----- Original Message -----
From: "Shane Mage" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>National exit polls said that half of Nader voters would have supported
>Vice>President Al Gore had Nader not been on the ticket. Thirty percent
>said they
>would not have voted and the rest would have gone for Bush.
>
>In Florida, that would have translated into an additional 30,000 vote
margin
>for Gore.
-This counterfactual, plus rotten data (no option to vote for any other
-candidate?),
-allows no inference about the Florida vote.
Sure it does. Especially since it fits every anecdotal discussion I have
had with the variety of Nader voters I have know. A core of them are the
hard lefties, as on this list, who would not have voted for Gore no matter
what. However, most of them are liberal types who generally are more
pro-capitalist than many Democrats but chose Nader on a general sense of
clean ethics and "good government" progressivism. Most of these almost
voted for Gore, but chose to make a statement by voting Nader. And 99% of
this group do not even know who David McReynolds is and would never have
voted for him. So without Nader, they would have returned to Gore, exactly
as the exit polls show.
Unless you can marshall any evidence to countermand the extensive polling,
surveys, anecdotal evidence, etc. that show that many Nader voters would not
have voted for Gore, you are just showing a complete ideological resistance
to rational discussion.
At least folks like Carroll and Justin accept Nader's role and actually
celebrate it by noting that it shows Nader's and his supporters' power.
Which it did, I readily admit. It was poorly and tragically misused power
in my view, but power nonetheless.
It actually seems bizarre to me to have some Nader supporters asserting the
irrelevance of Nader's campaign to the election outcome. If it was
irrelevant - just statistical noise - then who should care?
As to Justin's comments that voting Nader shows fundamental opposition to
capitalism, that doesn't hold up either. Nader supporters, while more
liberal on average than other voters, were not more radical in their views
than most Democratic voters. In fact, the core of Nader's support came from
moderate and even self-identified conservative independents. See
http://www.latimes.com/news/timespoll/pdf/449grph2.pdf
Unless you want to argue that blacks are overwhelmingly satisfied with our
system and that explains their overwhelming support for Gore, that argument
just fails on its face.
No, folks support Democrats for a wide range of reasons, some because that
is as much reform as they want and others, like myself and many left
Democrats, because we think it is strategically the best way to advance
limited reforms now in order to pave the way for the organizing in the
future that can attain more radical changes then.
Voting for Nader and helping to cancel ergonomic reforms, pass anti-union
executive orders, and disable abortion funding globally does not seem like a
gain in our view either for short term reforms or long-term radical change.
You can disagree with that assessment but the reality is that there are far
more people whose goals are fundamental change who voted for Gore than voted
for Nader.
-- Nathan Newman
