Remember John Anderson? He was the third-party presidential candidate in 1980. The earnest, scholarly Illinois representative attracted voters who wanted to break away from what they saw as a tired, corrupt two-party system. He scared both the Carter and Reagan campaigns by getting 15 percent in opinion polls. He even won the imaginary support of cartoon skeptic Mike Doonesbury.
Anderson took only 7 percent of the actual vote, and did not try for the presidency again. But he’s still in politics, working for Green Party candidate and lifelong consumer advocate Ralph Nader.
"I think he’s a man of utter integrity running for election at a time when public confidence in having public men and public women of great and unimpeachable integrity has sunk to a new low." Anderson has said. "He represents a progressive point of view that is lacking in both parties."
Anderson’s presence in the Nader campaign is like the Ghost of Elections Past — a reminder of the old dilemma of voting for third-party candidates. A third party candidate has never won an American presidential election, and many have served as spoilers, taking votes away from the party that is ideologically closest to the third-party platform. Democrats worry, rightfully, that Nader could cost Albert Gore key "swing" states such as California, Minnesota, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Illinois. Last August, polls showed Nader getting 8 percent of the vote in California, which has helped close the gap in favor of Bush taking that state. A joke currently running in Democratic circles is that the "Green" in Green Party stands for "Get Republicans Elected Every November."
"If [Nader is] on the ballot here, it will be very harmful to the Gore campaign," says Mort Kaplan, Columbia College professor of marketing communications and director of public relations studies. "You don’t need to be a genius to say people who’d go for Nader would go more for Gore. The Nader influence can really pull just enough in a swing state." Muffling somewhat the Nader effect in swing states is the presence of Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan, who could cancel out the influence of far-left votes with far-right votes.
Nader advocates claim there is little difference between the two major parties, and that a vote for Nader, even if it has no chance of winning him the presidency, will send a message to the Democratic party that it has moved too far to the center. "They’ll have to stop taking for granted certain constituencies — women, the poor, unions, and minorities," says Elizabeth Fraser, representative of the Illinois State Greens coordinating committee.
Nader’s candidacy presents a tough dilemma to progressive voters in Illinois. A Nader supporter in guns-and-cowboys Montana could vote Green without worrying that it would help Bush — Bush is going to take Montana anyway, so a protest vote against the centrist leanings of the Democrats wouldn’t do any harm. But Illinois progressives have to ask themselves if the nice, rebellious feeling they may get from voting for Nader is worth the price.
Third party history
Nader ran for president in 1996, but the campaign was like a tree falling in the forest — almost no one heard it, so it was hard to believe it was real. This time, Nader has actually made a campaign commercial, and at this writing (September 5), polls show him with 4 percent of the vote in opinion polls.
But even Green Party supporters will admit that Nader’s chances of coming from 4 percent to win the election is slim. So why do they want to give him their votes?
A voter may decide to go for a third party because his or her goals are long-term, rather than short-term, explained Kent Redfield, professor of political studies at the University of Illinois in Springfield.
"If your concerns are short-term, there is only one of two people who is going to win the election in Illinois, or nationally," Redfield says. "That’s George Bush or Al Gore — [like] a blue-plate special, no substitutes allowed. You pick the candidate closest to what your priorities are and you vote for him. Either they’ll be positive or they’ll do the least amount of harm... . If you’re concerned about public policy over the next four years, you ought to be picking which of the two candidates makes the most sense to you. If Bush is a minus ten and Gore is a minus eight, you can still make a rational decision to vote for Gore."
But if a voter is taking a long-term view and fundamentally believes that neither majority party has offered a good candidate, a voter may decide for Nader or some other alternative candidate (such as Natural Law Party candidate John Hagelin) even if the alternative isn’t likely to win. "Nader’s argument is essentially correct — if you don’t vote for the person you want, you’ll never elect the person you want. It’s a tautology but it’s true," Redfield says.
Redfield says third-party voters can argue that by voting against the majority parties, they can move their own issues to the center of the national debate. "The historical tendency has been that the two parties have been pretty adaptive and if a third party seems to attract significant attention, the majority parties have been pretty good at cannibalizing or adopting those policies.... Certainly there is a segment of historians who would tell you that the poorest parties have been fairly successful at getting things on the national agenda and the major parties have tended to absorb their positions." Redfield offered the example of Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s vice-president who was dumped in 1944 in favor of Harry Truman. Running as a progressive presidential candidate in 1948, Wallace insisted on integrated audiences and helped advance the cause of civil rights a good eight years before Brown v. Board of Education.
"A third party has often been a call to conscience," Anderson says. Anderson believes his own campaign served the purpose of making state ballot access easier for third parties by creating the Anderson-Burdick legal test, which helps courts determine whether a state has made it too difficult for a candidate to get on the ballot. The test came about as a result of a lawsuit by Anderson over state ballot access, and is now one of the legal precedents being used by Nader supporters to get him on the ballot in every state.
Besides bringing issues like universal health care into the national debate, another argument raised by Nader supporters is that if Nader gets at least 5 percent of the national vote, the Green Party can qualify for federal campaign money in the next election. "[Voters] are wasting an opportunity if they do not vote for Nader to get him above the level of support that would firmly ground the Green Party as part of our political process, as an institution that could in future years make the American political system more competitive,"Anderson says. "That’s the opportunity they ought to consider that will be lost if they simply succumb to the old line I heard so often, that‘We like you, we admire your views, but some other time, because this time it might be close, I have to vote for the least of the worst.’ I think that’s the wrong philosophical approach. The election ought to be more than your participating in a horse race and you want to put your money on the right nose."
Green Party activist Fraser says that it might even be better for the environment if Bush wins, because then environmentalists will not be complacent. "When you’re afraid of someone you watch your back," says Fraser. "I think environmentalists have become less vigilant because of the Clinton administration. You’re going to watch the guy you know is against you rather than the guy who’s on your side. An admirer of the vice-president’s book, Earth in the Balance, Fraser believes the environmental cause has actually been weakened under Clinton-Gore.
Redfield says environmentalists like Fraser are unrealistic about what they could expect from Clinton, since he has had six years with a Republican Congress. "The problem has not been the Clinton administration," Redfield says. "Congress is less environmentally friendly than the administration, and if you end up with a Republican president and a Republican Congress I don’t think that’s going to produce policies that the people supporting Nader find very congenial."
Tweedledum and Tweedledee?
In an interview with the San Francisco Bay Guardian, Nader called the idea that one has to be realistic and vote for one of the majority parties the "least worst syndrome. Or the evil of two lessers. Or the lesser of two evils."
But some Gore supporters say Nader, with all his years of advocating for the consumer, is himself ignoring "truth in advertising" when he makes this kind of argument. In a harsh editorial in the August 10 New York Times, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., senior attorney for the Natural Resources Defense Counsel, called Nader’s campaign a threat to the environment, and Nader’s suggestion that there is no difference between Gore and Bush "irresponsible."
Kennedy praised Gore as "the environment’s most visible champion since Theodore Roosevelt." Gore’s record as vice- president includes helping to persuade Clinton to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, securing more financing for energy conservation research and supporting the Kyoto agreement to limit global warning, Kennedy noted. Gore’s activism for the environment has earned him the mocking nickname "Ozone Man" from Bush, Sr.
George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, on the other hand, have environmental records that are abysmal even for Republicans, according to Kennedy’s analysis. Bush’s appointments to Texas environmental agencies have come from the chemical and oil industries. Under Bush, Texas is forty-ninth in the nation in per capita environmental spending, and Texas now has the country’s highest levels of air and water pollution and toxic releases.
Thirty-nine chapters of the Sierra Club favored a Gore endorsement, while one chapter went with Nader. In the Club’s official endorsement of Gore, Sierra Club president Dr. Robert Cox drew contrasts between the two majority candidates. "As Vice President, Al Gore helped strengthen clean air health standards, sped clean-up of Superfund toxic waste sites, reduced automobile tailpipe pollution, and protected America’s spectacular landscapes... . Gov. Bush on the other hand, has said that if he’s elected, he will weaken toxic-waste clean-up standards, allow oil drilling in the Arctic Refuge, and increase logging in National Forests."
Charlie Wheeler, director of public affairs reporting at the University of Illinois at Springfield, says the Gore campaign should not argue that Nader is a spoiler since that implies that only majority parties should run for office. Rather, Wheeler says, Gore has to make the point that there are fundamental differences on the environment and other progressive issues between himself and Bush, and he has the best chance of stopping Bush.
Nader’s ghostly candidacy
For all the passion of his supporters, Nader’s stand on what exactly he would do as president remains vague. While Nader has adopted the platform of the National Association of State Green Parties, his interviews do not focus on his own positions, but on how the Democrats have betrayed the progressive cause. In his interview with the Guardian, for example, he complains that the Democrats are "hopelessly corrupt," and that both parties are inextricably tied to corporate interests. He attacks the low minimum wage, the high cost of health care, the high cost of day care, and other pressing working-class problems. But he does not say how he would address these problems — what particular solutions he would bring before Congress as president, what programs he would advocate, how he would achieve what he wants. It is hard to imagine Nader working the phones all day like Lyndon B. Johnson, bargaining and wheedling, calling in favors from congressmen to push his own agenda. It is as though Nader is applying for the nation’s top job not by promoting his own qualifications, but by attacking the other applicants.
"He could be faulted at this point for not being sufficiently programmatic in his approach to the campaign," admitted Anderson (who was interviewed in late August). "There is some justifiable criticism that at this pre-Labor Day point there hasn’t been the specificity voters should have." Anderson says that as a member of Nader’s Citizen Advisory Committee, he hopes to help persuade Nader to talk more about what he supports. Of course, even if Nader does clarify what he would do as president, the fact that the majority parties will not allow Nader into national debates will make it difficult for him to expound his positions on a national stage.
Kaplan says it makes sense that Nader is pursuing the strategy of attacking Gore, since any votes he’ll get will come from Gore. "It’s good for Nader, but I’m not sure it’s good for the country," Kaplan says. "The role of the spoiler is not a gallant role."
For some progressives who believe that Nader can’t win, and yet who also believe that the Democrats have gone too far toward the center — supporting Nader may be like extramarital flirting at a party — not meant to be serious, just meant to make the real partner (Gore) pay more attention. But in politics as in marriage, sometimes harmless flirting has unintentional results.
"It’s a game of chicken," says Chicago voter Tom Rossen, 57. "I’d like to at least threaten to vote for Nader if it pushes Gore toward the classic non-New Democrat positions." Asked if he’ll actually vote for Nader in November, Rossen said he has to play a carefully calibrated game, figuring the odds of Bush winning the state. "If Gore holds onto his current lead," I’ll probably vote for Nader," Rossen said.