• Corpus ID: 18707439

A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election 1

@inproceedings{Herron2006ABS,
  title={A Ballot-Level Study of Green and Reform Party Voters in the 2000 Presidential Election 1},
  author={Michael C. Herron and Jeffrey B. Lewis},
  year={2006}
}

• Michael C. Herron, Jeffrey B. Lewis
• Published 2006
• Political Science

The 2000 presidential race included two major party candida tes—Republican George W. Bush and Democrat Al Gore—and two prominent third party candidates— Ralph Nader of the Green Party and Pat Buchanan of the Reform Party. While it is often presumed t hat Nader spoiled the 2000 election for Gore by siphoning away votes that would have bee n cast for him in the absence of a Nader candidacy, we show that this presumption is rather mis leading. While Nader voters in 2000 were somewhat pro-Democrat and Buchanan voters correspondi ngly pro-Republican, both types of voters were surprisingly close to being partisan centris ts. Indeed, we show that at least 40% of Nader voters in the key state of Florida would have voted for Bu sh, as opposed to Gore, had they turned out in a Nader-less election. The other 60% did indeed spoil the 2000 presidential election for Gore but only because of highly idiosyncratic circu mstances, namely, Florida’s extreme closeness. Our results are based on studying over 46 million vote choices cast on approximately three million ballots from across Florida in 2000. More gene rally, the results demonstrate how ballot studies are capable of illuminating aspects of third par ty p esidential voters that are otherwise beyond scrutiny. When asked if Green party candidate Ralph Nader spoiled the 200 0 presidential election for then Vice-President Al Gore, prominent Democratic consult ant James Carville proclaimed that the answer to this question was “obvious.” 1 In an election that turned on, among other things, 537 votes in the state of Florida, the conclusion that the 97, 488 Floridians who opted for liberal crusader Nader would have in his absence broken in sufficient numbers for Gore so as to reverse the election in Florida, and thus in the nation, borders on lo gical deduction. One might quibble that some of those who cast votes for Nader would not have vote d at all had Nader not been on the 2000 ballot and that a Nader-less campaign would have unfold ed in a way that altered the decisions of voters beyond those who supported Nader. Nonetheless, if testing for the presence of a spoiler involves assessing a counterfactual in which votes for the a lleged spoiler are allocated to second choice candidates, the combination of Bush’s minuscule Flor ida plurality in 2000, the relatively large number of votes cast there for Nader, and Nader’s wellknown leftward leanings obviates any real need to substantiate Nader’s role as Democratic spoile r. Undeterred by the apparent obviousness of Nader’s contribu tion to the 2000 general election, in what follows we attempt to construct meticulously a count erfactual in which Nader voters in the key state of Florida and those voters who cast their lots for Re form Party presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan instead are forced to choose between George W. Bush and Gore, the two major party candidates for president in 2000. Our counterfactual is based on a statistical analysis of approximately three million individual Florida ballots an d 46 million decisions that the people who cast these ballots made across the numerous contests pre ented to them in the 2000 general election. We find that at most 60% of Nader voters in Florida would have vo ted for Gore had they turned out in a Nader-less 2000 general election and that, as others have alleged with varying degrees of vehemence, Nader was a spoiler for Gore (although , according to Burden (2003), this was not his intention). Nonetheless, what is striking about the 60% figure is its complement: 1Ann McFeatters, “ Criticism Stings Unrepentant Nader.” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette . November 9, 2000.