Op Ed from week of Oct. 25th
Election Analysis and Commentary
Sunday, October 22, 2000
Eric L. Davis
Will Ralph Nader affect the outcome
of this year's Presidential election? Nader is doing well enough
in a few states, such as Oregon, Washington, and Wisconsin, that
he could tip the electoral vote in those states to George W. Bush.
Nader draws his votes primarily from Al Gore. If Nader were not
on the ballot, most of his voters would support Gore rather than
Bush.
In previous elections, many supporters
of third-party candidates have decided in the last few days before
the election to vote for one of the two candidates who has a legitimate
chance of winning the Presidency. The third-party supporters have
made this choice in order to prevent their least-desired candidate
from being elected. Will that happen this year? Will Nader supporters
in states where the race is close vote for Gore in order to prevent
Bush from winning their states' electoral votes?
Nader is most unlikely to receive
any electoral votes himself. However, receiving five percent of
the vote nationwide is a goal that is more important to him than
gaining electoral votes. The Federal Election Campaign Act provides
that any political party whose candidate receives five percent
of the vote is eligible for partial reimbursement of electoral
expenses from federal funds after the election. More importantly,
such a candidate is eligible for grants from the Federal Election
Campaign Fund in the next election cycle. So if Nader receives
more than five percent of the vote in 2000, the Green Party would
be eligible for federal funding in 2004.
Over the course of the twentieth
century, third-party candidates have had effects on the political
system that have taken longer than a single election cycle to
become evident. These effects are illustrated by two of the most
important third-party Presidential candidates in the twentieth
century: Progressive Robert M. LaFollette in 1924, and American
Independent Party candidate George C. Wallace in 1968.
LaFollette's candidacy illustrates
how a third party candidate can raise issues that make their way,
a few election cycles later, onto the agenda of one of the major
party candidates. In 1924, the major party candidates were incumbent
Republican Calvin Coolidge, and Democrat John W. Davis, a Wall
Street lawyer. LaFollette, like Nader this year, excoriated the
two major party candidates for being indistinguishable from each
other, since they were both handmaidens of corporate America.
Unlike Nader, LaFollette did not
begin his career in electoral politics by running for the Presidency.
When he ran for President in 1924, he had been a member of the
United States Senate since 1906, and he had served three terms
as Governor of Wisconsin before going to Washington. Among the
planks of LaFollette's Progressive Party in 1924 were government
regulation, if not takeover, of the railroads; easier credit for
farmers; government support to bring electric power to rural areas;
the outlawing of child labor; the right of workers to organize
unions; increased protection for civil liberties; and federal
anti-discrimination laws.
LaFollette won almost 5 million votes
in 1924. He carried his home state of Wisconsin, ran second in
eleven Western states, and did very well in working-class wards
of New York and other major Eastern cities. The rural-urban populist
coalition that LaFollette assembled in 1924 became an important
part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal coalition a decade later.
Many of the programs LaFollette advocated in 1924- such as federally-supported
rural electrification, government loans for farmers, and the protection
of workers' rights to unionize - became part of the Democratic
party's platform in the 1930s, and were pushed through Congress
by President Roosevelt and his Democratic allies on Capitol Hill.
In many ways, LaFollette
and the Progressives of 1924 were
important harbingers of FDR and the New Deal. George Wallace illustrates
a different effect of third-party candidates on American politics.
Wallace had been elected Governor of Alabama as a Democrat in
1962. In his inaugural address, delivered in front of the Alabama
State Capitol over which the Confederate flag flew, he vowed to
"draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet
of tyranny, and I say, segregation now, segregation tomorrow,
segregation forever." As Governor, Wallace literally "stood in
the schoolhouse door" to prevent an African-American student from
registering to attend the University of Alabama.
In 1968, Wallace launched his independent
candidacy for President, vowing there was "not a dime's worth
of difference" between Republican Richard Nixon and Democrat Hubert
Humphrey. Wallace's appeal was primarily to white Southerners,
but he attracted some support among working-class voters in Northern
cities as well. His campaign included a defense of traditional
patterns of race relations, emphasized Wallace's opposition to
the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965,
and stressed his attacks on "pointy-headed bureaucrats" who wanted
to involve the federal government in more and more aspects of
daily life. In the 1968 election, Wallace received 46 electoral
votes, from Alabama and four other states in the Deep South, and
13 percent of the popular vote.
Many of the white Southerners, and
some of the working-class Northerners, who voted for Wallace for
President in 1968 voted for Republican Nixon in 1972, and, over
the course of the 1970s, changed their party identification from
Democrats to Republicans. As the Civil Rights Act and the Voting
Rights Act eliminated Jim Crow and allowed African-Americans to
register and vote in Southern elections, many white Southern Democrats
left the party that supported those civil rights laws. These voters
moved to the Republican party, which in many Southern states was
a weak organization ready to be taken over by those with conservative
views on racial matters. The principal effect of the Wallace candidacy
of 1968 was to serve as a way station for white Southerners who
were leaving the Democratic party, but could not go all the way
to the Republicans just yet.
As with LaFollette, will parts of
Nader_s agenda end up being adopted by one of the major parties,
presumably the Democrats, over the next decade? As with Wallace,
will Nader's candidacy end up serving as a way station for voters
transitioning from one of the established parties to a new political
organization? The answers to these questions will not be known
for several election cycles, but they could turn out to be far
more important for the long-term future of American politics than
the share of the vote received by Ralph Nader this year.
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