President Clinton's Role in the Campaign
Vice President Gore appears to be keeping his distance from President Clinton in the last weeks of the campaign. Yet the President is proving to be a most effective fund-raiser and surrogate for Democratic candidates for the House and Senate. Reports on the many sides of Clinton's involvement in the campaign appeared on the same day last week in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, and The Los Angeles Times. Each paper's correspondent took a somewhat different slant on the President's role in the campaign.
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Source: The Washington Post

Vice President Al Gore is keeping his distance from President Clinton, to what is said to be the puzzlement and consternation of the president. The photo above was taken during a White House ceremony in 1998.

Bush's Iron Triangle: Karl Rove, left, strategist; Joe Allbaugh, campaign manager; Karen Hughes, communications chief.

McCain Campaigns with Bush in New England
Senator John McCain campaigned with George W. Bush in New England, where McCain received substantial support in the primary season. Will McCain's visible support of Bush help the Texas governor win New Hampshire, a state that is now considered up for grabs?

source: The New York Times

Senior Citizens: A Key Constituency in Florida
Both the Bush and Gore campaigns are working very hard to attract support from elderly voters in the battleground state of Florida. With a third of Florida's voters over 65, the votes of seniors may determine who is elected President on November 7.
Source: The Washington Post

The Place of the Vice President in the Next Administration
In these articles, Los Angeles Times correspondents explore the possible roles that a Vice President Lieberman or a Vice President Cheney would play in the Gore and Bush Administrations.
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source: The LA times

Gore Plans an Advertising Blitz
The Gore campaign, with more cash on hand than the Bush campaign, plans a huge television advertising buy for the last two weeks of the campaign, with the focus on Social Security.

Source: The Washington post

Foreign Policy Becomes an Issue in the Campaign
Sharp disagreements emerge between Vice President Gore and Governor Bush on U.S. policy in the Balkans.

Source: The New York Times

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.