Ralph Nader (Stephen C Webster / Flickr)

A recap:

1. Part 1 looked at the composition data of Nader votes, which clearly show Nader overwhelmingly took votes from Ross Perot voters, not Democrats
2. Part 2 looked at the composition data of Democrat voters, which showed hundreds of thousands of Dems voting Red, and a pittance voting Green
3. Part 3 looked at polling data throughout the election season showing, if anything, that Gore took votes from Nader, not the other way around, as people got cold feet on election day.

Part 4 is so simple and basic, it’s astonishing few have even mentioned or discussed it publicly.

Matthew Jones of USC’s Political Science Department says:

Every 3rd party candidate got over 600 votes, which means that if any one of those 3rd party candidates had potentially dropped out and those votes had gone to Al Gore, he would have won too. … Almost half of the Democratic Party voters stayed home, so who’s to say that the people who voted for Ralph Nader, if they didn’t have the choice of Ralph Nader, wouldn’t have stayed home or voted for somebody else anyway?

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Kevin Zeese pointed out long ago that 62% of Nader’s voters were Republicans, independents, third-party voters and nonvoters.

Ralph Nader (Stephen C Webster / Flickr)

In other words, these were not Democrat voters who switched sides. This is completely corroborated by the exit poll data from CNN.

Progressive Review did a review of national and Florida polls to quantify exactly how many votes Nader took from Gore.

The premise was to look at polls leading up to the election; what should have happened was that Gore and Nader’s poll changes would be inversely correlated. That is, as Nader’s poll numbers rose, Gore’s should have fallen by a proportional amount, and vice versa.

Needless to say, that’s not what the study showed.

In fact, it showed exactly what you’d expect from a candidate who had little exposure or money to make a blitz of attack ads: Nader’s poll numbers were pretty much unchanged for the duration of the election cycle. This means his effect on Gore’s total is statistically insignificant.

For example between August and September 2000 Gore’s average poll results rose 7.5 points but Nader’s went down only 1 point. Between September and October, Gore’s average went down 5.7 points and Nader’s went up .8 points. At least 85% of Gore’s changes were due to something other than Nader.

What the study did show was that Gore took votes from Bush.

Nader’s support was fixed, but Bush and Gore took votes away from each other the whole time. In fact, Gore was behind for quite some time, but caught up towards September by taking Bush’s votes, and faded away in October.

And in the last months, it was clear many Nader voters began to come into Gore’s camp at the last minute:

During almost all of 2000, Bush led Gore with the major acception of a month-long period following the Democratic convention. During this high point for Gore, Nader was pulling a running average of 2-4% in the polls. While it is true that during October, Nader began pulling a running average of 6% at a time when Gore was fading, Gore continued to lose ground even as Nader’s support dropped to its final 3%. In other words, despite the help of defectors from Nader, Gore did worse.

CNN’s exit poll showed Bush at 49 percent and Gore at 47 percent, with 2 percent not voting in a hypothetical Nader-less Florida race.
I ask again to the myth supporters, do you have any polling data or studies that refute the points made here? Not the opinion of a pundit, but actual verifiable data?

Sources:
Progressive Review study:
http://prorev.com/green2000.htm
FL exit poll data:
http://www.vrdc.cornell.edu/info4470/projects/~bap63/pdf/florida2000.pdf

Blue dog: Did I cost Gore the election? (Photo: Patti Haskins / Flickr)

A continuation of Part 1, a series that disproves the myth that alternative parties caused the world to come to an end a dozen years ago. It is simply another tribalist ‘veal pen’ authored fairy tale with little to no evidence to back it up, other than “I saw it on TV.”

As Aldous Huxley quipped in Brave New World:

“Great is truth, but still greater, from a practical point of view, is silence about truth. By simply not mentioning certain subjects … totalitarian propagandists have influenced opinion much more effectively than they could have by the most eloquent denunciations.”

In this case, the silent inconvenient truth is that hundreds of thousands of Democrats voted for Bush, and against Gore. The Bush Democrats outnumbered all of Nader’s supporters by a 2:1 margin in Florida, and outnumbered the Nader Democrats by a 16:1 margin.

If only 0.3% of these good for nothing Blue Dogs stayed home or, (gasp) even voted for their own party, Gore wins the election.

“Twelve percent of Florida Democrats (over 200,000) voted for Republican George Bush”
-San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 2000

Even more embarrassing is that 34% of union members voted for Bush, but only 3% for Nader, per the exit polls.

Again, this is straight from the official Florida exit polls taken in 2000. 16% of those who supported Clinton in 1996 supported Bush. Only 1% of those who supported Clinton in 1996 supported Nader in 2000.

Here’s the chart, again. The first column is the total vote count, and the rest is read left to right:

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The truthiness of this has been blown way out of proportion for far too long. It’s so bad even 3rd party supporters even believe it. I’d like to just dispense with this nonsense once and for all, and be done with it.

Ralph Nader (Stephen C Webster / Flickr)

As the Obama vultures come out from hiding as November approaches, two of the few reasons they have for supporting Mr. Obama are the Supreme Court (which is BS too, but I digress), and that an alternative candidate will supposedly cause the Republican to win, as evidenced by 2000. We need to do away with the falsehoods that allow the latter argument to still be said without shame or embarrasment.

This is the first of a series that will disprove this myth; a myth that can be debunked in a myriad of ways. I hope this info helps Firedogs in their efforts to keep other progressives from voting for their own oppressors, and will let people vote their conscience guilt free this fall.
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