We obviously won’t know what role Ralph Nader will play in the presidential race until tonight (at the earliest), but there is one key difference between this year and 2000 — how Nader spent the closing days of the campaign.
This year, despite vowing in September to help Bush by campaigning in swing states, Nader quietly changed his mind. He campaigned in New York City yesterday, which isn’t exactly in play. It appears to be part of an encouraging recent trend, in which most (not all, but most) of Nader’s campaign spots have steered clear of the real battlegrounds.
Over the weekend, [Nader] took his antiwar, anti-corporate message to the similarly Democratic states of Connecticut and Rhode Island. Along the way, he stopped in hotly contested New Hampshire and somewhat contested New Jersey. During the 2000 campaign, Nader won 22,000 votes in the Granite State — enough, Democrats said, to hand the election to Bush.
But on Friday, Nader was in Louisiana and Alabama, two states sure to vote for Bush. Today, he will host a news conference in the District, where he will denounce the lack of supermarkets in Anacostia. From there, he will wind up his campaign at the National Press Club, where his campaign is hosting an election-watching party.
There could be a variety of possible explanations for Nader’s travel schedule, but it’s worth remembering where the guy was spending his time at this point four years ago.
The Oct. 30, 2000, edition of The New Republic had a great piece from Michael Crowley (link no longer available) on Nader’s specific plans to hurt Gore by campaigning in key battleground states, as opposed to, say, New York and DC.
Does Ralph Nader want to torpedo Gore more than Pat Buchanan wants to torpedo Bush? It certainly looks that way. Because Bush and Gore are so close, the Green and Reform Party nominees both have a chance to swing important states, and maybe even the election. But only one of them seems inclined to do so. Buchanan is spending what’s left of his $12.6 million matching-fund windfall almost exclusively in states where the outcome is already certain–and as a result will probably have no impact on the race’s final electoral tally. Nader, by contrast, is trying to harvest votes in many of the toss-up states where the next president will likely be chosen.
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Nader’s campaign…seems to have it in for the vice president. While Buchanan and Nader have both repeatedly said Gore and Bush are so awful that it doesn’t matter which of them wins, Nader has gone further, suggesting on more than one occasion that he might actually prefer to see Gore lose. “I remember how Jim Watt, the Reagan administration’s interior secretary, galvanized the environment movement,” Nader told The New York Times’ Gail Collins, pushing the at best dubious theory that a Bush victory would galvanize a national progressive movement.
As if to test his hypothesis, Nader keeps returning to states that his candidacy could tip to Bush.
As I said, there are a variety of possible explanations for the change. Perhaps Nader’s poor fundraising efforts mean he can’t afford to travel beyond his Northeast base. Maybe his supporters in Midwestern battlegrounds have told him that he simply doesn’t have enough backers to necessitate a “rally.”
Or perhaps even Nader is slowly beginning to realize that America desperately needs a change of leadership. He may be too proud to admit he never should have run this year, but Nader’s recent choice of venues hints at a man who realizes he made a mistake.