Ralph Nader - "Stay Silent and Stay Powerless Against Trump's Tyranny"

[LetMyPeopleVote]

164. Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party

I was headed to Florida for the second recount when Bush v. Gore came down. I went to Florida as part of the Kerry/Edwards Voter Protection Team. Nader was a tool of the GOP and was funded by karl Rove and the GOP.

Remember Ralph Nader? So forget about voting for Jill Stein!

Ralph Nader Was Indispensable To The Republican Party | HuffPost Latest News

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065

#USElection2024 #ThirdParty #GreenParty #JillStein

— Jonathan Emmesedi (@jemmesedi.c.im.ap.brid.gy) 2024-10-22T05:17:42.000Z

Link to tweet

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ralph-nader-was-indispens_b_4235065

Ralph Nader was crucial to George W. Bush's win in 2000 against Al Gore. But Nader turned out to be superfluous to then-President Bush's win against John Kerry in 2004. Nader was trying to do damage to the Democratic Party, and he succeeded in 2000, but not in 2004. In fact, in 2000, he turned out to be the most indispensable person of all to the George W. Bush "win." And Nader was secretly ecstatic about that. Here are the details:

Nader-voters who spurned Democrat Al Gore to vote for Nader ended up swinging both Florida and New Hampshire to Bush in 2000. Charlie Cook, the editor of the Cook Political Report and political analyst for National Journal, called "Florida and New Hampshire" simply "the two states that Mr. Nader handed to the Bush-Cheney ticket," when Cook was writing about "The Next Nader Effect," in The New York Times on 9 March 2004. Cook said, "Mr. Nader, running as the Green Party nominee, cost Al Gore two states, Florida and New Hampshire, either of which would have given the vice president [Gore] a victory in 2000. In Florida, which George W. Bush carried by 537 votes, Mr. Nader received nearly 100,000 votes [nearly 200 times the size of Bush's Florida 'win']. In New Hampshire, which Mr. Bush won by 7,211 votes, Mr. Nader pulled in more than 22,000 [three times the size of Bush's 'win' in that state]." If either of those two states had gone instead to Gore, then Bush would have lost the 2000 election; we would never have had a U.S. President George W. Bush, and so Nader managed to turn not just one but two key toss-up states for candidate Bush, and to become the indispensable person making G.W. Bush the President of the United States -- even more indispensable, and more important to Bush's "electoral success," than were such huge Bush financial contributors as Enron Corporation's chief Ken Lay.

All polling studies that were done, for both the 2000 and the 2004 U.S. Presidential elections, indicated that Nader drained at least 2 to 5 times as many voters from the Democratic candidate as he did from the Republican Bush. (This isn't even considering throw-away Nader voters who would have stayed home and not voted if Nader had not been in the race; they didn't count in these calculations at all.) Nader's 97,488 Florida votes contained vastly more than enough to have overcome the official Jeb Bush / Katherine Harris / count, of a 537-vote Florida "victory" for G.W. Bush. In their 24 April 2006 detailed statistical analysis of the 2000 Florida vote, "Did Ralph Nader Spoil a Gore Presidency?" (available on the internet), Michael C. Herron of Dartmouth and Jeffrey B. Lewis of UCLA stated flatly, "We find that ... Nader was a spoiler for Gore." David Paul Kuhn, CBSNews.com Chief Political Writer, headlined on 27 July 2004, "Nader to Crash Dems Party?" and he wrote: "In 2000, Voter News Service exit polling showed that 47 percent of Nader's Florida supporters would have voted for Gore, and 21 percent for Mr. Bush, easily covering the margin of Gore's loss." Nationwide, Harvard's Barry C. Burden, in his 2001 paper at the American Political Science Association, "Did Ralph Nader Elect George W. Bush?" (also on the internet) presented "Table 3: Self-Reported Effects of Removing Minor Party Candidates," showing that in the VNS exit polls, 47.7% of Nader's voters said they would have voted instead for Gore, 21.9% said they would have voted instead for Bush, and 30.5% said they wouldn't have voted in the Presidential race, if Nader were had not been on the ballot. (This same table also showed that the far tinier nationwide vote for Patrick Buchanan would have split almost evenly between Bush and Gore if Buchanan hadn't been in the race: Buchanan was not a decisive factor in the outcome.) The Florida sub-sample of Nader voters was actually too small to draw such precise figures, but Herron and Lewis concluded that approximately 60% of Florida's Nader voters would have been Gore voters if the 2000 race hadn't included Nader. Clearly, Ralph Nader drew far more votes from Gore than he did from Bush, and on this account alone was an enormous Republican asset in 2000.

The GOP and Karl Rove knew that Nader was helping the GOP which is why Rove and the GOP funded Nader's campaign. In addition, Nader was campaigning in states where Nader could help Bush win and NOT in states where he could stand a chance

Furthermore, Karl Rove and the Republican Party knew this, and so they nurtured and crucially assisted Nader's campaigns, both in 2000 and in 2004. On 27 October 2000, the AP's Laura Meckler headlined "GOP Group To Air Pro-Nader TV Ads." She opened: "Hoping to boost Ralph Nader in states where he is threatening to hurt Al Gore, a Republican group is launching TV ads featuring Nader attacking the vice president [Mr. Gore]. ... 'Al Gore is suffering from election year delusion if he thinks his record on the environment is anything to be proud of,' Nader says [in the commercial]. An announcer interjects: 'What's Al Gore's real record?' Nader says: 'Eight years of principles betrayed and promises broken.'" Meckler's report continued: "A spokeswoman for the Green Party nominee said that his campaign had no control over what other organizations do with Nader's speeches." Bush's people - the group sponsoring this particular ad happened to be the Republican Leadership Council - knew exactly what they were doing, even though the liberal suckers who voted so carelessly for Ralph Nader obviously did not. Anyone who drives a car the way those liberal fools voted, faces charges of criminal negligence, at the very least. But this time, the entire nation crashed as a result; not merely a single car.

Furthermore, it seems that during the closing days of the 2000 political contest, Ralph Nader was choosing to campaign not in states where polls showed that he had a chance to win (of which states there were none), but instead in states where Gore and Bush were virtually tied and Nader's constant appeals to "the left" would be the likeliest to throw those states into Bush's column. One political columnist noted this fact: On 26 October 2000, Eric Alterman posted online for the Nation, "Not One Vote!" in which he observed with trepidation, that during the crucial final days of the campaign, "Nader has been campaigning aggressively in Florida [get that - in Florida!], Minnesota, Michigan, Oregon, Washington and Wisconsin. If Gore loses even a few of those states, then Hello, President Bush." This was prophetic - but also knowable in advance. Nader wasn't stupid; his voters were, but he certainly was not.

That list of states where Nader was concentrating near the end of the campaign consisted of the large states that were the closest between Bush and Gore. Everyone knew that Nader's appeal was being made to "the left," and Nader was concentrating his campaign now on sucking foolish leftist voters away from Gore. He was claiming to be the preferable leftist candidate. He wasn't campaigning at all to draw votes away from the conservative end of the political spectrum. So: Nader clearly was targeting to throw this "election" to Bush - and he succeeded in Florida, at doing precisely that.

Nader was a tool of Rove and purposely campaign in states where Nader could help Bush win.

I am sad that people are defending Nader. Nader claimed that there were no differences between the Democratic Party and the GOP in 2000 and 2004. Nader also claimed that there was no difference between trump and Kamala Harris. Nader is NOT a trustworthy source on anything.