Gore's Defeat: Don't Blame Nader.

• Author: Marable, Dr. Manning
• Position: Al Gore Jr.; Ralph Nader - Statistical Data Included

The conventional political wisdom about last year's presidential election is that Green Party candidate Ralph Nader is largely responsible for the defeat of Al Gore. At first glance, the accusation appears to be true.

Although Gore won the popular vote over Republican presidential candidate George W. Bush, he narrowly lost the Electoral College. Because of our archaic and anti-democratic winner-take-all presidential system, the candidate who carries a state either by a majority or plurality of votes, no matter how close the vote was, wins that state's entire electoral votes.

Nationwide, Ralph Nader's nearly three million votes were generally thought to have come at the expense of Gore. In Florida, for example, Nader's 98,000 votes left Gore only several hundred votes behind Bush, with over six million votes cast statewide. Gore narrowly lost New Hampshire to Bush, 47% to 48%. Nader's New Hampshire vote was 22,000, about 4% of the statewide total, significantly more than Gore's margin of defeat.

Even before the November election, many liberals within the Democratic Party carried out a vituperative, polemical campaign against the Green Party, and targeted Nader personally. In a widely circulated public letter, "To Ralph or not to Ralph," a group of prominent intellectuals, including Nobel laureate and novelist Toni Morrison, feminist Gloria Steinem, journalist John B. Judis, and Princeton scholar Sean Wilentz, denounced Nader and those who had endorsed him. They attacked Nader's call to cut US aid to Israel as "irresponsible" and "inflammatory." "Nader and his supporters" were accused of "Orwellian utterances," and given to "disingenuous claims about a 'risk-free' Nader vote in places where Gore or Bush are strong." Nader's brand of "sectarianism had reaped nothing but catastrophe for liberal and progressive politics."

Days following Gore's narrow defeat, writer Eric Alterman in the Nation all but buried Nader politically. "An honest Nader campaign slogan might have read, _'Vote your conscience and lose your union...or your reproductive freedom," Alterman bitterly declared. Nader's three million popular votes were dismissed as "pathetic," and his campaign described as "infantile" and a "quixotic quest to elect a reactionary Republican to the presidency." Alterman warned that the "die-hard Naderites" should anticipate "an ugly period of payback. Democrats will no longer return (Nader's) calls. Funders will tell him to take a hike."

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