Every campaign season, people are quick to point out that third parties should stay out of the election because, well, reasons.There are two talking points. 1) A third party can never win because so few people vote for them and 2) They will only 'spoil' the vote for a major party candidate,and this election season is no different. As proof of the latter, people smuggly point to the 2000 campaign season of Gore vs Bush, and the effect Ralph Nader supposedly had on Gore losing, thereby keeping Gore out of office and saddling us with George H. W. Bush.
This is a lie promulgated by the major parties for the express purpose of discouraging people from voting for third parties, and spreading it is helping them do just that to this day. Pretty good bang for their buck, wouldn’t you say? Here are a few facts. FACTS, not opinions:
Facts:
Just like Hillary Clinton, Gore lost because he was a terrible candidate, not because it was stolen from him (as if it were already his to be stolen). Al Gore didn't even win his OWN state, nor that of the sitting president, with whom he'd served for eight years. Electoral loss? 17. Enough to have handily won the election.
Several factors in the much talked about Florida results tell a story contrary to Nader "spoiling" the election:
Bush beat Gore by 534 votes in Florida. How many Florida Democrats do you suppose voted for GW Bush? The San Francisco Chronicle puts the number at 200,000, and The Atlantic says 308,000. The Atlantic went on to say, “Nader only drew 24,000 Democrats to his cause ( . . . ) If Gore had taken even 1 percent of these Democrats from Bush, Nader's votes wouldn't have mattered. ( . . . ) Gore lost 191,000 self-described liberals to Bush, compared to less than 34,000 who voted for Nader”. All of a sudden, it sounds like Nader had a much smaller impact on the tally than Democratic voters, themselves.
The butterfly ballot cost Al Gore thousands of votes, more than enough to have won the presidency. A Guardian review (2001) found that Gore would have had a net gain of 662 votes, enough to win, if there had been a hand recount of "over-votes," mostly from double bubbles.
The Florida Secretary of State’s Office hired a private firm known as Database Technologies, Inc. (now ChoicePoint Corporation) to identify convicted felons and remove them from Florida’s voting rolls. Prior to the election, 94,000 voters were removed. This is legal if someone has been convicted of a felony, but as it turns out, 97 percent were innocent and should not have been removed. The list of voters denied the right to vote was overwhelmingly Democratic, and half were minorities. Al Gore neither protested the disenfranchisement nor supported these voters’ lawsuit to regain their vote.
There were more than three presidential candidates on the Florida ballot in 2000. In fact, there were TEN. Every single one of them, including Pat Buchanan (Reform Party) and Harry Brown (Libertarian Party) garnered more than enough votes to have made the 537 vote difference between Bush and Gore. I have not heard ANYONE accuse Buchanan of spoiling the vote. (See the chart below)
So, sure, if NOBODY but the major parties ran, nobody but the major parties would affect who wins. Do you REALLY think no one else should even be allowed to be heard? How many times have you heard, “This is the most important election in our lifetime” since the 1990s? I’m willing to bet that’d be the same number of elections held during the same time period. Think, people. They literally use the very same language and ‘reasoning’ every single time. Where does this end? They don’t even have to think up a new strategy; they just trot out all the talking points that worked last time. And it has worked every time. I can’t tell you the Democrats (rank and file, not politicians) who will argue until they’re blue in the face that THIS time is different...no, really. Will it EVER not be the most important election? Recent history says no, it won’t. And that being the case, we have no hope of any sort of real change to help the beleaguered voters who continue to fall in line. Every. Single. Time.
As was noted above in the first point about the Florida election results, Nader garnered 97,000 votes. Only 34,000 were Democrats. And that is another of the salient points about voting third party. Most voters who chose Nader were neither Democrat nor Republican. Neither of those parties' candidates would have received those votes. The independent left does not want to help further intrench our corrupt system. We don't want either of them to win. We want to build a movement to usurp that system you are intent that we should support. Our votes never belonged to either major party candidate to lose. Those are our votes, and it is the height of arrogance to suggest we owe them to your candidate. We would argue that a vote for your candidate is a wasted vote, because you continue to get what you don't want to prevent something you don't want even more. That is not our purpose, it is yours. We do not vote for someone who does not deserve our vote, no matter what you may think is the right thing to do. You can do something constructive and join us in our outrage at the system and our passion to stop it. To stop the starvation. To stop the homelessness. To stop the poverty. To stop people dying and/or going broke trying to keep their families and themselves healthy. STOP THE WARS that benefit no one but corporations. A candidate who stands for those principles deserves our votes. Not the grifter who will say they wish they could help, but it's just out of their hands. We call bs. All of those things are doable. It's not the money or resources we lack, it is the political will, the courage to actually take a stand and do it. For the people they care so much about to continue in the dire and worsening state that their parties caused in not only callous, it is inhumane. No, we will not support such a candidate. If your candidate can't win without the measly numbers you say we have, that is on you and your candidate, not on third parties. Get better candidates or continue to go round and round the very same track year after year, election after election.
Third parties and independents are not the only losers if we keep all others out of the equation. The American people lose BIG TIME. WE, the American people, deserve more choices. No matter what you think the outcome should be, you should at least be in favor of fair elections. Is that bar too high for you? In a fair election, one that offers real choices, if the person you don't like wins, that is because more people voted for them. Period. That is the way democracy is supposed to work. The system we have is the "Major Party Protection System," written BY the parties, FOR the parties. If the major parties are allowed to continue keeping out third parties and independents, it is to your (and all of our) own peril because you stifle any chance we have of changing ANYTHING.
These are just a FEW of the facts; there is much more to be found for anyone who wants to know the truth. Think critically, find the information that is out there, and please...PLEASE...use logic and not knee jerk reaction to choose what you will do.
It may be convenient to blame Nader and with him all other third parties—convenient for the major parties—but it is not factual.
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