WASHINGTON, D.C. — Green Party presidential candidate Ralph Nader told his supporters in an eleventh-hour speech Tuesday evening that they did the right thing by “voting their conscience” and supporting the third party.
Since Nader began campaigning, Democrats have been warning liberals that votes for Nader would benefit Bush by taking support away from Vice President Al Gore.
But it is debatable whether Nader’s supporters would have voted for Gore had Nader not been on the ballot. Gore supporters said that Nader voters are liberal and would therefore have voted for Gore. On the other hand, Nader and his supporters assert that many of Nader’s voters wouldn’t have voted at all if they couldn’t vote for Nader and that only Gore was to blame should he lose the election.
While the election teetered over the final undecided states, Nader lambasted the Democratic Party for being corrupt and ineffectual and told about 100 of his backers who remained at the National Press Club that their support of the Green Party was well-placed, though the party didn’t gain enough votes to secure federal campaign funding.
“How many years are we going to be betrayed by a Democratic Party with an atrocious record,” Nader said. “[Green Party supporters] can say: ‘Don’t blame us, we voted for Nader/LaDuke.’” Winona LaDuke was Nader’s running mate.
Nader said that this election was a victory for the Green Party’s cause. It jettisoned the Green Party into becoming the nation’s biggest third party and shook up the Democrats, he said.
“There are a lot of people in the Democratic Party who are squirming,” he said. “If we make them squirm enough and sweat enough, maybe we could make them a little more honest … a little more like the party they were decades ago, the party of the working people.”
Earlier in the evening, about 300 Nader supporters listened to Nader rail against Republicans and Democrats saying the parties had “morphed into one corporate body with two heads.”
“If you vote for the least of the worst and the lesser of two evils … at the end of the day you’re still stuck with the worst and the evil,” he said.
Though a president opposed to much of Nader’s platform may well be elected, many of the Green Party supporters at Tuesday night’s rally in Washington, D.C., said they would still vote for Nader and not for Gore, given the chance. Nonetheless, a pall seemed to fall over the jovial rally when the race came down to the wire.
Greg Kafoury, the Portland lawyer who organized Nader’s Aug. 25 rally in Portland, said he didn’t regret supporting the campaign and voting for Nader “He’s the kind of man who comes a long once in a century,” Kafoury said, adding that he left his law practice for three months to support Nader.
“Young people, particularly the smartest and most active, have received a baptism in progressive activism,” he said. “They’ve come to appreciate the corruption of major parties. They’ll become better people and do more for the world than they would if Ralph Nader never ran for president.”
Reflecting the vehemence of many Nader supporters, Chris Andino, a sophomore at the University of Virginia and Nader campaign volunteer, said he would have never voted for Gore.
“If it was Bush, Gore and Jell-O mold running, I would vote for Jell-O mold,” he said. “I wouldn’t vote for a person I don’t believe in. I believe in Ralph Nader.”
Still, a handful of Nader supporters at the rally who lived in states solidly favoring either Gore or Bush said they would have reconsidered their votes if they lived in contested states.