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An unREASONABLE
man Nader
Minor Parties in the 2000
Presidential Election
 Minor Parties in the 2000
Presidential Election by BARRY C. BURDEN Though neither Patrick Buchanan
nor Ralph Nader garnered as many votes as some earlier
minor-party candidates, they had the potential to affect the
2000 presidential election in ways that their predecessors
could not. This is possible because of the sheer closeness
of the major-party vote. The popular vote nearly rendered
the presidential contest a tie with Democrat Al Gore and
Republican George W. Bush both winning about 48 percent of
the vote. Moreover, the electoral college outcome, which
depended on a contentious series of legal battles in
Florida, gave Bush the majority by just one vote. Al Gore's
266 electoral votes are the most ever won by a losing
candidate. [1] And 2000 was the first time in more than a
century in which the winners of the popular and electoral
votes were different. In an electoral context as balanced as
this one, candidates from outside the two-party system who
manage even meager showings can have remarkable effects on
the election's outcome. In this chapter I examine the
roles that Reform Party nominee Buchanan and Green Party
nominee Nader played in the 2000 presidential election.
Using a variety of data from election returns, exit polls,
and academic national surveys, I address two questions.
First, how did minor-party voters reach their decisions
given the great potential for sophisticated behavior in a
close election? This requires that we determine the sources
of minor-party support and the relationships between their
electoral coalitions. Second, what effects did minor parties
have on voter turnout and on who won the election? Answering
this question requires us to analyze counterfactuals that
estimate what would have happened had Buchanan and Nader not
been running. The results expand the growing body of
theoretical and empirical research on "major" minor parties
in America generally as well as help us understand these
parties' roles in the 2000 presidential election
specifically. [2] The stark realities of this election are
sure to force political scientists to rethink some of our
conclusions about the dynamics of minor parties. Minor parties have been of
growing interest because their influence appears to have
been increasing in recent years. In fact, five of the last
nine presidential elections have seen strong minor-party
showings. The most dramatic of these was Ross Perot's
garnering of 19 percent of the popular vote in 1992 (Jelen
2001). There has also been substantial activity at the
sub-presidential level, most notably Jesse Ventura's Reform
Party victory in the 1998 Minnesota gubernatorial election
(Lacy and Monson 2002; Lentz 2001). But if the appearance of
new academic work on the subject is an indicator, there
appear to be broader forces at work that are conspiring to
overcome the standard hurdles facing minor parties at all
levels of government (Bibby and Maisel 2002; Herrnson and
Green 2002; Sifry 2002). One purpose of this chapter is to
explore the role of minor parties in the 2000 presidential
election in the light of a burgeoning body of research. My analysis begins by
reexamining the election outcome in terms of social-choice
analysis. A simple look at the preference rankings of
candidates shows that, for the first time in the survey era,
the winner of the presidential election was not the
Condorcet winner, as explained in the next section.
Moreover, almost no common voting method would have selected
Bush as the winner. The analysis also shows than an
unprecedented number of party supporters were strategic in
2000. The second section of this chapter analyzes Nader's
standing in the polls dynamically by examining the patterns
and determinants of his support over the final months of the
campaign. Unlike nearly all minor-party candidates, Nader
actually rose in the polls over time, even after controlling
for the closeness of the major-party vote and support for
other candidates. The third section turns to the effects
that Buchanan and Nader had on voter participation and the
major parties' vote shares. A larger number of minor-party
voters would have abstained had their candidates not been in
the race. Minor parties, most notably the Greens, increased
turnout both directly by mobilizing votes for themselves and
indirectly by adding interest to the campaign, for a total
effect of around 2.5 percentage points. The next section of
the chapter reexamines the possibility that Nader threw the
election to Bush. It is clear that Florida almost certainly
would have gone Democratic without Nader in the race. Yet it
is at least possible that Bush would have won easily in the
electoral college without Buchanan in the race. I then turn
to examining the sources of minor- party support. Nader
voters were more liberal, pro-choice, and educated than
other voters on average. The factors that distinguished
Nader from Gore in particular were primarily economic in
nature. Nader voters disliked the administration's record
and took their discontent out on Gore. Aggregate analysis
shows that Nader did much better at drawing on his earlier
support and Perot's base from 1996. Surprisingly, Buchanan
and Nader both performed better where the major-party vote
was closer. I conclude by suggesting how this multifaceted
picture of results fits with existing work on minor parties
in America. A. Perverse Social-Choice
Function Elections are a key mechanism
for aggregating individual citizen preferences into
collective decisions. The proper way to do this is a matter
of great contention. A prominent line of research focuses on
the rationality of voting rules and a society's
social-choice function. Though no single method of
aggregation is ideal, some appear more perverse than others
because they violate common assumptions about how
preferences ought to be represented. Arrow (1951) has argued
that seemingly trivial characteristics such as transitivity
and nondictatorship should be maintained, but he has also
shown that no voting system can maintain several such
characteristics simultaneously. This "impossibility result"
confirms that no vote aggregation method is perfect. Plenty
of examples can be generated that produce rather different
social outcomes from the same individual preferences simply
by altering the aggregation rules. At a minimum, one would
hope that some basic principles of fairness are retained
that at least make the process, and thus the outcome, appear
legitimate to voters (see Hibbing and Theiss-Morse 1995). Two common voting methods are
majority and plurality rule. Majority rule would have failed
in 2000 because no candidate won 50 percent of the popular
vote. Plurality rule would have elected Gore since he won
the popular vote. Neither majority nor plurality rule is
more natural than or superior to more complicated methods.
Indeed, the Founders purposely created the electoral college
to avoid popular election. The question becomes whether this
rather unique method of election selected the same winner
that other aggregation schemes might have, or whether Bush's
victory was an idiosyncratic result of the particular set of
institutions and events that put him into office. [3] One of the most stringent
methods of selecting a candidate was proposed by the Marquis
de Condorcet more than two hundred years ago. Condorcet
argued that a winning alternative ought to be capable of
defeating all other alternatives in head-to-head
comparisons. That is, A should be the victor only if she
beats both B and C in paired situations. Even if some voters
choose strategically rather than sincerely -- perhaps due to
a combination of mechanical and psychological incentives
(Duverger 1963) -- the Condorcet winner should also be the
election winner. The Condorcet criterion is an especially
desirable method of choosing among multiple candidates
because it sets the threshold of victory quite high. In many
elections, a Condorcet winner does not even exist. National Election Study (NES)
data from 2000 make it possible to conduct a crude analysis
of strategic voting. I follow a long line of research that
uses rankings of the candidates on the NES "feeling
thermometers" as estimates of the relative ordinal utilities
each person has for each candidate. Thermometers are
reasonable proxies for respondents' utilities for the
candidates and tend to predict voting decisions well
(Abramson et al. 1992, 1995, 2000; Brams and Fishburn 1983;
Brams and Merrill 1994; Kiewiet 1979; Ordeshook and Zeng
1997; Palfrey and Poole 1987; Weisberg and Grofman 1981;
Weisberg and Rusk 1970). Abramson and colleagues (1995) show
that the winners of the popular and electoral vote in three
notable third-party elections -- 1968, 1980, and 1992 --
were all Condorcet winners. In each of those years the
electoral college victor also would have won the popular
vote using Condorcet's standard of beating each of the other
candidates in head-to-head comparisons. Clinton was easily
the Condorcet winner in 1996 as well (Abramson, Aldrich, and
Rohde 1998). It is reassuring that different
voting schemes -- simple plurality rule, the electoral
college, the Condorcet criterion, and perhaps even approval
voting -- all select the same candidate in each of the
past four elections with significant minor parties (Brams
and Fishburn 1983; Brams and Merril11994; Kiewiet 1979). It
is more remarkable that every presidential election for
which adequate survey data exist seems to have chosen the
Condorcet winner, regardless of minor-party showings. This
is satisfying because no voting method is ideal, and the
Condorcet method is so stringent. The 2000 election is not so
tidy. Not only did George W. Bush not take the popular vote,
but the data clearly show that he was not the Condorcet
winner either. This is apparently the first time in the
survey era that this has happened. Figure 11.1 shows the
pairwise rankings of the four presidential candidates in
graphical form. [4] The arrows point to the candidates who
lose in each comparison. Pat Buchanan is the "Condorcet
loser" because each of the other three candidates beat him
in head-to-head comparisons. This is indicated by the three
arrows pointing toward his name. Gore is the Condorcet
winner, beating each of the other candidates (see also
Abramson, Aldrich, and Rohde 2002). In between these two
extremes, Nader is preferred to Buchanan but loses to both
major-party nominees. Bush loses to Gore but defeats both
minor-party candidates.
 Several other voting methods
would also choose Gore as the winner. Running through the
list of voting methods that are commonly discussed in
textbooks on the subject (e.g., Shepsle and Bonchek 1997),
Gore wins whether one uses a plurality runoff, a sequential
runoff, or approval voting procedures. [5] The 2000 election
thus represents a highly unusual event in modern U.S.
politics, as the electoral college appears to be the only
existing nondictatorial method that would result in George
W. Bush's election.
The thermometer rankings also
show an unprecedented degree of strategic voting. Other
presidential elections where strong minor parties ran of
course saw strategic voting, but the pivotal roles that
Buchanan and Nader played in 2000 took strategic behavior to
a new plateau. Table 11.1 demonstrates this by comparing
respondents' candidate rankings along with their vote choice
and turnout decisions. The data show that a large majority
of those who rated Buchanan or Nader as their most
preferred- candidates before the election actually voted for
someone else. Among voters, over 80 percent of people who
rated Buchanan or Nader highest did not vote for them. Most
of the Nader preferrers who voted chose Gore, with the
remainder splitting between Bush and Nader. This suggests that many voters
were deciding which candidate from outside the current
administration was worth their support rather than simply
whose platform was nearest their ideal points (Cho 2000;
Lacy and Burden 2002). It seems that Nader preferrers and
Nader voters are two distinct groups. If the Nader camp was
comprised mostly of traditional liberals interested in
ideological purity, a strategic voter would have chosen
Gore. Presumably, a leftist voter who prefers Nader but
fears that his candidacy is not viable would turn to Gore as
second choice. A sizable contingent of Nader preferrers
appear to have felt that way but abstained. Although many
Nader preferrers who voted did pick Gore, it remains
counterintuitive that so many voted for Bush instead. Many
of these voters must have been motivated not just by
progressive ideals but by the desire to end the Clinton-Gore
reign and decided that Republican Bush was most likely to do
that. Respondents who ranked Buchanan
first were even more disloyal, but their strategic votes
were cast more in Bush's direction than in Gore's. More
interesting are the abstention rates for each of these
groups. About one in five Bush preferrers abstained while
one in four Gore supporters did. But more than a third of
those who favored Nader abstained, and 42 percent of
Buchanan's preferrers stayed home. This is an unprecedented amount
of strategic voting among minor-party supporters (see
Abramson et al. 1995; Cho 2000; Ordeshook and Zeng 1997).
Strategic considerations are even more widespread if
strategic "voting" means more than just choosing a candidate
who is not one's most preferred alternative. To the extent
that abstention is a purposeful activity akin to choosing a
candidate (Aldrich 1997; Lacy and Burden 1999,2002), many
Americans who preferred Buchanan or Nader found nonvoting a
more satisfactory decision than either jumping to a
minor-party candidate at the other end of the spectrum or
stomaching one of the major-party standard-bearers.
 It is noteworthy that abstention
rates were highest among voters who preferred one of the
minor-party candidates. This lack of participation does not
necessarily imply lack of enthusiasm for the candidate,
however. The strength of support for a chosen presidential
candidate was weakest for Nader. Nader voters said they felt
less enthusiastic about their choice than did people who
voted for one of the other three candidates. The percentage
of NES respondents saying they "felt strongly" was 74
percent for Gore, 79 percent for Bush, and even 83 percent
for Buchanan, but only 64 percent for Nader. The fact that
so many of those who ranked Nader first abstained suggests
that they were not particularly fond of any of the
candidates. Those who voted for Nader probably felt tepid
toward all of the candidates running and were only willing
to cast protest votes because the antiestablishment Greens
happened to be on the ballot. This might explain why
apparently not many Nader voters regret their decisions.
Only one in ten Nader voters say they wish they could change
their vote after knowing how close the election was (Jackman
2000). Given the perversity of the election result shown
earlier, it is simply remarkable that 90 percent would pick
Nader again even knowing that Bush -- often their third- or
fourth-ranked choice -- would be elected president. Campaign Dynamics Some of the more interesting
aspects of minor parties are the changes they induce in
otherwise normal presidential campaigns (Rosenstone, Behr,
and Lazarus 1996). Among other things, a threatening
outsider causes the Democratic and Republican nominees to
deal with new issues, distribute their resources
differently, and assemble altered coalitions. Strong minor
parties introduce a great deal of uncertainty into the
campaign and force the major parties to begin foraging about
for votes more strategically. As a zero-sum game, any
support that goes to third-party candidates effectively
reduces the pool of votes available to the major parties. At
the same time, the possibility of increasing turnout makes
the situation look more like a positive-sum game. However,
new voters mobilized by a minor party are relatively
unpredictable, which often leads the major parties to shore
up their bases. To examine some of these
dynamics, I have gathered trial-heat and tracking polls
conducted over the last two months of the campaign. Nader's
support in the polls bucks historical trends in one
important way: it rises rather than falls. As Rosenstone,
Behr, and Lazarus (1996, 41) argue, "Third-party support
fades as the election approaches. This pattern of declining
support has been apparent since the advent of survey data."
[6] Though Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus argue that voters
are apparently willing to consider minor-party candidates
when the stakes are low, the electorate abandons them when
the stakes increase near Election Day. They show that this
pattern holds for seven different candidacies ranging from
Robert LaFollette in 1924 to John Anderson in 1980. Figure 11.2 shows that this
decline does not hold for Nader. [7] Though the raw data
points are a bit lumpy due to rounding, Nader's support
clearly rises. A spline fit to the data shows the upturn
well. Despite the variation around the main trend line,
there seems to be about a percentage-point increase over the
last two months of the presidential campaign.
 Nader's rise in the polls
apparently defies history. Not only does minor-party support
wane in most polls as the consequences of committing to a
candidate rise, but the 2000 major-party race remained close
enough that Nader votes could have swung the election.
Because of the closeness, one might have expected Nader to
fall even faster than minor parties running in more lopsided
elections. A "gut check" by Nader supporters late in the
campaign should have caused them to waiver and throw their
support, however weak, to Gore as the second best. If
sophisticated maneuvering does not explain the rise in Nader
support, what does? Table 11.2 reports several
simple time-series regression models of Nader support. [8]
There are five columns, each of which introduces different
independent variables to the analysis. The variables include
a simple daily counter, Gore and Buchanan vote percentages,
and a measure of the closeness of the race. Closeness is
measured as the absolute difference between the Bush and
Gore percentages, so higher values indicate a more lopsided
race. This is done to be sure that the relationship between
time and Nader's support is not spurious. It might be, for
example, that Nader's support rises only because the race
gets closer.
 The first three columns of Table
11.2 examine the relationships between time, closeness, and
Nader support. It appears -- both independently and jointly
-- that Nader's standings rise later in the campaign and
when the race is more lopsided. So Nader does better later
in the campaign, even after showing that many of his
supporters strategically left him when the major party
campaign got tighter. The last two columns reveal how his
support interacted with the nearest substitutes, Buchanan
and Gore. It is perhaps surprising that Buchanan and Nader
appear to do well or poorly together, as indicated by the
positive and significant coefficient on the Buchanan
variable. In the end, however, this analysis confirms that
Nader's unique rise in the polls over the final weeks of the
campaign is not due merely to closeness or the standings of
the other,candidates. The daily counter remains significant
regardless of the control variables introduced. In addition,
the size of the coefficient confirms the finding in Figure
11.2 that Nader rose about a point over the last two months
of the campaign. Turnout and Vote-Stealing
Effects Two of the most important
effects a minor-party candidate can have are in increasing
voter turnout and in altering the major-party vote split
(Lacy and Burden 1999, 2002). Minor parties, of course,
shake things up in a host of other interesting ways, from
altering the campaign agenda to fracturing the major- party
coalitions. In the end, however, it is enlightening to know
how the election results would have been different without
minor parties in the mix. Though one can never answer these
counterfactual puzzles definitively by rerunning history
(Asher 1995), they are ways of gaining insight on such
questions using available data. We must make do by asking
how things would have been different with Buchanan or Nader
out of the race, assuming that everything else about the
campaigns would have remained the same. This is an
unrealistic but unavoidable assumption. Exit polls asked voters about
their choices in the hypothetical situation in which neither
Buchanan nor Nader was running. [9] Table 11.3 presents a
cross-tabulation of these hypothetical questions and self-
reported votes. Because minor parties earned so few votes,
the aggregate major-party split remains right at fifty-fifty
even removing Buchanan, Nader, and the other minor-party
nominees.
 More intriguing is what
individual voters would have done. Nearly all Bush and Gore
voters would have remained loyal in a two-way race, as one
might expect. This fits with the great consistency between
ranking of and voting for major parties shown earlier. In
contrast, many minor-party voters would have abstained.
Nearly 30 percent of Nader voters and more than 40 percent
of Buchanan voters would have abstained without their
candidates in the race. About half of Nader's votes
would have gone to Gore, the perceived next-best candidate.
It might seem surprising that Buchanan's brigade would have
switched to Gore at least as strongly as it lined up behind
Bush, though I will provide some evidence later that
Buchanan drew heavily on the normally Democratic union vote.
Regardless, this result should be taken lightly since the
number of Buchanan voters is too low (33) to reach firm
inferences. The point is merely that Buchanan's bloc would
not have all gone to Bush nor would all Nader votes have
necessarily gone to Gore. One can estimate the effects the
candidates had on voter turnout by multiplying their actual
vote shares by the percentage who would have abstained in a
two-way race. For example, 30.5 percent of Nader's 2.5
percent of the popular vote -- or 0.75 percent -- would have
stayed home if he had not run. Taken together, minor parties
boosted turnout directly by roughly 1.2 percentage points in
2000.
But candidates also have
indirect effects on voter mobilization. Whereas direct
effects are caused by a candidate mobilizing his supporters
in an immediate way, indirect effects occur when supporters
of one's opponents are mobilized by systemic changes in the
campaign. Indirect effects are caused by such things as
increasing closeness, adding color and drama to the race,
introducing issues that mobilize new voters, and simply
raising voter interest. The percentage of Bush and Gore
voters who would have abstained in a two-way race is
suggestive of how large these indirect effects might have
been. These voters presumably turned out for one of the
major-party candidates because a minor-party candidate
reminded them about the importance of voting or threatened
their candidates' victory. Without Buchanan or Nader in the
race to make things interesting, they would have abstained.
The percentages of Bush and Gore voters who would have
behaved this way are small since most would have voted in a
two-way race as well, but they are many in number. Using the
same method I used earlier, I estimate that turnout for Bush
and Gore would have fallen by a similar 1.3 points, for a
total (direct and indirect) turnout effect of about 2.5
points. [10] These self-reported results are
reasonable, but ought to be taken with a grain of salt given
the small samples and known differences between opinions and
behavior. If the results are reliable, they ought to be
replicated in other data. To check this, I turn to aggregate
election returns to help develop an understanding of the
turnout consequences of minor-party voting in 2000. Because
the electoral college operates on a winner-take-all basis
within states, the first analysis relies on states as the
units of analysis. I begin with a regression model
that predicts voter turnout in the states. Control variables
are included to account for baseline turnout differences
across states. Controls include such things as percentage
college educated, per capita income, and population
density. I hypothesize that the closeness of the race in the
state as well as the vote shares for minor parties might
each increase turnout. Closeness might boost turnout
indirectly by convincing voters that their votes matter more
or by simply making the campaign more interesting. Most
importantly, the Buchanan, Nader, and other minor parties'
vote shares are included to determine which of them managed
to raise turnout directly. Because Buchanan and Nader were
not listed on the ballot in a few states, I run the analysis
both for all the states and for the forty-three states (and
the District of Columbia) where both candidates appeared on
the ballot. This enabled me to be sure that the results are
not sensitive to effects caused by ballot-access
restrictions. The results are found in Table
11.4. The regression models suggest that state electorates
with more whites, fewer cities, more education, and higher
incomes all have higher turnout. These variables capture
interstate differences sufficiently well that southern
exceptionalism has disappeared. As expected, the closeness
of the race seems to have a positive effect on turnout after
controlling for minor-party showings. This could be because
closeness per se encourages potential abstainers to turn out
or because a closer race causes the candidates to engage in
more voter mobilization (Cox and Munger 1989). Buchanan has
a negligible effect on turnout, but Nader in contrast
appears to have increased voter participation directly. This state-level analysis, in
conjunction with the survey data analyzed earlier, confirms
that Nader had an indisputable effect on voter turnout. Many
of his supporters were so committed to him -- or
dissatisfied enough with every other candidate -- that they
simply would have abstained had Nader not run. It is this
inverse relationship between voters' enthusiasm and their
candidate's vote shares that allows some of the
poorest-performing minor parties to have some of the largest
direct effects on voter turnout.
 Though many would have chosen
not to vote in a two-way race, the largest group of Nader
voters would have gone to Gore. In fact, many journalists
have speculated that the Florida fiasco could have been
avoided if Nader had not run since Gore would have picked up
enough net Nader supporters to defeat Bush there. Throwing the Electoral
College The analysis presented so far
indicates that the outcome of the 2000 election was
perverse. Bush not only lost the popular vote but also
failed to be the Condorcet winner. Nonetheless, these
findings do not address whether Nader indirectly elected
Bush by stealing votes disproportionately from Gore. Though
many Nader voters said they would have voted for Gore in a
hypothetical two-way race, it is difficult to know how well
these responses would predict their actual behavior were
that to occur. And the data presented so far are merely
national averages that cannot reveal how minor parties
affected the major- party vote in particular states.
 Florida was the center of
attention for over a month following the November 7
election. The razor-thin result there was subject to ballot
recounts and a series of legal maneuvers by the parties
aimed at starting, stopping, and controlling the recounts.
Just a few hundred votes separated Bush from Gore, yet Nader
received nearly 100,000 votes. If even a small fraction of
his voters had chosen Gore instead, the Democrats would have
won the presidency. [11] In fact, Buchanan and six even more
obscure minor- arty candidates each received more votes than
Bush's margin of victory. Together, these extremely small
minor parties account for 250 times the 537 votes that
distinguished Bush from Gore in the end. Though Nader's
absence might have given Gore a clear Florida win, the
absence of a number of right-wing minor-party candidates
from Buchanan to Hagelin to Browne might have allowed for a
clear Bush victory. Although issues of ballot design
and election law are important, they have overshadowed the
kingmaker effects that Nader and other minor-party nominees
might have had beyond the butterfly ballot. [12] For a
deeper look at this relationship, Table 11.5 shows the
results of a regression model that explains the Gore vote.
Here the dependent variable is Gore's vote share in each
county, though the specification looks much like the
state-turnout model in Table 11.4. Nader's support in 1996
and 2000 are included as independent variables to determine
how the Gore and Nader fortunes co-varied. In addition to a
set of control variables, Clinton's share of the 1996 vote
is included to measure general support for Democratic
presidential candidates and the Clinton-Gore administration. The results suggest that Gore
and Nader were indeed viewed as near, though certainly not
perfect, substitutes, as indicated by the negative sign on
the variable for Nader's vote share in 2000. This
suggests that although Nader drew some of his support from
the Gore camp, a much larger share of it came from other
sources. Potential abstainers appear to make up the lion's
share of Nader's support. This corroborates the
substantial turnout effects found in the state analysis
(Table 11.4) and the self-reported estimates in which many
Nader voters report that they would have abstained in a two-
way election.
 However, many Nader voters also
stated that they would have supported Gore had their
candidate not been running. If the dynamics in Florida were
at all similar to this average effect, then it is evident
that Al Gore would be president today had it been a
traditional two-candidate race. But was Ralph Nader able to
drain away enough Democratic votes to cost Gore the
presidency? In the days following
the-election itself, the unsettled Florida outcome left the
electoral college up for grabs. Gore held 266 electoral
votes to Bush's 246. Since 270 are needed to win the
presidency outright, the Florida outcome would determine the
next president of the United States, as long as the other
state outcomes remained fixed. At the same time, four other
states were won by razor-thin margins that could have gone
either way. Even conceding Florida to Gore, Bush could have
won the presidency with moderate vote shifts in Iowa, New
Mexico, Oregon, and Wisconsin. Collectively, they could have
thrown the election to Bush. As Table 11.6 shows, Gore beat
Bush by a small number of votes in each of these four
states. In all four states the Bush-Gore margin accounted
for less than half a percent of the total votes cast (the
same threshold below which Florida law requires a recount).
Yet together these four states hold thirty electoral votes,
five more than in Florida. [13] Also, in each of these states
Buchanan won more votes than the difference between Bush and
Gore. Had Buchanan not been on the ballot it is at least
possible that Gore would have lost these states and Bush
would have been elected regardless of the Florida outcome.
It is difficult, however, to know for certain. All that
would have been required was that enough Buchanan voters
chose Bush rather than vote for Gore or abstain. Assuming
for the moment that no Buchanan voters would have chosen
Gore, "enough" is anywhere from a reasonable 13 percent in
New Mexico to a less realistic 65 percent in Iowa. Since
many Buchanan voters nationally would have picked Gore in a
two-way race, the thresholds were higher than this in
reality. One cannot know for certain
whether Bush would have won these four states without
Buchanan in the race. It appears to be possible but perhaps
not likely. National exit polls indicate that about one in
four Buchanan voters would have chosen Bush, but the ratios
probably vary depending on the state. Unfortunately, state
exit polls included too few Buchanan voters to reach firm
conclusions. Had Pat Buchanan not been running, it is at
least plausible, though perhaps not likely, that Florida
would have been subject to less scrutiny and that Bush would
have been elected easily with as many as 301 electoral
votes. Sources of Minor-Party
Support According to exit polls, Nader's
support came mostly from those who voted for Clinton in 1996
and, secondarily, from those who abstained in that election.
Together, they made up 55 percent of the Nader coalition.
This confirms the suspicion that he drew mostly from the
left and from those less engaged with the system. As a share
of previous voters, Nader drew mostly from the Perot camp,
though it is only about a tenth of "Perotistas," and this
smaller pool makes the total Perot contribution modest. More
Perot voters broke for Bush in 2000 than for all of the
others candidates combined (Rapoport and Stone 2001). It is not yet clear what
individual-level determinants drove citizens to vote for
Buchanan and Nader. To address this question I estimate a
vote-choice model using exit-poll data. These data have the
benefit of large samples that make it possible [to] analyze
minor-party voting. Otherwise rich NES data simply have too
few Buchanan and Nader voters to allow firm inferences. The
primary drawback of exit polls is that the sample excludes
abstainers, but this is an unavoidable trade-off. I estimate a discrete-choice
model that includes a set of explanatory variables generally
suspected to influence vote choice. These variables fall
into four broad categories. I begin with measures of general
political orientation: party identification and ideology.
Both are long-term attachments shown to have strong effects
on voting behavior. Next are several economic evaluations.
Economics and elections are deeply intertwined, and these
variables allow for national and personal as well as
retrospective and prospective judgments to influence vote
choice. The third set of variables measures the
sociocultural nature of contemporary American elections. I
include a variable that measures attitudes on abortion, a
measure of religious attendance, and a variable that weighs
whether a person identifies with the religious right.
Finally, I include a set of demographic control variables
such as race, education, gender, and age. The wordings of
the questions are given in the Measurement Appendix at the
end of this chapter.
 The estimates in Table 11.7 show
how variables influenced the choices between each of the
other candidates and Nader. Nader is chosen as the arbitrary
baseline category since not all pairwise comparisons are
simultaneously estimable. Using Nader as baseline allows one
to'examine the most interesting Gore-Nader and
Buchanan-Nader comparisons. Positive coefficients indicate
that higher values on the independent variables lead to a
greater likelihood that voters support a candidate other
than Nader. For example, the significant coefficient of
.50 on the female dummy variable reveals that women are
significantly more likely to vote for Gore than Nader, all
else held constant. But the variable's insignificance in the
remaining columns indicates that women are no more likely to
vote for another candidate relative to Nader. Some
classes of variables affect all of the comparisons with
Nader while others influence only one or two of the
pairings. The major factors separating
Gore and Nader voters are economic evaluations. Economic
variables fail to achieve statistical significance in most
other cases, but all three measures are strongly related to
the Gore-Nader vote. In all three cases those who are less
content with the economy tend to choose Nader over Gore.
This might reflect a failed strategy on Gore's part in not
associating himself closely enough with strong economic
performance during the Clinton years. This was difficult to
do, of course, since Gore also wished to distance himself
from Clinton the person. It might also be that Nader voters
misperceived the strong economy as weak or that they focused
on different aspects of economic performance such as
inequality. Although most Americans viewed the economy
positively in 2000 (see Norpoth, Chapter 3 in this book),
those who were dissatisfied with it clearly turned to Nader
over Gore.
In accord with earlier work (Cho
2000; Lacy and Burden 1999, 2002), it seems that minor-party
candidates owe much of their support to anti-incumbent
sentiment. And the substantive effects of these variables
are not trivial. For a voter who is undecided between Gore
and Nader, viewing the current economy as "poor" rather than
"excellent" increases his probability of picking Nader from
.50 to .79, a change of nearly thirty percentage points.
Though national retrospections turn out to matter more than
national prospections and personal retrospections, all three
clearly separated Gore and Nader voters in 2000. Contrast the power that
economics has to separate Gore and Nader voters with the
weaker effects of the cultural variables. Attitude toward
abortion and identification with the religious right have
consistent effects on every comparison aside from
Gore-Nader. Pro-choice voters are more likely to choose
Nader than Bush, Buchanan, and other minor parties. Yet
abortion attitudes do not distinguish between Gore and
Nader. Again, assuming that a voter is initially torn
between the candidates, the probability of voting for Nader
rises by anywhere from .27 (Bush) to. 43 (Buchanan) as we
move from the pro-life voter to the pro-choice voter. For at
least some voters abortion was definitive. The power of
these variables to shape the voting decision fits with
earlier work on the importance of abortion in modern
electoral politics (Abramowitz 1995; Adams 1997). But other
cultural issues matter too. Belonging to the religious
right makes a person 19 to 36 percent more likely to vote
against Nader. These effects are strongest for the
Buchanan-Nader pairing, which makes sense given the socially
conservative content of the Buchanan rhetoric. Consistent
with this, married respondents are far more likely to pick
Buchanan over Nader, though marriage has no impact
otherwise. In contrast to the denominational differences
that drive voting based on sociocultural issues, religiosity
itself, at least as measured by frequency of church
attendance, appears unrelated to vote choice in 2000 (cf.,
Gilbert et al. 1999). Long-term political orientations
such as partisanship, ideology, and demographic
predispositions have strong effects on vote choice. As
one might expect, liberals are almost always more likely to
vote for Nader than an opponent, and partisans support
their nominees in most cases. The one exception to this
is that both Democrats and Republicans favor Buchanan over
Nader. This might reflect the fact that Nader, unlike
former Republican Buchanan, comes from outside of the
conventional party system. This finding reinforces two
themes. First, of all voters, Nader voters were the least
enamored of the entire slate of candidates. Second,
minor-party candidates differ from one another about as much
as they differ from their major-party competitors. Finally, though African
Americans and to a lesser degree women favored Gore over
Nader, age and education had more systematic effects on the
Nader vote. All else remaining constant, younger voters
and those with more education were more likely to vote for
Nader. This fits with conventional views of party
identification and minor-party voting in which the young are
expected to support minor parties disproportionately. It is
noteworthy that age does not distinguish Buchanan and Nader
voters, as young people tend to support minor parties of all
stripes. Though income and education are often assumed to
run in the same direction because they contribute to a
person's socioeconomic status, they sometimes work in
opposite directions here. Nader occupied a niche that
attracted those with higher educations and lower incomes.
Although both Buchanan and Nader raised objections to free
trade, union members were more likely to favor the Reform
Party than the Green Party in 2000. Whereas Nader seems to
have won votes on college campuses, Buchanan collected more
in the union halls. Many Americans knew they might
be electing their third-most preferred candidate, so why did
so many nonetheless vote for Buchanan and Nader? The
vote-choice model revealed that Nader tended to win the
votes of white, liberal yet nonpartisan voters who were
discontented with the economy. These findings confirm
earlier work that found that economic grievances, age, and
strength of partisanship are all associated with minor-party
support (Abramson et al. 1995, 2000; Alvarez and Nagler
1995, 1998; Gold 1995; Lacy and Burden 1999, 2002;
Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus 1996). But in addition to
understanding why individuals behave as they do, we should
also wonder what contributes to minor- party showings at the
aggregate level. Table 11.8 addresses this issue
by regressing the Buchanan and Nader county vote shares on a
series of political and demographic variables. In addition
to a common set of controls, I include measures of Nader's
showing in 1996 to measure support specific to his
candidacy. But I also wish to see the degree to which
Buchanan and Nader drew from Perot's 1996 base and the votes
of other minor parties that year. Rapoport and Stone
(2001), for example, find that Republicans, not minor
parties, were the main beneficiaries of the Perot movement's
collapse. It is reasonable to hypothesize that minor
parties drew support from the Perotistas as well. Finally,
the closeness of the election is included to assess
strategic voting.
 The results indicate that Nader
far exceeded Buchanan's ability to build on his earlier
campaigns. Not only did Nader regain most of the votes
earned in his lackluster 1996 run for president, but it
appears that he drew from the Perot camp as well. Nader took
about 15 percent of the 1996 Perot vote while Buchanan
apparently pulled in none. Once again, the analysis shows
that differences among minor parties make it difficult to
generalize. Much of the literature looks for commonalties in
voting for different minor parties across elections (Gold
1995; Gilbert et al. 1999; Herrnson and Green 2002; Lacy and
Burden 2002; Rosenstone, Behr, and Lazarus 1996). However,
researchers ought to acknowledge differences as well.
Nader was more likely to win the votes of those living
outside the South, with more education, and with lower
incomes. Buchanan did better in the South and among those
with less education and those with higher incomes.
Buchanan and Nader appealed to quite different kinds of
voters. After including the 1996
minor-party vote shares and controlling for demographics
like race, region, and education, the lopsidedness of the
election is positively related to both the Buchanan and
Nader votes. This confirms a finding repeated throughout
this chapter: that minor-party voters were highly
sensitive to the possibility of being pivotal in a close
major-party contest. The "wasted vote" logic and
sophisticated voting were apparently on many Buchanan and
Nader supporters' minds. Conclusion The 2000 presidential election
has done much to enlighten our understanding of minor
parties in U.S. politics. At a practical level, 2000 added
two fascinating observations to the growing number of cases
available for study. In some ways, this research will
reinforce earlier conclusions based primarily on Wallace,
Anderson, and Perot. For instance, supporters of minor-party
candidates are less partisan and less satisfied with the
nation's economic performance than other voters. These are
the same relationships that helped and hurt earlier minor
parties. At the same time, the Buchanan
and Nader candidacies stand apart from their predecessors.
Among other things, these candidates could have easily
affected who won the election. Gore probably would have won
without Nader in the picture, and Bush could have won more
easily had Buchanan not been around. These minor-party
candidates occupy an important slot at the end of a string
of such candidacies. Indeed, five of the last nine
presidential elections have witnessed significant minor
parties. Nader rather than Buchanan managed to build on
these successes by tapping into the bank of Perot's voters.
Nader's candidacy is unique in that his standing rose during
the final days of the campaign, an anomaly among minor-party
presidential campaigns. And despite the closeness of the
election, minor-party voters in 2000 were far more strategic
than their predecessors. A larger share of Buchanan and
Nader supporters would have rather abstained than vote for
another candidate. These unusual dynamics led to one of the
least satisfying social-choice outcomes of any presidential
election. One of the findings of this
chapter is that Buchanan and Nader introduced an
unprecedented amount of distortion into the aggregation of
preferences. This was possible because of the extreme
closeness of the major-party contest. Though eventually
chosen the victor, Bush did not win the popular vote and
would not have won using just about any other democratic
voting method. Nader also made minor-party history by
defying the strong tendency of such candidates to lose
support in the final days of the campaign. It actually
appears that Nader rose in the polls in the weeks preceding
election day, this despite the possibility that his presence
meant the election could be thrown to many of his
supporters' third-choice candidate. Building on earlier
work, this chapter also showed that minor-party candidates
have effects on both turnout and the major-party vote
shares. Buchanan and Nader had surprisingly large turnout
effects despite their small vote totals. This suggests that
the most meager campaigns might actually raise turnout the
most because they bring out diehard supporters who would
otherwise abstain. Running as minor-party candidates in
the same election, Buchanan and Nader remind us of the
great, though often downplayed differences among such
candidates. Nader drew support from young voters, the
educated, liberals, and those upset with the economy;
Buchanan won his votes in the South, from the religious
right, and from the less educated. These differences
warn against the development of a grand theory of
minor-party coalitions. MEASUREMENT APPENDIX Exit-poll data were collected on
Election Day 2000 by the Voter News Service. Pollsters
collected self- administered questionnaires from more than
thirteen thousand voters. In Table 11.3, the two-way race
question is "If these were the only two presidential
candidates on the ballot today, who would you have voted
for? 1 Al Gore (Dem), 2 George W. Bush (Rep), 3 Would not
have voted for president." The wording of the questions used
in Table 11.7 are listed here. Note that several of them
were recoded in the ways explained earlier in this chapter. Democrat and Republican: "No
matter how you voted today, do you usually think of yourself
as a: 1 Democrat, 2 Republican, 3 independent, 4 Something
else?" Ideology: "On most political
matters, do you consider yourself: 1 Liberal, 2 Moderate, 3
Conservative?" National Prospections: "During
the next year, do you think the nation's economy will: 1 Get
better, 2 Get worse, 3 Stay about the same?" National Retrospections: "Do you
think the condition of the nation's economy is: 1 Excellent,
2 Good, 3 Not so good, 4 Poor?" Personal Retrospections:
"Compared to four years ago, is your family's financial
situation: 1 Better today, 2 Worse today, 3 About the same?" Abortion Attitude: "Which comes
closest to your position? Abortion should be: 1 Legal in all
cases, 2 Legal in most cases, 3 Illegal in most cases, 4
Illegal in all cases. " Church Attendance: "How often do
you attend religious services? 1 More than once a week, 2
Once a week, 3 A few times a month, 4 A few times a year, 5
Never." Religious Right: "Do you
consider yourself part of the conservative Christian
political movement, also known as the religious right? 1
Yes, 2 No." Married: "Are you currently
married? 1 Yes, 2 No." Homosexual: "Are you gay,
lesbian, or bisexual? 1 Yes, 2 No." Age: "To which age group do you
belong? 1 18-24, 2 25-29, 3 30-39, 4 40-44, 5 45-49, 6
50-59, 7 60- 64, 8 65-74, 9 75 or over." Income: "1999 total family
income: 1 Under $15,000, 2 $15,000-$29,999, 3
$30,000-49,999, 4 $50,000-$74,999, 5 $ 75,000-$99,999, 6
$100,000 or more?" Education: "What was the last
grade of school you completed? 1 Did not complete high
school, 2 High school graduate, 3 Some college or associate
degree, 4 College graduate, 5 Postgraduate study." Union Member: "Do you or does
someone in your household belong to a labor union? 1 Yes, I
do, 2 Yes, someone else does, 3 Yes, I do and someone else
does, 4 No one does." African American and Latino:
"Are you: 1 White, 2 African American, 3 Hispanic/Latino, 4
Asian, 5 Other?" Female: "Are you: 1 Male, 2
Female?" You've Got Issues
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