Reply #59: First, Perot didn't help Clinton win. Second, you can't reconstruct an [View All]

[jobycom]

election any more than you can reconstruct a football game. The election began a year or more before the votes were cast, and all players put together a strategy that took into account ALL factors, including Nader. Without Nader, Gore would have run a different campaign, and there's no way of knowing which way he would have come out. Maybe he would have been more moderate, and those Green voters would have stayed at home (as the polls showed many would). Maybe he would have run more liberal to gain those voters and lost some in the middle. Maybe all the voters the Greens registered would have not voted at all, driving everybody's total down. Nader may have even helped the Democrats by angering enough of them to get out and vote when otherwise they may have been lacadaisical about voting.

You can't know.

As for Perot putting Clinton in office, that's an old Republican claim that's been thoroughly disproven. Exit polls showed Perot supporters dividing equally between Bush and Clinton. Clinton was leading before Perot jumped back in the race. Analyses since then have broken down the numbers by regions and by every other division imaginable, and they all (all that I've seen) conclude that Clinton would have won without Perot running, and some conclude he may have won more strongly.

And one final point-- recursive formula analysis of the Florida 2000 "election" show that one factor determined how likely your vote was to not count. Not income, not education, not age, not voting experience, not even party. Race. Black voters lost their votes no matter what education or experience they had. It's almost like someone just went in and tampered with ballots in heavily black districts after the election-- especially since the regions that were pulled off the election boards right after Gore was declared the winner were heavily black, and turned out to be the regions with the most overvotes. You remember overvotes-- where a voter chose one candidate and then somehow another hole appeared on their ballot? I suspect that if Nader was not in the race, and Gore had picked up more votes (not a given), somehow just enough of those votes would have been "overvoted" to almost give Bush the election, too. But that's just my suspicion. One more point: although there was a 633% increase in Palm Beach county in the number of overvotes for president, there was no increase in the number of overvotes in any other category on the same ballot. People couldn't figure out how to vote for president, but they had no trouble for any other office.