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Ralph Nader would like to stop having to explain why the spoiler coverage is stupid
(www.motherjones.com)
this post was submitted on 15 Apr 2024
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Politics
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I respect enormously where he's coming from, but he refuses to acknowledge the very simple fact that spoilers do occur, and in close-run races, they can change the outcome for the worse. He says the Democrats didn't understand the winner-takes-all Electoral College in 2000, while he himself dismisses his own part in that. Yes, ideally, Democrats would have played a better game and won by a larger margin and the spoiler wouldn't have mattered. But they didn't, and I think every factor that lead to Gore's loss should be looked at and criticised, including Nader's run.
The first and most important change that could be made in America is moving to a real voting system. First Past the Post is a sham. It isn't democracy. Whether the move is to IRV or MMP or STV or whatever almost doesn't matter. Just move to something real. Eliminate the spoiler effect, and then you can begin to see real meaningful policy change.
He's not refusing to acknowledge spoilers exist, he's saying that the whole premise is that they are voters who would be voting for the larger party if their policy positions were adopted or engaged with by the party they're "spoiling", and yet when the e.g. Democratic Party just refuses to engage with any policy changes and thusly doesn't gain those voters who were available to them, they turn around and blame the voters, when it was literally a choice they made to decline engaging with their positions. He is pointing out that it is the party choosing to stick with their corporate-backed positions over gaining voters (i.e. over winning).
They either don't understand, or actively refuse to engage with, coalition-building.