Half a million votes for Nader
By Barry Sheppard
Ralph Nader, who ran for president on the Green Party ticket, received more than half a million votes, with more than 200,000 in California. This represented the most votes cast for a presidential candidate to the left of the Democrats and Republicans in many decades.
Nader was on the ballot in only 22 of the 50 states, and in those he received on average between one and two per cent of the vote. His highest%age was in Oregon, where he got 4.1%. In California, his vote was 2.4% of the total, although in certain areas it was higher; for example, in San Francisco his vote was 8%.
Some activists were disappointed, hoping Nader would do better. However, his vote gives a more or less adequate expression of the existing political reality of the number of those willing to vote for a presidential candidate on the left.
His campaign did bolster the Green Party. New Green Party chapters were set up in Connecticut, Nevada, Vermont, Wisconsin and Minnesota.
Greens won a number of local contests and did well in others. In the small university town of Arcata, California, two Greens were elected to the city council, joining a third, to form a majority. A city council seat was won in Santa Monica, California, and two in Berkeley, California.
In New Mexico, local Greens received votes up to 25%, while Nader got 2.4%. Willingness to vote for left candidates on the local level does not translate into willingness to do so on the presidential level, where there is more pressure to vote for the "lesser evil".
Doug Young, a striking Detroit newspaper worker, ran as a pro-labour independent for the Michigan legislature in a district north of Detroit. His vote was something over 1%.
Campaign workers were not discouraged by the vote, however, pointing to the lack of funds and organisation for the campaign. "We learned a lot" said Alan Jacobsen, Young's campaign treasurer. "If in the future the Labor Party fields candidates, what we learned about the difficulties and opportunities for workers running independent campaigns will be useful."
Young's campaign centred on the need for labour to break from the Democrats and Republicans in order to fight back against government attacks on the right to strike and organise.
How the capitalist class is being successful in its drive to divide the working people along race and sex lines was indicated by the victory by a 56% to 44% margin of California's Proposition 209, which outlaws affirmative action for the racially oppressed and women.
That there will be continued opposition to the effort to turn back the clock on these issues was immediately evident when hundreds of students at the University of California at Berkeley marched and briefly occupied a university facility in protest against the vote.
In assessing the meaning of this defeat, we have to keep in mind that voter turnout was the lowest since the 1920s, and that among the oppressed it is even lower. Also, while the Republicans made the issue a major one and threw in millions of dollars for a "yes" vote, the Democrats, while formally supporting affirmative action, hardly mentioned it and refused to spend any money to campaign for a "no" vote.
We can add that the proposition itself was so worded that is was confusing, since it claimed to be anti-discriminatory.
But with the lack of a mass working class alternative to the parties of big business, and with those two parties moving to the right, politics as a whole, including among working people, is becoming more conservative. Exit polls reported that a minority, but a significant minority, of both Blacks and Latinos voted for Proposition 209, and one found that six out of ten women did so.
Already, the victory in California for the racist and anti-woman initiative is being taken up elsewhere in the country, and is sure to be an important issue in the next years.
Of the smaller socialist groups that fielded presidential candidates, Peace and Freedom (only in California) received 22,593 votes. The Workers World Party got 29,118; Socialist Workers Party 11,513; Socialist Party 3376; and Socialist Equality 2752. 255D>