Ralph Nader, man misunderstood?

• Author: Hall, Oliver
• Position: LETTERS - Letter to the editor

The charge that Nader's Green Party candidacy caused Democrat Al Gore to lose the 2000 presidential election to Republican George W. Bush is repeated so often that some view it as an uncontested fact, rather than a highly selective and ideological interpretation of a complex historical event. So it is with the Washington Monthly [Charles Peters, "Tilting at Windmills," January/February 2012].

But there were seven presidential candidates on the Florida ballot in 2000 in addition to Nader, and together they won more votes than the margin of victory between Bush and Gore. And more than 250,000 Florida Democrats voted for Bush, and not for Gore. Furthermore, Gore failed to carry his home state of Tennessee, or Bill Clinton's home state of Arkansas.

There can be no doubt that if the 97,000 votes Nader won in Florida had been taken from him and given to Gore, then Gore would have won the election. But it is far from clear that Gore would have won if Nader had not run at all. No one knows what those 97,000 voters would have done had they been denied the choice of voting for Nader. Some might have voted for Gore, but others might have voted for another candidate, and still others might have stayed home. It is also possible that Nader increased Gore's votes, by pressuring Gore to draw sharper distinctions between his campaign and Bush's, or by running to Gore's left and making him more appealing to independent voters. These hypotheses are difficult to test, perhaps, but they are not unlikely, and they render the "spoiler" charge against Nader even more dubious.

More important, to label any candidate a "spoiler" is to adopt an overtly antidemocratic theory of...