A puzzle about the polls

About seven years after Nader first claimed that his presence on the ballot actually helped Democrats, I finally figured out how this might be true.

Freakonomists have recently harped on the notion that stores, restaurants, etc. include some extremely expensive things on the menu which they don’t expect anyone to buy, with the purpose of making the other things on the menu look cheaper. Suddenly the $12 burger looks like a lot more plausible option if the alternatives include the $16 burger and the $20 burger.

Now, say you are a voter who has no idea what is going on or why you should vote for anyone in particular, but you want to be in the mainstream of national politics so you can say with a weary sigh that both sides are full of liars and fools and extremists whereas you are steadfastly in the middle. In some countries, people who don’t like any of the candidates are encouraged to stay home, but here voting for a random person is seen as a civic good, better than staying home to express your true preference. So if there were only two candidates, the unmotivated voters would be equally split up between them. But then if there’s an extra, super-leftwing candidate, the regular ordinary sort of leftwing candidate looks like an acceptable middle ground, because at least you’re not voting for the most leftwing person on the ballot.

It takes a certain sort of contrarian to vote for a third party candidate; you essentially have to be excited enough about losing to show up at the polls. These contrarians, if not given a choice to vote for a candidate that will *certainly* lose will be willing to vote for the candidate who will *probably* lose. They also obviously don’t think that there is much of a difference between McCain and Obama (which there isn’t on the issues they care most about: election reform, ending the drug war, ending corporate welfare like farm and oil subisdies). Hence, they’ll just vote for McCain to be contrary.

There are also people who want to vote for a losing candidate because then they can claim it’s not their fault when things go haywire (as they invariably do with politicians).

Also, McCain is the more libertarian candidate between McCain and Obama. Neither is libertarian, but McCain is moreso. I’m a libertarian and will almost certainly be a Nader voter, and I know many other libertarians who are planning to be as well. He’s not that ultra-left-wing. Nader, Barr, McKinney, Baldwin, and Ron Paul all tend to make common cause on essentially libertarian issues like the ones I listed above, which are also among the most important to libertarians.

I’m a total non-expert on this, but here’s a guess: Ignoring people who support Nader/Barr means that you’re looking at a smaller group of voters, and working with a smaller group thereby exaggerates any difference in popularity between the main two candidates.

An extreme example: Imagine there are 100 voters. Imagine Obama has 80 votes, McCain has 10, and Nader/Barr have 10 between them. So expressed as a percentage, Obama is 70% ahead of McCain. Now ignore Nader/Barr. So we’re now considering 90 voters, of which Obama has 80. So Obama has 89% of the vote, and McCain 11% (rounded).

But as I say, this is pure guesswork.

I’m pretty sure the explanation is that pollsters that screening choices etc, favor Obama, mainly I think dailykos/research 2000, are the only ones who include Nader and Barr.

the anti-Nader tactics of the Democrats backfired in 2004

And not just in 2004. If Gore had agreed to debate Nader, had made the “lesser-evil” case directly to potential Nader voters, and had agreed to support electoral reform, he would have won easily.

In fact (contra Ed’s 8), Nader voters in 2000, when asked about their second choice, expressed a strong preference for Gore over Bush. The idea that Nader has some special appeal to Republicans that Buchanan, say, lacks, is just the sort of fantasy that sometimes leads one to be a Nader voter in the first place, I’m guessing.

The idea (per geo in 9) that Gore could have persuaded Nader voters had he included Nader in a debate seems even more insulting to Nader voters than I am inclined to be. Nader voters certainly understood Gore’s position that he was different from Bush. They just disagreed with that position.

Alex, Harry is saying that the split goes the other way — the poll which has Nader and Barr shows a greater gap than polls that don’t offer them as a choice. We would expect it would go the other way, as you outline, that the gap widens if you calculate it as a percentage of the two-party vote.

I’m not sure what polls Harry is referring to, however. Pew and Ipsos/McClatchey, which include Barr and Nader by name, show only a 6 and 5 point gap, below the RCP average.

What’s the problem? Nader/Barr voters are saying “neither of the above” to McCain/Obama but when forced, pick McCain for whatever reasons. I suspect that all this shows is that Republicans are less enthused about McCain than Democrats are about Obama (huge revelation, eh?), and some are much less enthused.

I’ve been comparing the average of polls at RCP every couple of days (comparing the with Barr and Nader average to the without Barr and Nader average) and have noted that specific polling companies get bigger gaps for their with Barr and Nader polls than for their without Barr and Nader (despite, presumably, using the same basic methodology for both).

political football — geo’s idea wasn’t that Gore would have convinced Nader voters (highly unlikely!) but that the contrast would have made him seem more moderate and acceptable to swing voters who either sat it out or went for Bush. That’s entirely plausible. It wasn’t however, a risk-free strategy — its entirely possible that Nader would have made Gore look like a fool, and/or forced him to alienate left-ish voters who he had in the bag. Given that he ended up with a populist strategy to appeal to left-ish voters, I imagine that is what his strategists were worried about.

Finally, left-wing Nader voters had very complex reasons for voting for Nader. In some States they believed that Gore had the state sewn up so voting for Nader was costless. Attention to the polls led them to believe (wrongly) that there might be a real pay-off for the Green Party (if N reached 5%) which would have made it worth losing to Bush in the long run. And, to be honest, even I, who have very little regard for the Democrats, didn’t believe they could screw up opposing Bush. I even thought that 9/11, when it happened, would help them (as it would have helped a political party with any level of competence). If Nader supporters shared my unreflective assumption that the Dems were not completely inept they might well have thought that there was a not a large long-term cost to Gore losing. I’ll just add that I know a lot of people who voted Nader in 2000, and not one who thought that Bush and Gore were the same.

Ed’s succinct statement really says it best: “I think minor party candidates tend to draw protest votes from the party in power.”

I would also agree with Harry B’s comment about some of the calculations behind the larger vote for Nader in 2000. Of course, the goal of getting Nader to 5% for the sake of the Green party can’t apply this year, because he is not the Green nominee. That would be Cynthia McKinney. She is not present in most of these polls, but the few I have seen do not change the picture much; she does not even seem to cut into Nader’s vote, despite nearly indistinguishable policy prescriptions. And then there is Chuck Baldwin, social-authoritarian, endorsed, over “Libertarian” Bob Barr, by that other alleged libertarian, Ron Paul.

Yeah, basically, other than the tiny committed ideological core, the 1% or so that is probably each minor candidate’s ceiling this year comes from anti-incumbent-party voters. But Ed said it more succinctly than I just did.

In democracies, opposition parties can use the incompetence of ruling parties to generate widespread support. One might have expected, in a democracy, that the party responsible for failing to prevent a disastrous terrorist attack, and then launching a pointless and distastrous war, would be punished by an electorate, especially if the opposition party had all but won the previous election. Failure to make real political gains in the circumstances they faced reveals a lot about the capabilities of the Democratic Party.

That they failed to do it in 1 and a half years, but succeeded in spades in 3.5 years, and are now expanding upon that in spades this year tells us what, exactly about the ineffectuality of the Democratic Party?

I suppose one can reasonably claim that it shows the difference between the pre-Dean Democratic Party and the current Democratic Party, but it seems equally likely that it shows that one and a half years just wasn’t long enough to get Americans to turn completely against the war.

specific polling companies get bigger gaps for their with Barr and Nader polls than for their without Barr and Nader (despite, presumably, using the same basic methodology for both).

What happens when they include Morgenbesser?

harry b@17: “left-wing Nader voters [in 2000] had very complex reasons for voting for Nader. In some states they believed that Gore had the state sewn up so voting for Nader was costless.”
In states that Gore had sewn up, voting for Nader *was* costless. There was no cost to voting for Nader in, say, Massachusetts or Maryland. Voting for Nader in Florida was quite different.

As much as it may be fun to guess about what motivation drives the trend, the only statement that can be solidly made from the numbers is also the blatantly obvious one you already made: that when not given the option of picking a third-party candidate, more of their supporters pick McCain than Obama and the gap is narrower. I’m sure there are quite a lot of reasons for this. There are, after all, an infinite number of wrong answers to any question.

The Iraq War, meaning the invasion of Iraq and the complete dismantling of its military and the destruction of its economy, was a success.
Now it’s over.
Whoever was waging it, whoever wanted it fought, they won. It’s an occupation now, and has been for some time.
It will remain an occupation for a very long time, because that was the whole idea all along.

Well, we won the far fast, and it didn’t cost all that much. The occupation has cost us a whole lot more casualties and a whole lot more money and there’s no end in sight, no victory to look forward to.

The occupation is a whole lot more like a war than the war was. You can say it isn’t a war if you want to, but for most of us it’s a war we want ended. Officially you could stress that it isn’t an occupation either — we had to stop calling it an occupation because some of the things we were doing were officially war crimes during an occupation, but the Geneva conventions don’t apply to non-war/non-occupations. But these niceties are pretty much irrelevant.

I say it’s broccoli and I say the hell with it.

Don’t forget the Party for Socialism and Liberation is running candidates too:
Gloria La Riva and Eugene Puryear.

c.l.ball (#13): Ah, thanks. I misread the post; I should have known it couldn’t be anything so simple.

Why are so many Dems so invested in blaming Nader and his voters for the 2000 loss?

I’m not so interested in blaming Nader voters as I am in pointing out in ridiculous errors in logic and fact (for example, that all the negative consequences of Bush’s presidency can be blamed on the ‘incompetence’ of the Democratic Party, or that Nader contributed anything to the Green Party’s nonexistent long-term success).

If Nader supporters shared my unreflective assumption that the Dems were not completely inept they might well have thought that there was a not a large long-term cost to Gore losing.

Fantastic!

Because they wish to avoid losing in the future

Perhaps Democrats also wish to deflect Nader’s devastating criticisms of their miserable (though not, of course, as bad as the Republicans’) policy positions.