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Nader considered launching a third party around issues of citizen empowerment and consumer rights. He stated that the Democratic Party had become "so bankrupt, it doesn't matter if it wins any elections." He suggested a serious third party could address needs such as campaign-finance reform, worker and whistle-blower rights, government-sanctioned watchdog groups to oversee banks and insurance agencies, and class-action lawsuit reforms.
Nader waged a minor write-in campaign for " None of the Above" in the 1992 New Hampshire primary, which had the unintended effect of resulting in a few thousand votes for Nader himself.
Nader was drafted as a candidate for President on the Green Party ticket in the U.S. presidential election, 1996. He was not formally nominated by the Green Party USA, which was, at the time, the largest national Green group; instead he was nominated independently by various state Green parties (in some areas, he appeared on the ballot as an independent). However, many activists in the Greens/Green Party USA worked actively to campaign for Nader in 1996. Nader qualified for ballot status in relatively few states, garnering less than 1% of the vote, though the effort did make significant organizational gains for the party. He refused to raise or spend more than $5,000 on his campaign, presumably to avoid meeting the threshold for Federal Elections Commission reporting requirements; the unofficial Draft Nader committee could (and did) spend more than that, but was legally prevented from coordinating in any way with Nader himself.
Nader ran again in 2000 as the candidate of the Green Party of the United States, which had been formed in the wake of his 1996 campaign. This time he received almost 3% of the popular vote, missing the 5% needed to qualify the Green Party for federal matching funds in the next election.
The exclusion of Nader and other third-party candidates from events staged by the bi-partisan controlled Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) contributed to the marginalization of those candidates and helped minimize their support on election day. This issue led to an effort to build a more independent Citizens' Debate Commission.
Nader campaigned against the pervasiveness of corporate power and spoke on the need for campaign finance reform, environmental justice, universal healthcare, affordable housing, free education through college, workers' rights, legalization of commercial hemp, and a shift in taxes to place the burden more heavily on corporations than on the middle and lower classes. He opposed pollution credits that make it more profitable to pollute than conserve, and giveaways of publicly-owned assets.
The extremely close race between the two major presidential candidates, Al Gore and Bush, helped to create some additional controversy around the Nader campaign. Before the election, a number of those who supported Gore claimed that since Nader had no realistic chance of winning, those who supported the Nader platform should nevertheless vote for Gore, the theory being that a victory for Gore was preferable to a victory for a more conservative candidate, even if an individual voter might, in a perfect world, prefer Nader. Late in the campaign, the Gore campaign dispatched prominent liberal celebrities to present this argument to Nader voters in swing states. Nader and many of his supporters, however, claimed that while Gore was perhaps marginally preferable to Bush, the differences between the two were not great enough to merit support of Gore.
When challenged with complaints that he was taking away votes from Al Gore, Nader argued at times that he was trying to save the Democratic Party, and at other times, that the party was not worth saving. When Nader argued that he was trying to hold the Democrats' "feet to the fire," he was suggesting that he wished the Democrats were more progressive. However, at other moments Nader said he wanted the Democrats to go the way of the Whigs, and that he would support Green candidates who ran against even the most progressive Democrats, such as Paul Wellstone and Russell Feingold.
As it turned out, the number of Nader votes was more than the margin of Bush over Gore in Florida and New Hampshire, which meant that Gore would have won the election if even a small fraction (as little as 1%) of Nader's supporters in Florida had instead voted for Gore. Nader supporters claimed that many Nader voters would not have voted at all if Nader wasn't on the ballot. Regardless, many analysts believed that Nader supporters would more likely choose Gore over Bush. (Nader has stated on his website: "In the year 2000, exit polls reported that 25% of my voters would have voted for Bush, 38% would have voted for Gore and the rest would not have voted at all." [1]) Most political analysts and experts believe that Nader's presence on the ballot in Florida caused Bush to win the election. For their part, Nader supporters countered that the Democrats could handily have won the election with a better and more competent candidate than Gore, who made a series of blunders in his debates against George W. Bush. And, of course, the U.S. presidential election, 2000 was hounded by the Florida situation.
Some voters had attempted to minimize this problem by engaging in Nader trading , in which Nader-inclined voters in swing states agreed to vote for Gore in exchange for Gore-inclined voters in safe Bush states to vote for Nader. Even though Nader trading had the theoretical potential to allow Al Gore to win the election AND at the same time to earn the Green Party its 5% and an award of FEC party convention funds, Nader himself rejected the idea. He and his campaign explained that they were running in every state.
The "A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush!" phenomenon is the so-called spoiler effect where candidates split the vote, and it is common to most third-party or independent candidacies, whenever such candidates are perceived as likely to draw most of their support from constituencies who would otherwise support one or the other candidate. The problem is endemic to the First Past the Post electoral system; according to Duverger's Law, such a voting method naturally results in a two-party system. Some, such as Democrat Dennis Kucinich, advocate approval voting or instant runoff voting to address the spoiler effect. Nader has made strong statements in favor of election reforms and it is listed in the number two position on Nader's list of 2004 campaign issues (below health reform).
But since, in the long run, both the Democratic and Republican parties appear to be net beneficiaries of this state of affairs, many commentators conclude that electoral reform addressing the matter is improbable - unless of course one party consistently loses because of it. Some Greens hope to force election reforms by causing Democrats to lose until the situation becomes intolerable. Nader has not stated such a goal publicly, nor is he a member of the Party. Other progressives believe strongly that a deliberate "spoiler" strategy is doomed, and that candidates sharing Nader's views should run in Democratic primaries, taking advantage of an electoral reform that has already been implemented.
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