Sunday, December 17, 2000

THE SPOILER: Ralph Nader

Angry Democrats excoriated him for costing Al Gore the presidential election, but Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader remained unrepentant.

Exit polls showed half of Nader's voters would have chosen Gore in a two-way race, while one-third wouldn't have voted at all, so Nader's candidacy made the difference in several states.

The Nader effect was most obvious in Florida, where he collected 97,000 votes. If half had gone to Gore and only a relative handful to Bush, Gore would have easily won the state's 25 electoral votes and the White House.

Aside from wrecking Gore's chances, Nader, 66, also failed to achieve the prime objective of his $7 million campaign: gaining 5 percent of the national vote so that the Green Party would qualify for federal funding in the 2004 presidential election. He got only 3 percent of the vote, but insisted that he put the Green Party on the map and that it would continue to increase its political clout even without federal funds.

"This is the beginning of the end of the two-party duopoly," Nader declared the day after the election.

THE WOULD-BE SPOILER:
Patrick Buchanan

The conservative commentator alarmed Republicans when he defected from their ranks in October 1999 to seek the fledgling Reform Party's presidential nomination. Buchanan had sought the Republican presidential nomination three times, so his departure fueled fears that he would drain conservative support from GOP front-runner George W. Bush.

In announcing his switch, Buchanan, 62, told supporters that the "vaunted two-party system is a snare and a delusion, a fraud upon the nation."

But the former communications aide to Presidents Reagan and Nixon did little to strengthen the third-party movement. His candidacy splintered the Reform Party and embroiled its convention in acrimony. He claimed the Reform Party's $12.6 million in federal campaign money, but his candidacy never gained steam.

On Nov. 7, Buchanan received less than 1 percent of the popular vote, a performance so poor as to deprive the Reform Party of federal campaign money in 2004.

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