Oregon supporters of Green Party candidate Ralph Nader are resolute that their campaign had a significant impact on the presidential election, despite Nader’s failed attempt to get 5 percent of the national vote.
If Nader had met that goal, he would have secured matching political funds for the Green Party for future elections.
Some polls placed Nader at just less than 10 percent of Oregon’s votes before the election, but the latest results, with 99 percent of total ballots counted, show Nader with only 5 percent, or 68,175 votes.
Vice President Al Gore leads Texas Gov. George W. Bush by 3,375 votes in Oregon, although early returns during the past two days had the Republican candidate leading.
The results also discount the widely reported “Nader factor,” which many recent speakers on campus said would throw the election into Bush’s favor.
Green Party volunteer and Eugene resident Mark Robinowitz said the election will not disappoint him, even if Bush, whom he described as a “swaggering dunce-head,” wins in Oregon.
“Personally I would have voted for ‘none of the above,’ so I’m not a vote away from Gore,” he said.
Robinowitz said Nader’s role in the election was to place the Green Party’s agenda in the national spotlight. The party’s platform includes ending the war on drugs and putting a halt to clearcutting. The major political parties routinely ignore these issues, Robinowitz said, and so the attention that Nader and the Green Party have received is a success in itself.
Robinowitz argued that the close national race proves neither candidate had a message strong enough to energize the electorate.
“What I think is that the real sad thing is millions of people voted for someone they did not believe in,” he said.
Linda Lee Charles, a Springfield Nader Green Party spokeswoman, said local Nader supporters are as dumbfounded by the national election as the rest of the country.
“All of us are all sitting around discussing this,” she said. “It’s the strangest election we’ve ever experienced.”
She said Nader supporters are not disappointed by the election, but are instead optimistic about what they can do in the future. She said the Lane County headquarters will be moving to a new location downtown and will host its first meeting Nov. 18.
“We are hoping to create, from the bottom up, awareness about what is happening in this country,” she said.
Charles said that, before the election, the local Nader campaign headquarters received several threats from people fearing a Gore defeat as a result of Democrats and Greens voting for Nader. While Charles wasn’t certain, she said this may have convinced other Nader supporters to hold onto their ballots until they could see how Gore fared on the East Coast. If Gore did poorly, they would vote for him, not Nader.
She said this could explain why Nader did better in polling than in actual results.
“I’m assuming that the percentage points lost was because people held their ballots and waited,” she said.
Hope Marston, a member of the steering committee for Lane County Nader supporters, said the election may have helped the Nader organization discover who its true believers are. Now that the group knows who stuck with Nader, it has a new corps of supporters it can depend on in the future.
She said the election has only given more energy to a Green Party that is looking to maintain the level of national recognition it earned in this campaign.
“We are going to be a force to be reckoned with for years and years to come,” she said.
While the election results mean a complete loss for Nader, Marston said this doesn’t convey what has actually happened for the party.
“Ralph has already won, because he has gotten us to work so hard,” she said, adding that the Green Party will continue to promote its interests at both the state and federal level.
“We’re all really glad about what we did,” she said. “Even if there isn’t a win it gets people excited and interested.”