23 August 2016
Updated 30 April 2018

The mischief wrought by third parties, and in 2000 by Ralph Nader

Update, 30 April 2018. Since writing this post in August, 2016, I’ve reconsidered whether Gore would have won Florida in 2000 had Nader not been on the ballot, and no longer embrace the premise that had Nader not been on the ballot, enough of his supporters would have voted for Gore that Gore would have won Florida. There’s no way of knowing for certain. See my 24 April 2018 post, Montana’s Green Party and the ballot.

23 August 2016. Officially, George W. Bush received 537 more votes in Florida than Al Gore in the 2000 election, thereby winning the state’s 25 electoral votes and the presidency despite losing the national popular vote to Gore (download Excel spreadsheet with the details). Bush won Florida by a plurality — but liberal presidential candidates received a majority of the state’s popular vote. If the Florida liberals and leftists who voted for Nader — whose positions on the issues were far closer to Gore's than to Bush's — had instead voted for Gore, Bush would have lost.

Here’s the Florida breakdown:

Nationally, liberal candidates received a majority of the votes cast for President.

But a conservative candidate who lost the popular vote became President because in a first past the post election, an election in which the candidate with the most votes wins — no majority required, a third party receiving a very small share of the vote can perturb the results. And in a multi-party election with more than two fairly evenly matched parties, those in the philosophical minority can prevail. Here are a few recent examples:

• Minnesota, 1998. Reform Party candidate Jesse Ventura is elected governor with just 37 percent of the vote in a multi-party election against Republican Norm Coleman (34 percent) and Democrat Skip Humphrey (28 percent) and five fringe party candidates (less than one percent). Whether Ventura would have prevailed in a traditional runoff, or in an instant runoff, is unknown.


• Montana, 2006. Democrat Jon Tester wins the U.S. Senate election with a plurality thanks to Libertarian Stan Jones’ drawing conservative votes from incumbent Republican Conrad Burns.


• Maine, 2010. Tea Party Republican Paul LePage is elected governor with 37.6 percent of the vote. Independent Eliot Cutler (35.9 percent) and Democrat Libby Mitchell (18.8 percent) split most of the liberal vote.


• Montana, 2012. Jon Tester wins re-election by a plurality thanks to Libertarian Dan Cox’s drawing votes from Republican Denny Rehberg. And Democrat Steve Bullock is elected governor with a plurality thanks to Libertarian Ron Vandevender’s drawing votes from Republican Rick Hill. Montana's Republicans, still hopping mad about 2006 and 2012, may again try to condemn Montana to a top two primary to keep Libertarians off the general election ballot.


• Maine, 2014. LePage wins re-election by a plurality, receiving 48.2 percent of the vote. Democrat Mike Michaud (43.4 percent) and independent Cutler (8.4 percent), who again subordinates good political sense to his unbounded vanity, split the liberal vote.

Unlike Ventura and LePage, Ralph Nader never had a prayer of winning the election. Nationally, he received 2.74 percent of the vote, enough to be noticed, not enough to win, but enough to throw the election to Bush. Nader knew what he was doing. He was(is) angry at the Democratic Party for not being pure enough. He knew he might draw enough votes to deny Gore a victory. But that possible outcome didn’t deter his candidacy. If anything, he relished the opportunity to punish Democrats by denying them the presidency.

Would Gore have prevailed in a two-party election in Florida? Would he have prevailed in an instant runoff election in Florida? We’ll never know for sure. Nader’s apologists, sometimes citing exit polls, still argue that Nader’s voters would not have voted for Gore had Nader not been on the ballot. But that’s conjecture based on a small sample of dubious reliability. In an instant runoff election (also known as a ranked choice election), it seems reasonable to suppose that Gore would have been the second choice of Nader’s voters.

The instant runoff election — not the top two primary — is the best way of reducing unpleasant outcomes in elections with more than two candidates on the ballot. The technology required for instant runoff voting exists. All that’s missing is the political will to adopt the system.

If the 2016 election between Trump and Clinton tightens, and it could, votes cast for third party candidate Gary Johnson (Libertarian) and Jill Stein (Green) could perturb the election, generating a perverse outcome not unlike that in 2000.

Johnson, a former Republican governor of New Mexico, provides a safe haven for Republicans who cannot bring themselves to vote for Trump, but can never vote for a Democrat.

Stein offers an opportunity for disgruntled Democrats and nihilistic leftists to administer a rebuke to the Democratic Party. But that opportunity comes at a cost: the risk of repeating Nader’s terrible deed; the risk of throwing the election to Donald Trump.

After the 2000 debacle, many of Nader’s supporters argued that the two party system was broken and that the difference between the parties wasn’t big enough to matter. Some still do. George Wallace said much the same thing in 1968: “There isn’t a dime’s worth of difference between them.” They who will believe that will believe anything.