as follows:

NATIONAL POPULAR VOTE

Al Gore - 51,003,926 (48.4%)
George W. Bush - 50,460,110 (47.9%)
Ralph Nader - 2,883,105 (2.7%)
Others - 1,070,117 (1.0%)

FLORIDA

George W. Bush - 2,912,790 (48.8%)
Al Gore - 2,912,253 (48.8%)
Ralph Nader - 97,488 (1.6%)
Others - 40,579 (0.6%)

The simplistic approach to the question is to say, with a great deal of finality and purpose, that Nader cost Gore the election. You would have a point, certainly. Voters are supposedly rational actors, and Gore was certainly closer to Nader on the spectrum than Bush was.

Still, the truth is, many third party voters vote only because they are fond of the particular candidate. The best example of that this year is Ron Paul. People started to come to the realization that Paul had tapped into a heretofore untapped vein of electoral support. The question was asked often: where do those supporters go after their hero drops out? Most people came to the conclusion that those voters would go home.

But because Nader's voters aren't seen as insane, and Paul's are, Nader's voters were not usually considered to be "going home" if Nader weren't there. They were anticipated to vote.

The best academic look at this that I've seen was done by Priscilla D. Southwell at the University of Oregon, and she concluded that Nader's voters were likely to vote for Gore in a general, all while accounting for the fact that their turnout might have been more depressed. So, I think that the conclusion that was reached is sound, though I'm not happy with its slipshod nature.

Less talked about is Nader's own assertion, that he helped the Democrats' retake the Senate. I'll look at Washington State as an instructive example of this.

In the 50-50 split Senate, the Democrats courted moderate and maverick Republicans to switch allegiance in order to flip the Senate back to the Dems. If I'm not mistaken, Jim Jeffords, Lincoln Chaffee, and John McCain were their targets. Jeffords became an independent and decided to caucus with the Dems, thus giving them their majority. But before that happened, they needed to tie the Senate, right?

Enter Washington:

Al Gore - 1,240,302 (49.7%)
George W. Bush - 1,101,621 (44.1%)
Ralph Nader - 101,906 (4.1%)
Others - 24,980 (1.0%)

A pretty significant win for Gore, no? He won by almost 6 percentage points, even before the Nader votes are taken into account.

Here's the Senate race:

Maria Cantwell (D) - 1,199,437
Slade Gordon (R-incumbent) - 1,197,208

Less than 2,500 votes separated the Senate winner from the Senate loser. The question is, did Nader increase the total of voters for Maria Cantwell by more than that number? For this, we have to go to the Exit Polls. I would much rather have the raw data here, but it's not available. What I'm about to do is speculative. I merely want to see if this theory is plausible.

Because the sample isn't big enough, our most critical question, "Who would you have voted for in a two-candidate race?" has no data. This is methodologically questionable, but I extrapolated the information on the national poll to get the splits on this: 31% of the people who would not have voted in the election if it had been a two-candidate race were Nader supporters. It's essentially 31% of 2%, which is .62% of the electorate. My estimate, ignoring significant digits and stuff like that, is that Nader increased turnout by .62% in Washington, which was a little over 16,000 new voters.

The question is, where would those voters go? Exit polls indicate that 7% of Cantwell's supporters voted Nader, and that 3% of Gorton's supporters voted Nader. But there was also a third party candidate running in the Senate election (a lonely libertarian), and he got 2.6% of the vote. Did the same iconoclasts vote for him as the ones that voted for Nader? How can we really trust the exit polls when they completely ignored Jeff Jared, the libertarian?

So, it's a tough question. I think Nader's claims about Washington are plausible, though.

This year? I would be very surprised if Nader netted more than 1% of the vote. I also don't think he will take very many votes away from Obama or Clinton; he will simply bring out more people who probably wouldn't vote for the mainstream candidate anyway.

So, in the end, I actually think Nader could help the Democrats. Nader voters, like he has claimed, often vote for the Democratic senatorial or House candidates. The Senate, which is very closely contested, might swing further to the Democrats' with the help of Nader voters.

My advice? Don't worry about Nader, if you're a Democrat. He's irrelevant and 40 years past his prime, but he actually might help out this year.