Nader's fade

Indecisive leadership, a weak VP candidate, and a late start doomed Ralph Nader's campaign from reaching the five percent threshold

by Micah L. Sifry

Two-point seven percent.

What happened? Why didn't Ralph Nader get five percent of the vote on November 7? Polls taken as late as the weekend before the election seemed to show that the Green Party candidate would meet that target, which would have made the Green Party eligible for at least $8 million in federal funds in the next presidential race.

But his campaign fell well short of that goal. This failure surprised many people, given everything the Green Party accomplished through Nader's run for the presidency this year. To be sure, some of the reasons lay beyond Nader's and the Green Party's control. Had there been a genuine four-way race among Nader, Gore, Bush, and Reform Party nominee Pat Buchanan, for example, Nader might have avoided the ugly endgame with the Democrats that dominated his campaign's final weeks. And the close race between Gore and Bush ultimately depressed Nader's vote totals. But clearly Nader and a good number of his supporters misjudged the reluctance of many liberals to abandon the Democratic Party, and underestimated the effectiveness of the Gore campaign's scare tactics in the final weeks of the election.

"The most disappointing thing to me was the way the polls shrank," says Nader. "They gave every indication to me of holding, going into the last weekend before Election Day, even surging in some places. . . . There's this psychology among voters not to stray from the major parties."

Still, a full postmortem requires an honest look at the mistakes that the Nader campaign made on its own: its late start, its weak vice-presidential candidate, and problems created by the Greens, as well as the stumbles of an inexperienced staff that didn't maximize the campaign's message. It's also worth questioning whether Nader was too "left" or too "Green" a candidate to reach most voters -- a topic of great importance if Nader and the Greens are to prosper in the future. And finally, it's important to ask what can be learned from his campaign that can be applied to future progressive third-party efforts.

THE FIRST error, and the biggest, was starting the campaign so late. Although Nader had let a few people know (off the record) as early as June of last year that he would run for president, he didn't begin looking for a campaign manager until early 2000, and his official announcement wasn't until February 21. The result was a cascading series of blown deadlines and late starts on everything from ballot access to fundraising. All of which were complicated by Nader's decision to spend most of the first three months of his campaign -- from mid March to mid June -- flying around the country keeping his promise to campaign in all 50 states.

It wasn't until late July that the funds really started pouring in, enabling campaign manager Theresa Amato to triple the staff to more than 100 by the end of August, and to hire field coordinators in many states. But the Nader campaign didn't really get out of first gear until Labor Day. When he was asked in mid October about what he would have done differently, Nader said he might have started campaigning earlier.

"If we had started in November, it would have been better, but I'm not sure the intensity could have been kept up with some people," he said at the time, adding that it would have been hard to get out the campaign's radical message so early in the political season -- especially during the primaries, when many of the mainstream candidates were touting their reformer credentials. "Too many people were giving [campaign donations] to Bradley and McCain. That opened up substantially after March."

The consensus of Nader's inner circle is less sanguine. "Tactically, we were at a disadvantage starting late," Amato concedes.

A second internal problem was that the campaign had, essentially, a part-time vice-presidential candidate in long-time environmental-justice activist Winona LaDuke, who gave birth to her third child early this year. Her presence on the ticket was obviously reassuring to hard-core Greens concerned that Nader would neglect their broader platform in his effort to focus on corporate-power and democracy issues. But while Nader stood solidly with the Green platform throughout the campaign, LaDuke was nowhere near as active on the campaign trail. Her absence sometimes angered and confused Greens, particularly women, who came to rallies expecting to see her speak.

What if someone like African-American scholar and Nader backer Cornel West had stepped in to fill her shoes? The move might have broadened the Greens' appeal to more people of color. West came out for Nader in August, after having stumped actively for Democrat Bill Bradley. The day before Election Day, after he and Nader spoke at Al Sharpton's headquarters in New York City, I asked him whether he could imagine running for vice-president with Nader. Laughing heartily, West said, "Now that's something I could wrap my mind around, my brother!"

Amato doesn't deny that LaDuke had a part-time role in the campaign. But, Amato says, "she had done more than she had committed to Ralph to do. And she did have other commitments."

Some of the campaign's day-to-day difficulties flowed from its relationship with the Greens, who brought their own unique combination of enthusiasm and amateurism to the effort. One close Nader adviser rattles off a quick list of missteps: "First, the timing and location of the convention [in Denver in June] screwed the campaign out of plenty of matching funds [which are available only until a party nominates its presidential candidate]. We could have held it in September. And why not hold it in New York or California, where more people would have attended?

"Second, in lots of places there was little focus on the presidential campaign, with Greens more interested in local issues like animal rights or power lines. Third, the `Super Rallies' were a success despite the Greens. We'd give them a bunch of tickets to sell and they'd stick them on the side of the table. In many places, they haven't made the transition from being a debating society to being a political party.

"Fourth, I don't know who put out that statement on the Middle East and what they thought they were doing."

Indeed. The Association of State Green Parties (ASGP) issued a release on October 24 endorsing a United Nations resolution that condemned Israel's handling of the Palestinian protests and called for an end to US aid to Israel until the country agrees to withdraw from the occupied territories and recognize the Palestinians' right of return. The statement went beyond Nader's own position on the conflict -- he is against any immediate aid cutoff and has talked only about phasing down economic aid to the country, citing former Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu's support for the notion.

Needless to say, the ASGP's statement quickly became part of anti-Nader propaganda being circulated by some Jewish Democrats -- including vicious e-mails that gratuitously emphasized Nader's Lebanese heritage and claimed that his father had refused to serve Jews at his restaurant in Winsted, Connecticut. The result? According to the Voter News Service exit poll, Nader received only one percent of the vote of a very liberal minority that had earlier supported his candidacy disproportionately.

Then there was the inexperience of the campaign staff, which showed in every department. Some field staffers were hired haphazardly, the campaign's Web site languished for months, and campaign manager Amato was more of an administrator than a strategist.

THESE SORTS of problems crop up in all kinds of seat-of-their-pants campaigns, and though they're painful, they don't have to be fatal. But indecisive leadership and sloppy work in Nader's headquarters triggered the candidate's legendary propensity for micro-managing. After some press releases were sent out with typos, for example, Nader insisted on personally approving every outgoing communication -- dramatically slowing the campaign's ability to respond to reporters.

The team's flaws were most noticeable when it came to getting the campaign's message out. There's no question the mainstream media disdained the Nader campaign until the end. With a few exceptions -- USA Today, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the Hartford Courant, and ABC News -- Nader was nothing more than an occasional feature story. The New York Times set the tone with its sneering editorials and skimpy news coverage. But with some creative campaigning, Nader might have been able to break through the media brownout.

Despite pressure from several close supporters and campaign advisers, however, Nader refused to elbow his way into front-page-hogging sagas like the Elián González brouhaha or Texas's controversial execution of Gary Graham -- even though both cases offered an excellent opportunity for him to distinguish his stance on the issues from those of Bush and Gore. For Nader, these stories were distractions from his core message about corporate power and its stranglehold on American life.

Since he couldn't count on the automatic daily coverage that is a perk of being a major-party candidate, Nader continually needed to find targets that could illustrate his message -- i.e., we need to save democracy from corporate power -- while also affecting the Gore-Bush horse race upon which nearly all media coverage was focused. He hit the occasional bull's-eye, as in a trip to East Liverpool, Ohio, where for eight years protesters have ripped Al Gore's broken promise to prevent the opening of an incinerator near a public school. But most of the time Nader's message was more diffuse and less "newsworthy."

Nader also never really succeeded in crafting a more positive message from his relentless critique of the status quo. Although he listened to those who urged him to speak more to the "joy" in his avowed "politics of joy and justice," he frequently fell back into a well-worn groove of excoriating the major parties -- particularly the Democrats, for betraying their party's ideals.

Nader was also distracted by personal attacks -- the New York Times in particular got under his skin. This sometimes blurred his focus, as did his tendency to speak too long, testing the patience of his most adoring crowds. And his flip remark that abortion rights would simply "revert to the states" if Roe v. Wade were overturned by a Bush-stacked Supreme Court did little to dispel the fears of many liberals. Anti-Nader Gore-ites like Gloria Steinem had a field day with it.

BUT THESE stumbles don't fully explain why Nader was not better prepared for the inevitable tendency of third-party leaners to melt away on Election Day. In this regard, the campaign made a strategic mistake when it failed to budget and raise enough money for a substantial ad run in the last two weeks before November 7. "You need a field campaign, absolutely," says Bill Hillsman, the Minnesota ad whiz who produced Nader's TV and radio ads. "But this was a case where we never reached critical mass with TV and radio. Our message never made it out to the independents in the suburbs. It was all focused on college campuses and urban centers."

Nader himself was never thrilled about having to buy TV ads -- when he and I first discussed the emerging campaign a year ago, he refused to commit even to doing broadcast ads, hoping to run the whole thing on a combination of grassroots organizing and free media coverage. And he was unimpressed when his campaign spent $800,000 broadcasting the critically acclaimed "Priceless" ad (a parody of MasterCard's famous campaign) during the August convention season, pointing out that "our poll numbers went down afterwards."

Others in the campaign argued that those ads -- which drew secondary media attention after a humorless MasterCard sued -- kept Nader on the playing field during the onslaught of convention coverage, and that his numbers went down because Gore began stealing his populist rhetoric, starting with his nomination-acceptance speech.

Nader disagreed, even after the election. "The clutter of ads at the end was staggering," he says. "The Democrats spent $8 million in Michigan alone." He prefers to point to places where extensive grassroots campaigning by local Naderites had a big impact. "We got 14 percent in Great Barrington and 33 percent in Sheffield" -- two towns in liberal Western Massachusetts -- "where we had two people going neighbor-to-neighbor for six months."

Most of America is not like Western Massachusetts, however, culturally or even geographically. Grassroots political movements need to be organized, yes, and that takes tens of thousands of individuals doing the hard work of talking to their neighbors. But those people need to be motivated by the sense that they are part of something larger than themselves -- and that might have been fostered by an effective national ad campaign. As Hillsman says, "going from zero to five percent is much harder than going from five to 15 percent." Noting Nader's reluctance to put more money into media, Hillsman concludes, "I was never sure about how committed the candidate was to getting the five percent [needed for federal matching funds in '04]."

The lack of paid media may have tilted Nader's itinerary in the final weeks more toward swing states. The campaign had decided that, in aiming for at least five percent of the vote, it needed to shore up its base in those states where the ticket was already polling above that threshold -- a strategy that meant going into some battleground states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. The campaigners also believed they would drop out of the news if they went only to "safe" states like Texas and New York.

To be sure, Nader did not get into the presidential race hoping he would have a free and easy ride -- i.e., winning five percent of the vote without affecting the Bush-Gore contest. It was clear he wanted to teach the Democrats a lesson by hurting Gore, and the campaign never pushed the "safe states" message as hard as it could have. On the other hand, if all Nader wanted to do was deny Gore the election, then he could simply have rented a bus and campaigned solely in his Midwestern and Northwestern strongholds, rather than making multiple trips to New York and California.

In any event, the campaign spent only about $200,000 for paid media during the last two weeks, precisely when a host of Gore allies -- including the Sierra Club, the League of Conservation Voters, and NARAL -- were spending millions on ads directly attacking Nader and suggesting that a vote for him would elect Bush. And if there's one rule in politics today, it's that an attack on television must be answered on television.

Nader did have a good response in the can -- an ad produced by Hillsman depicting kids contemplating their future (a parody of a Monster.com ad) that evoked the campaign's essentially humanistic and uplifting purpose. But Nader worried that the ad would be seen as exploiting children and that as a long-time opponent of commercialism and commercials aimed at kids, he would be attacked as a hypocrite. Precious time was lost as the campaign debated what to do; the ad finally ran here and there, but only at the very end of the campaign.

AND SO he ended up with 2.7 percent. But all this nitpicking skirts a more serious question: regardless of any fine-tuning that could have been done to his campaign, is it possible that Nader was just headed in the wrong direction? Specifically, should he have run less as the progressive prophet scolding the right-drifting Democratic Party and more as the maverick independent, zeroing in on the "buy-partisan" political establishment -- especially as it became clear that Buchanan was not going to siphon off many votes from Bush, leaving a leftist Nader in a much more exposed "spoiler" position? Had Ralph mistakenly traded his "civic" armor built over decades for a "green" suit that didn't fit?

Consider that when Nader campaigned in the 1992 New Hampshire primary and urged voters to write in his name "as a stand-in for `none of the above,' " he received two percent of the Democratic vote and two percent of the Republican vote. This somewhat surprising appeal across party lines was reflected in the large, diverse crowds that came to his rallies: middle-aged men with gun racks on their pick-ups and young professionals bothered by high real-estate prices, as well as the familiar ponytailed Birkenstockers. He had recently led a successful populist uprising against Congress's attempt to vote itself a pay raise, and his stock was high on talk-radio dials across America.

More recently, he continued to make odd-bedfellow alliances on issues ranging from global-trade agreements to getting Channel One out of public schools (on which he worked with Phyllis Schlafly). But in the 2000 campaign, Nader came out as a full-blown progressive, taking strong positions on the death penalty, the military budget, health care, gay rights, labor organizing, racial profiling, reparations for slavery, hemp, Palestinian rights -- you name it. And while he did focus on the issues surrounding corporate power and democracy that could appeal to an independent skeptic, he saddled himself with the mantle of a fledgling social-democratic party whose core base is mostly crunchy granola.

"I always framed things as an appeal to traditional values," Nader insisted, when asked if his campaign wasn't too much like "Noam Chomsky for President." "I would define the corporatists as the extremists, pointing out their exploitation of children and commercialization of childhood, for example. I was always careful to appeal to conservatives."

Perhaps. But exit polls show that Nader's support came predominantly from the left side of the spectrum; obviously, conservatives weren't hearing him.

Ultimately, there may be a hard lesson here for those of us seeking a way out of the major-party duopoly. Yes, the mythic party of nonvoters outnumbers both Democrats and Republicans, and is potentially more radical. But there are also many independent voters who are open to new choices beyond Tweedledee and Tweedledum -- and these people vote more regularly than typical "nonvoters." Thus, it may make more sense to build a third-party campaign as an independent-populist play rooted in the "radical middle" that came out for Ross Perot in 1992 and Jesse Ventura in 1998.

Such a strategy doesn't have to mean jettisoning progressive principles -- indeed, most of these speak to the majority of Americans when they are framed as appeals to fairness, justice, and democratic empowerment. But it does mean taking very seriously the need to speak to Americans where they are, without expecting them to come all the way over to the progressive side on their own.

Nader's gamble was that his 37 years as a citizen advocate, his convincing fight for the "little guy," and his defense of civic over corporate values would transform the Greens into a new kind of populist/social-democratic party. Clearly that didn't happen -- or at best, it is only beginning to happen. Instead, in this campaign, Nader became a "Green" -- and despite his best efforts, that term by itself still doesn't resonate with most Americans.

Micah L. Sifry's book on third parties in American politics will be published next year by Routledge. This piece was originally written for www.newsforchange.com.