A Tale of Two Campaigns: Ralph Nader's Strategy in the 2004 Presidential Election

In the final days of the 2004 election, independent candidate Ralph Nader hardly resembled the same man who ran for president four years earlier. In 2000, Nader had catapulted himself from con sumer activist to Green Party nominee, pledging to build a new progressive al ternative to the Democratic and Republi can parties. He raised $8.4 million, appeared on 44 state ballots, earned al most three million votes nationwide, and was widely blamed for Al Gore's defeat in Florida. Four years later, Nader had shed his Green Party affiliation, raised only $4.6 million, appeared on just 35 ballots, and earned a meager .38% of the popular vote. The controversial third party candidate who drew so much atten tion for his pivotal role in the 2000 elec tion outcome had become a mere footnote by 2004. This dynamic follows a more general trend of minor party candidates who make strong showings and then disap pear (Rapoport and Stone 2005; Rosen stone, Behr, and Lazarus 1996). In this essay, I suggest that Nader's level of support was not the only thing that changed between the two elections. I demonstrate that Ralph Nader's motiva tions also changed between 2000 and 2004 as he responded to changes in his own electoral situation. In 2000, many observers credited Nader with spoiling the election. Al though Gore almost certainly would have won Florida, the Electoral College, and thus the election without Nader on the ballot (Burden 2003; Collett and Hansen 2002), complaints about spoiling unfortu nately confound Nader's effect with his intent.' Affecting the election outcome and planning to do so are quite different things. In fact, empirical research has shown that Nader was in fact not trying to spoil the election (Burden 2005). Throughout the 2000 campaign Nader stated he was trying to maximize his vote share and pass the 5% threshold set by the Federal Election Commission (FEC) to earn millions of dollars in Green Party funding. Although he failed to reach 5% of the popular vote, the manner in which he allocated campaign resources such as personal appearances and television ad buys was consistent with his stated goal. At the same time, there was no evidence that Nader was targeting battleground states to purposely spoil the election for the Democrats. In short, Nader's words and deeds in 2000 were in close agreement. But what of 2004? Elite opinion on why Nader ran in the 2004 campaign was almost as divided as it was four years earlier. Even after looking over his final campaign schedule, respected journalists drew wildly different infer ences about his motivations. For exam ple, Brian Faler of the Washington Post concluded that "the independent presi dential candidate appears to be making little effort to woo swing state voters in the final hours of his campaign, spend ing most of his time away from the bat tleground states where Democrats fear he will hurt John F. Kerry."2 In con trast, John Mashek of the Chicago Sun Times argued that "Nader continues, however, to travel the road as a hard headed spoiler. He is campaigning pri marily in the swing states-the very states where even a few thousand votes could tilt the election. Nader's campaign has no other legitimate cause than his massive ego."3 I evaluate the likelihood of these pos sible Nader strategies in the 2004 presi dential campaign. First, the "vote maximization" strategy hypothesizes that Nader would target his resources in states with the largest populations to crank up his vote total. Vote maximizing could be viewed as a way to earn FEC matching funds or simply to build clout for his cause. Second, the "spoiler" strat egy hypothesizes that Nader would focus on battleground states where he could have the most influence on the election's outcome. Spoiling would have been an obvious way to defeat John Kerry. But other reasons for a spoiler strategy in clude seeking leverage over the outcome to influence the major parties' platforms or to use the controversy to draw atten tion to his cause. I suggest that these competing views should be treated as hypotheses to be tested empirically. One contribution of political science is the ability to offer social scientific arbitration of issues that otherwise would not be settled. Observ ers will continue to disagree about the desirability of Nader's candidacy, but as academic researchers we should be able to at least agree on basic facts about the nature of his campaign. Without clear evidence, both the vote maximization and spoiler hypotheses remain equally plausible. To the degree that minor party candi dates such as Nader are responsive to context, one might have reasonably ex pected his strategy to change. Having already been blamed for spoiling the 2000 election, Nader had little to lose in terms of reputation by shifting to a swing state strategy. Further, the goals he elab orated in 2000 were absent in 2004, when he ran as an independent rather than a Green and no longer spoke about winning 5% of the popular vote to eam federal matching funds to support party building. Finally, having been discredited by many on the left, Nader lacked the critical financial support and celebrity endorsements that aided his effort in 2000. Pushed into a desperate situation with fewer resources, Nader might have been motivated to seek free media cover age in any way possible. Although con troversial, targeting swing states would have been an easy way to make news. At the same time, being kept off the ballot in more states should have constrained Nader's strategy. The ability of Demo crats and others to prevent Nader from appearing on the ballot in swing states such as Ohio and Pennsylvania should have made a spoiler strategy more diffi cult. However, none of the other 14 states where Nader was off the ballot were true battlegrounds, suggesting that ballot access limitations should have made Nader more, not less, likely to pur sue a spoiler strategy. Barry C. Burden is professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin Madison. He is the coauthor of Why Amer ican Split Their Tickets, editor of Uncertainty in American Politics, and author of the forthcoming book, Personal Roots of Repre sentation. Burden has also authored numer ous journal articles on electoral politics, Congress, and representation. He may be contacted at bcburden@wisc.edu.