The Politics of the Environment: Ideas, Activism, Policy, 2nd Edition

Party politics and the environment

5.5 The impact of Ralph Nader

Ralph Nader, the respected veteran consumer

campaigner, contested the 2000 presidential

election on a Green Party ticket. He ran an

impressive high-profile campaign fought on a

broad political programme headed by a fierce

critique of excessive corporate power and

demands for campaign finance reform and

‘clean government’, with the environment given

lower priority. Nader’s support for liberal

policies such as affirmative action, tougher gun

controls and an end to the death penalty,

resulted in a programme similar in many

respects to the left-libertarianism of European

green parties.

Strong pre-election polling, giving Nader up

to 10 per cent in some key states, prompted the

Democratic candidate Al Gore to launch a

negative ‘A vote for Nader is a vote for Bush’

campaign to persuade Nader sympathisers

that, by failing to support Gore, they might put

the Republican, George W. Bush, in the White

House. In the event, Nader received a

respectable 2,878,157 votes (2.73 per cent), a

good result for a third-party candidate. Nader

drew most support in the East and on the West

Coast, including 10 per cent in Alaska and

418,000 votes (3.9 per cent) in California. Many

Democrats blamed Nader for Gore’s defeat

because in Florida and New Hampshire,

Nader’s vote far exceeded Bush’s majority over

Gore. With polls reporting that in the absence

of Nader his supporters would have voted 2:1

for Gore, victory in either state would have

made Gore President.

Nader stood again in 2004, but as an

independent, because the Green Party put up

its own candidate. After four years of a distinctly

anti-environment Bush presidency, most

‘environmentalists’ who had previously

supported Nader decided that now the priority

was to defeat Bush. Nader polled just over

400,000 votes, well under 1 per cent of the

national vote. Rather than encouraging the

Democrats to chase the environmental ‘issue

public’ with a more radical left-libertarian

programme, it seems that the long-term impact

of Nader’s success in 2000 in the context of an

increasingly sharp partisan divide will be to

remind potential defectors from the Democrat

banner of the potentially dramatic

consequences of supporting a third-party

candidate.

representatives are more likely to support tougher environmental measures
than their Republican counterparts (Kamieniecki 1995 :156), with recent
figures (see Box5.6)showing the gap between the two parties widening.^7
Partisan differences became very pronounced during the Reagan presi-
dency (1981–8) when the government enthusiastically pursued environmen-
tal deregulation through a combination of savage budgetary cutbacks and
ideologically committed presidential appointees to key agency posts, includ-
ing the Environmental Protection Agency (Long et al. 1999 :210–11). Hostili-
ties were renewed after the 1994 congressional elections, when the Republi-
can ‘Contract with America’ manifesto identified environmental regulations
as a prime target for its conservative ‘revolution’, leading to further budget
cuts and deregulation. Between these two periods, President Bush (1989–
92), after declaring initially that he would be an ‘environmental president’,
had briefly tried to strengthen the Republicans’ green credentials (Sussman
et al. 2002 :163). Yet, with the exception of the 1990 Clean Air Act, few
new environmental initiatives were forthcoming. Moreover, Bush supported