Third Parties Week: Ralph Nader, Spoiler? (2000)

This Day

Jody Avirgan & Radiotopia

History

4.6 • 982 Ratings

🗓️ 18 June 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Welcome to Third Party Week! From time to time this election year, we're going to do some special series that highlight the rhythm of an election cycle. This week, we are looking at third parties: who runs for a third party bid, who votes for a third party, and how much do third party candidates really matter?

Today: Ralph Nader's 2000 run as a Green Party candidate is largely remembered for the question of whether he drew votes away from Al Gore and "spoiled" the election. This episode, we look at why Nader was running to begin with, and what the discourse around his run was like before the Florida recount.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to this day in esoteric political history from radiotopia.
0:06.7	My name is Jody Avergan.
0:10.7	Third Parties Week continues part of our election year series of conversations
0:14.7	around some of the key rhythms and themes in an election year and we are talking
0:19.0	about the role of third parties and third party candidates and party candidates.
0:24.0	Last episode, we did a bit of an overview
0:26.1	with our pal Dave Weagle.
0:27.3	We laid out some categories for who decides
0:29.7	to run as a third party candidate, who decides
0:31.5	to vote for third party candidates and of course one of the people
0:35.3	who came up in that episode and we have to talk about probably have to talk about as the first one in this
0:40.5	series is a look at Ralph Nader in the year 2000. Look the 543
0:46.6	votes by which Bush beat Gore in Florida and the Supreme Court intervention in
0:51.3	the question of whether Nader drew those votes from Gore and
0:54.4	tipped the election.
0:56.2	That is one of the most litigated stories in modern political history.
0:59.6	We will touch on that, but I really think what's worth doing is revisiting the months
1:04.8	before the hanging chads and the blame game and all of that to get a sense of why Nader was
1:09.6	running to begin with as a third party candidate, why he was finding an audience, and also this really
1:15.4	interesting question of whether people saw him as a quote unquote spoiler before the election.
1:21.0	And going back and reading some of the coverage and looking at this I've been really
1:24.3	surprised to reread some of the discourse around Nader's run in the months before what went down in Florida.
	...

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