Cornel West: Ralph Nader Redux?

Click above for video: West talking with Greenwald

Democrats are having conniptions over Cornel West’s third party candidacy. They say it’s a “game” and will only help Trump.

Cornel West and his supporters deny this. They say — with some logic — that the mainstream parties ought to take note of what West is saying and what support he gets, and amend their policies accordingly, instead of complaining. 

They deny that Ralph Nader running as a Green in Florida 2000 cost Al Gore the 2000 presidency. They deny the same for West, also running as a Green, on the same grounds. A vote for Cornel is Not a vote for Trump, they insist. 

Whether or not Nader cost Gore the election in 2000 is a counterfactual and impossible to know. Each view is unfalsifiable. But which view is more likely? Let’s revisit. (I already looked at a few years ago).

Gore lost the election in 2000 to W Bush because he lost Florida. Bush won the Florida popular vote by just 524 votes in over 2 million votes. That gave him the 25 Electoral Votes of Florida, which put him over the line to win the presidency. 

In that election, Ralph Nader, running as a Green, won 97,488 popular votes in Florida. 

Here are the two sides to the argument:

1. Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign in Florida did NOT throw the election to Bush. 

The argument here is that the Greens who turned out for Nader would not have turned out for Gore, had Nader not run in Florida. IOW it was “Nader or Nothing”. Or if they did turn out they would have voted in equal numbers for Bush as for Gore. That’s it. That’s the argument.

2. Ralph Nader’s 2000 campaign in Florida DID throw the election to Bush. 

The argument here is that it only needed 537 votes out of 97,488 to go to Gore, or 0.6%. Is it likely the same amount would have gone to Bush to balance it out? No. Because Greens are of the Left. If they don’t have a Green to vote for they’ll go for the Democrat. 

There’s more. A Gallup exit poll at the time asked Green voters who they would have voted for if Nader had not been there. 80% said Gore. That would have given an overwhelming victory to Gore. And the world would be a different place, as Gore would not have invaded Iraq after 9/11: he said so at the time. 

I find the latter argument more persuasive.

And so I also think that if Cornel West goes on as a Green candidate, he will draw votes from the Democrats, to the benefit of (the presumed) Trump.