When Ralph Nader announced he was entering the 2008 presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton repeated the charge that he had "spoiled" the 2000 election for Al Gore and was responsible for Bush’s coming into office. When Bob Barr gained the nomination of the Libertarian Party last month, many pundits asked whether he might become a "spoiler" for John McCain. What is a spoiler supposed to be and by what reasoning are they identified?
In the case of Ralph Nader, the reasoning behind Clinton’s charge has the appearance of scapegoating. It is true that if all of those who voted for Nader had instead voted for Gore—and holding fixed all other votes as they were cast and recorded—Gore would have had more votes than Bush. However, looking at the vote totals for Florida in 2000, it is also true that if all of those who voted for Browne (or Buchanan or Phillips or Hagelin) had voted for Gore, then Gore would have had more votes than Bush. It might be that, on average, Nader voters were more likely to prefer Gore as a second option than were those who voted for the other minor party and independent candidates. However, the fact that any of these other groups of voters could also have swung the vote to Gore points to the real problem with spoiler arguments/accusations.
In most elections there are multiple candidates all competing with each other for as many votes as they can get. (But it is not just that there are a set number of voters who will vote and for whose votes the candidates are competing; the candidates are also all trying to "get out the vote.") And since the system is winner-take-all, every candidate covets the potential voters of every other candidate. In such a situation, every candidate wants to win (or so I am assuming here) and thus wants to spoil the election for every other candidate. Given this state of affairs, it would seem George W. Bush deserves Clinton’s ire as a "spoiler"—far more than Ralph Nader—since Bush took far more votes from Al Gore. Indeed, he took far more votes cast by registered Democrats!
Here is the vote count from Florida in 2000:
Bush 2,909,176
Gore 2,907,451
Nader 96,837
Browne 18,856
Buchanan 17,356
Phillips 4,280
Hagelin 2287
In this year’s election why shouldn’t Bob Barr or Ralph Nader claim that John McCain and Barack Obama are spoilers? If there is some asymmetry such that the "spoiler" label sticks only to underdogs and not to those who are favored in the polls, what principled account can be given of this asymmetry? The two major parties might want to perpetuate the assumption that a voter’s task is to choose between the two major party candidates. But this seems to me to be a false dichotomy.
Saturday, June 14, 2008
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5 comments:
Jay J,
I'm not saying that it the term "spoiler" is incoherent. I am saying that it is problematic to apply it only to third party or independent candidates rather than with equal justification to all who are competing for votes.
You repeat the common claim that Ralph Nader "took votes away from Gore." But no one has any votes until the votes are cast. There is no sense in which any of the votes cast for Nader properly belonged to Gore. There is no sense in which the votes cast for Bush properly belonged to Gore. There is no sense in which votes cast for any candidate belong to any other candidate. If Gore had earned the votes that were cast for Nader, then those votes would have belonged to him; but he didn't.
Given that everyone has an equal right to run and collect votes, I'm saying, either every candidate should be called a spoiler for every other candidate, or no candidate should be called a spoiler.
Thanks for the reply Nathan.
Umm, I'm only seeing your response to my comment, I'm not seeing my comment.
But in any case, I didn't claim that any votes belong to anyone.
You may feel that I have somehow implied this, but I didn't mean to, and I didn't explicitly make any claims about votes properly belonging to anyone. Perhaps you used to quotes loosely when you said that I claimed that Nader "took votes away from Gore." But I didn't say this.
I said:
"Persuading people who would have otherwise voted for Gore had there been no notable Green-ish option to vote for Nader instead made it much more likely for Bush to be elected."
Saying that the votes belong to Gore and that Nader took them away is crude, while what I said is subtle.
The key disagreement seems to be over whether it's relevant that we could have predicted that Nader was going to receive a *very* small percentage of the vote, while knowing that George W. Bush had an excellent chance of winning.
That's the difference between a viable candidate and a "spoiler." No concepts such as anyone properly owning votes needs to be deployed, so long as we can get a handle on who people who voted for the spoiler would have voted for otherwise.
And as for Bush getting more registered Democrats, I think that's a shaky comparison to Nader. I mean, I'm from the South, and I can tell you that there are plenty of "registered" Democrats who are Dems in name only, the Nader folks seem like a much more likely Gore voting group.
Besides, you acknowledged in your entry that perhaps Nader voters were more likely to vote for Gore than anyone else.
Since you've conceded this, then I'm saying this is all we need to call Nader a "spoiler." And this doesn't have to rely on anyone properly owning any votes.
Jay J
Sorry, Jay J, that it has taken me a few days to get back to our discussion.
Your first comment is still posted under the un-revised version of my post below. I don’t know whether Dr. Braybrooke can consolidate the posts and transfer your comment or not.
Although “Nader took votes away from Gore” wasn’t a direct quote, after the paragraph you cite—suggesting that I was trying to paraphrase it—you did, also, go on to say: “It seems that there is nothing incoherent about calling someone a ‘spoiler’ if they had no chance of winning to speak of, but insisted on taking enough votes away from the center-left candidate to ensure victory for Bush” [my emphasis]. I took the referents of “they [the spoiler]” and “the center-left candidate” to be Nader and Gore, respectively.
In your more recent comment, you identify as the keys to determining whether it is justifiable to label Nader a spoiler: (1) the predictability of Nader getting a small percent of the total vote, and (2) the ability to get a handle on who Nader-voters would have voted for had they not voted for Nader.
My previous post on so-called “wasted votes” speaks to the predictability of Nader getting a small percent of the vote total.
In my first comment, I conceded that on average Nader-voters might have been more likely to vote for Gore than (again on average) Browne-voters, Hagelin-voters, Buchanan-voters, or Phillips-voters were to vote for Gore. You quote me as saying “Nader voters were more likely to vote for Gore than anyone else.” But that is ambiguous between what I’ve just said that I said and the claim that Nader-voters were more likely to vote for Gore than they were to vote for any other candidate. But this latter interpretation would be a false claim. Some Nader-voters would have voted for Bush, some would have voted for other third party/independent candidates, some would not have voted at all, and only a minority of them would have voted for Gore if not for Nader.
But even if all of Nader’s voters would have voted for Gore as their second choice, this wouldn’t justify scapegoating Nader. In the passage I quoted above, you say that Nader “ensure[d] victory for Bush.” But this is neither fair nor right. In the first place, all of the people who voted for Bush, ensured victory for Bush. And again, this includes many democrats—of whom it is at least as likely to be true as it is of Nader-voters, that they would have taken Gore as their second choice. And, again, there were many more such Gore-as-second-choice democrats who voted for Bush than there were Gore-as-second-choice Nader-voters. Why not say that Gore ensured victory for Bush by not running a campaign that would have appealed to all the Nader-voters, not to mention all of the people who didn’t vote at all? Of those who didn’t vote at all, should we ask whether their second choice behind not voting was voting for Gore? Again, there would be many more such people than there were Nader-voters.
If we want to identify spoilers via this kind of counterfactual reasoning, there will be many whom we can call spoilers with equal justification. So, again, I conclude, either all of the candidates running in an election should be called spoilers for each other, or none of them should. (In passing, let me say, in my opinion it is to Obama’s credit that he did not repeat these spoiler fallacies when asked about Nader’s current campaign; Hillary Clinton on the other hand, did blame Nader for Bush’s being elected. And for whatever it’s worth, Gore apparently doesn’t blame Nader, either.)
(By the way, you can watch Ralph Nader himself make similar arguments at the link below.)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzxIxXj5K_M
Hi Nathan,
I think I would be well-served to say what I think your position is, and say that I agree with most of it, but first I want to point out that I perhaps didn't make the assumptions about what was going on in Hillary's claim that you did.
I read the original entry, and all the evidence it contained was Hillary's statement that Nader "spoiled" the election for Gore, and you added that her comment had the appearance of scapegoating.
Perhaps I was supposed to assume that the rest of your argument was defending Nader against the charge of scapegoating, but I'm not sure that I did make this assumption.
What I did assume is that the charge carries with it, at the very least implicitly, the idea that Nader was somehow in a unique causal position to "spoil" the election for Gore, and this is the part of the charge that I want to defend.
First I should acknowledge that if the only method we can apply is to see which non-Democrat got the most votes from registered Democrats, then Bush would truly be the spoiler.
My biggest weakness may be soundness rather than validity... What I mean is that I just don't believe that Democrats who voted for Bush were as "in play" as Nader voters. I base this on personal experience growing up in the South were there are large numbers of registered "Democrats." But I realize that if you don't share my intuitions here, then Bush should be the spoiler, if the only key is which non-Democrat received the most votes from registered Democrats.
Also I realize it's a little mind-bending trying to decide which cause is more fundamental... did Bush cause Gore to lose, did some other 3rd party candidate? Metaphysically, it's hard to say that any cause has a privileged position over any other.
But conceptually I think it makes sense to assign Nader's *actions* some degree of causal responsibility which is higher than the other causes. I say this based on my belief that virtually all the other votes were "locked in." Even if this is shaky, I believe that Nader's votes were less locked in than the others.
I realize that I'm on shakiest ground with independents and registered Democrats who voted for Bush, but again I'm suspicious of the claim that a significant number of these were really in play for Gore.
Now I think we can add a key (which I mentioned briefly in another post) to the definition by saying that candidates who have a unique position to persuade significant chunks of voters from viable candidates, such that they can tilt the outcome of the race, but not win the race themselves, are spoilers.
I also want to specify that I mean nothing about assigning responsibility to Nader other than causal responsibility, I'm not interested in moral blame.
So my strategy is:
1. Make sure that it's only causal responsibility being talked about here.
2. Admit that as far as the raw data go, it is arbitrary to assign causal responsibility to one 3rd party candidate rather than another, so long as they got similar amounts of votes, or to assign responsibility to anyone other than the winning candidate.
3. Based on #2, make sure that the causal responsibility is assigned to Nader's actions in running, rather than arbitrarily just pointing to his vote totals on election day. True enough, I need vote totals to make the argument I'm making, but the trigger is Nader's unique position in the ideological spectrum, and his decision to run.
My position may not be the same as Hillary's, but the entry I'm basing this on simply said that Hillary claimed that Nader "spoiled" the election for Al Gore. I believe if the principle of charity is applied, there is a way for this claim to be flawless.
But I don't want to ignore any blindspots... so I look forward to your reply.
Jay J
Here's another instance of the "spoiler" label being applied to Barr and Nader with very little critical scrutiny:
http://thehill.com/leading-the-news/barr-joins-nader-in-potential-spoiler-game-2008-07-09.html
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