Seva Guniskiy
In accordance with the spirit of these political times, the Gore campaign is fighting defeat to the last breath, armed with impromptu court appeals and vague invocations of preserving our nations democracy. Gore seems embarrassed, and rightly so, to lose the presidential election to a nitwit. The media watchdogs, meanwhile, are eagerly backtracking down the campaign trail, sniffing out potential scapegoats to explain Gore's flop.
As it turns out, they don't have to look far. Nader's 97,000 votes in Florida seem so obviously crucial in having determined the winner that frustrated Democrats everywhere are screaming 'see I told you so' at the top of their lungs.
The two states that have been overshadowed by the Florida debacle are New Hampshire and Oregon, yet even there Nader has absorbed all the blame for Gore's marginal defeats. In New Hampshire, Bush won by 7,500 votes with Nader capturing 22,000 votes, seemingly handing the victory into Bush's hands. Yet exit poll data shows that less then half of the Nader votes would have gone to Gore, with a fifth going to Bush, still assuring his victory in that state. Likewise in Oregon, a Nader stronghold (as far as Nader strongholds go), where Bush won by 23,000 votes with Nader receiving 54,000. Yet again exit polls show that only 47% of Nader voters would have gone to Gore without the Green party, and 21% would have gone to Bush, affording him a comfortable victory margin of about 8,000 votes.
But even with those points aside, the hatchet truly comes down in Florida. Sure, its safe to say that without Nader many of his 97,000 votes would have voted for Gore, thereby assuring his victory. But Nader is only a small piece of the puzzle. What happened to Clinton's easy victory in 1996? It cannot be that all of these formerly Democratic voters were captured by Nader, who after all the hoopla walked away with a meager 3 percent of the national vote. Other demographics must have been responsible for Gore's defeat, and in fact the voting demographics show this to be the case.
Despite Bush's threats to criminalize abortion, Gore lost among white women in Florida. Gore also lost among the seniors in that state, who were apparently undeterred by his opponent's ideas about privatizing social security. Nader support in both groups was negligible. Both of these were crucial demographics which Clinton carried in 1996 and Gore should have carried in this election. And despite the notion that all those Nader votes would have easily gone to Gore, exit poll data shows that
self-identified "Democrats" were 12 (!) times more likely to vote for Bush then for Nader. What that says about the Nader campaign is downright saddening, but that's not the point. Incomprehensibly, sixteen percent of self-described Florida "liberals" voted for Bush, representing 3% of the state vote, and this demographic alone is larger than Nader's 2 percent in that state. Clearly, when your core supporters turn to the GOP candidate, the Green party cannot be at fault. There is one person to blame for Gore's failure, and that is Gore himself.