Nader to announce on Meet the Press

[Gustaf]

wheher he run or not i think no matter in a electoral sense.

If he pulls four percent then it matters big time.

There is no way Nader polls 4%, he only polled 2.74% with the greens before he was blamed for the gore loss.  Now, he will have to obtain the ballot status by himself, and fights the unpopularity.  No way he gets 4%.

In the hard lefts eyes Kerry or Edwards is worse then Gore.

No, they're the same.  No way Nader takes over 2%.

Not the same and I say four percent.

I say not even half of that.

I say...nothing right now...

[Gustaf]

Nader will attract 2% at most. In 2000 he gained a big protest vote from fringe Democrats who this year will be ABB.

That's if they see a difference between the two.

They hate Bush much more than they will ever hate Kerry or Edwards. They're just as worried about him as the Reps are of them...

[Gustaf]

Nader will attract 2% at most. In 2000 he gained a big protest vote from fringe Democrats who this year will be ABB.

That's if they see a difference between the two.

They hate Bush much more than they will ever hate Kerry or Edwards. They're just as worried about him as the Reps are of them...

The big idea of Nader and those who follow him is that there is no difference between the parties.

That was pre-Bush. He's a divisive president.

[Gustaf]

The most he got was 10% in Alaska...
Apart from Oregon and Minnesota, he got goodish results only where everybody knew it wouldn't hurt.
I'd be surprised if he polled above 1%. Then again, I'd be surprised to see Roy Moore poll above 1,5% either.

If Moore's 1.5% is concentrated in Alabama it could still hurt a lot...GOPman, I think you're way off, why on earth would Nader do better than he did in 2000? That's highly unlikely, he'll do much worse, and the MN effect was probably b/c his running mate, Winona LaDuke was from MN.

[Gustaf]

The most he got was 10% in Alaska...
Apart from Oregon and Minnesota, he got goodish results only where everybody knew it wouldn't hurt.
I'd be surprised if he polled above 1%. Then again, I'd be surprised to see Roy Moore poll above 1,5% either.

What about Florida and New Hampshire? Or you don't regard these results ad good?

[Gustaf]

No way will Nader get 5% nationally... many liberals voted for Nader because they saw Gore as too moderate and little different to the ostensibly centrist Bush... Gore minimised the damage caused by Nader's by moving slightly to the left during the election (which he first did to defeat Bradley in the primaries)... the great desire within the democratic party simply to win will massively reduce the effect of a Nader run added to this Nader has no party structure and will have to get him slef on the ballot in all fifty states by himself... I would be surprised if Nader got 1/2 what he got last time and most Democrats and liberals who voted for Nader in 2000 will vote for the Dem nominee...

Lewis Nader did not only get goodish results where if would not hurt in Florida and New Hampshire he held the balance had he not run and only 1/3 of his votes gone to Gore… Gore would have won both states… Wisconsin, Minnesota (as you say that’s largely the La Duke factor), Oregon and Washington where all made much closer than they ever should have been by Naders run and in the dying days of the campaign he made last minute drives in marginal states across the country including Florida and New Hampshire… sometime I really doubt that this guy is not a republican plant… I really do….  


GOPman I’m afraid that Kerry has a very good record on the environment and why would those to whom the environment is the most important issue in this election allow Bush to win?

If he runs I'd say he'll got on the ballot in about 30 states... and will get a little over 1% nationwide ... If Roy Moore runs (assuming an alliance of sorts between the Constitution and Reform Party's and no DOMA) then I imagine he'll get around 2.5-3% nation wide however I would imagine that will be concentrated in the south, but I would imagine in close states such as OH and NH even if he garners only a little under 1% that could be important...        

Nader got 1,6% in Florida, after having polled there as high as 7% at one point (sorry, I don't have that poll, I've read that figure somehwere.) That's not a good result. It was indeed enough to easily take Gore over the top, but then there's lots of other factors you could blame just as easily.
Wherever the election was close he got much less than what polls had proclaimed. Yes, he still got 5,2% in Minnesota, 5% in Oregon, 4,1% in Washington, 3,9% in New Hampshire, 3,6% each in New Mexico amd Wisconsin. (I've looked 'em up before writing this post...)
These are results above his national average of 2,7%. The other 19 states and equivalents with over average Nader results are safe states. Note that there are a number of states where Nader was only a write-in candidate or not even that, so the average for ballot status states is higher. (Then again, he got 2,5% as a write-in candidate in Idaho).
The point is: The vast majority of potential Nader voters bottled out and returned to the "minor evil" Democrats even before the elections. Expect more of the same in close states, expect the Green vote to hold up slightly better where you can really use your ballot to send a message, because it won't hurt.
PS While clearly above the national average, the NH result is still Nader's worst in New England
Vermont 6,9
Massachusetts 6,4
Rhode Island 6,1
Maine 5,7
Connecticut 4,4
New Hampshire 3,9
And Connecticut was considered not safe by many pundits.

You seem to indicate that the 2.73% Nader got nationally in 2000 was some kind of minimum, but 3rd party candidates usually don't get a lot of votes. Ballot-status is also important. More to the point, we most likely won't have exactly the same battlegrounds this time around, I'd expect New Hampshire and Florida to both be safer for Bush this time around. And I think people are more anti-Bush now than they were in 2000.

[Gustaf]

Not exactly a "minimum", but it was less than had long been expected. The Green Party were quite confident until a few weeks before the elections that they'd get the 5% nationally they needed to get federal matching funds. (Don't ask me how that works exactly in the US.) When Nader started campaigning in battleground states again, it was mostly because they realised they would definitely not get their 5% otherwise. And 1,6% is bad compared to 2,7% nationally, just like 40% is bad for a Democrat compared to 50% nationally.
If the election had been considered in the bag for either gore or Bush some weeks before the election, I guess Nader would have polled about 5-6%. However, that was last time around. He won't poll that much again, we're quite agreed on that one.
Basically what I'm prickly about is the assertion that it's all Nader's fault Gore lost the election. Lots of factors contributed to that.
-The Democrats wrote off Ohio as lost two weeks before the election and stopped campaigning there
-Gore campaigned somewhat too much in the center and chose a less-than-perfect running mate
-people on the left were angry at Clinton's selloutish second term, not that that's really Clinton's fault
-there's the Florida election issue, which I won't rehash here
-whoever but Al Gore in the garment that least suits him for the debates? And who coached him?
-etc etc
-And Bush made mistakes too of course. He too might have won more clearly with a perfect campaign

A perfect campaign is always nice, but hard to achieve...there were a number of factors combining to create the 2000 result, of course, but Nader is a rather clear one. All other things equal, Nader lost Gore Florida, and thus the election.

[Gustaf]

EMERGING D MAJORITY, GO AND VOTE IN THE FANTASY ELECTION NOW.

Holy sh*t, EmergingDmajority turned up!

Btw, I just saw the Simpsons episode where Ralph Nader attends the Republican meeting...it's really cool.

[Gustaf]

Why are you writing off Nader's ~5% in MN as the 'LaDuke' factor?  Even though MN has been drifting right (or more to the center, shall I say ), there are still quite a few liberals here.  Since we have good natural resources, Minnesotans tend to be more liberal environmentally.  I went to a Nader rally; it was thrilling!

Also, why so quick to blame Bush being elected on Nader?  You could aso blame it on the Libertarians, the Write In voters... the list goes on and on

B/c I see no other good reason...

Actually, the only GOPer from MN in this forum is an environmentalist, so there might be something to your theory...