Virtually all major news media, when they refer to Ralph Nader’s 2004 showing, claim that he got .3%.
Actually he got .4%. More exactly, he got .381%. It is convention to round to the nearest digit. Thus, in 1992, Ross Perot got 18.9%. The media always says he got 19%. Quite sensibly, they never say he got 18%.
The only known news source that has the Nader percentage from 2004 as .4% is Ron Gunzberger’s www.politics1.com.
Richard, does anyone aside from a few political scientists & 3rd party fanatics (like us) care about 81/1000ths of 1%?
Mr. Gaines, I don’t know how many people voted in 2004, but I’m sure .1% of them was a large number. Their voices deserve to be heard.
No one said their voices don’t deserve to be heard. However, I’m not sure what the energy spent on badgering the media over the difference between 0.3% and 0.381% accomplishes toward enabling their voices to be heard. It is a statistically meaningless difference. I’m a little more concerned about the media getting the Israel-Palestine conflict and the war in Iraq right than I am about whether they report that Ralph Nader got 3/10ths of 1% or 4/10ths of 1% four years ago.
Nader’s showing at the polls did not reflect his popularity or the voters’ opposition to the war in 2004. His campaign fought law suits, state by state, designed to keep him off of the ballot.So the lion’s share of Nader supporters in so-called safe or unsafe states never had a chance to vote for him.The Democrats had a strategy to beat Nader, but not Bush and so can’t even blame him (falsely as in 2000) for the party’s defeat. This anti-civil rights campaign is the great untold story.
The percentage difference between .3% and .4% is 25%. In other words, the media is slicing Nader’s percentage total by 25%, which is a significant slice.
In 2004, Nader was on the ballot in states containing 50.1% of the voters who voted for president. So it is certainly true that his vote total was artificially reduced. However, in the 16 states in which he wasn’t on the ballot, at least write-ins for him were counted in 12 of them.
Thanks for pointing this out. It IS a significant oversight.