Nader campaign pushes forward in the face of resistance and apathy

While the majority of the nation focused on the presidential race between John McCain and Barack Obama, a small, devoted contingent pulls for another outcome entirely: Ralph Nader for president.

Aiming for 3 million votes nationally, their sights are set beyond 2008 and perhaps beyond a single candidate.

“Whenever you bring up a third party whether its Libertarian, Constitutional, Green or any other third party entity running against the two majors, you run up against a lot of resistance,” David Peyton said.

“Sure it’s a waste of time to people who feel apathetic,” he said, “but I think a lot of people don’t want to, don’t really reside with apathy all the time.”

Peyton is the National Get Out the Vote Coordinator for the Nader/Gonzales campaign. For the past five weeks he has worked out of a sparsely furnished office in Streeterville along with Get Out the Vote Field Coordinator Paul Aranas.

Nader, an activist, author and attorney who leans far left, is running as an independent candidate as he did in 2004.

For the prior two election cycles he was the green party candidate. After the contested 2000 election in which Nader won about 2.9 million votes -- 2.7 percent of the national vote -- he drew criticism for allegedly taking votes from Democrat Al Gore.

When he is not being portrayed as a spoiler, Nader is largely ignored by the mainstream media and shut out of the presidential discourse, Aranas said. A sign hangs in their office reading, “Open the debates.”

“Our views would resonate with mainstream Americans if they had access to them,” Aranas said.

People supporting third party candidates in this election season are usually voting in protest against what they see as too mild a platform, according to Dick Simpson, professor at University of Illinois at Chicago.

Among Nader’s key issues are implementing a Canadian-style, single-payer public health insurance system in which patients have a free choice of hospital and doctor, instituting an alternative energy policy, and cutting the military budget and rapidly withdrawing troops from Iraq.

Peyton said the goals for this campaign are to get three million votes and gather 100,000 supporters who will work towards the key issues beyond 2008. “The idea is that we can take these supporters and this groundswell movement and pressure the Congress and pressure the presidency to move in a more progressive manner,” he said.

About 80 people volunteer for the campaign in the Chicago area, performing such roles as handing out materials, gathering signatures and fundraising. They gathered 52,000 signatures in Illinois, more than double the 25,000 signatures required to get on the ballot in this state.

Advancing the issues rather than a specific candidate is a common goal for third party campaigns. Simpson explained that when a party achieves around 15 percent of the vote, the majority party will often adopt their platform in future election cycles. Such was the case when the Republican Party took on issues from Ross Perot’s campaign, and a large socialist vote impacted Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s policies.

One of the talking points on the campaign is to liken their efforts to historical progressive movements such as abolition, women’s rights and the farm workers movements.

Of the politicians who supported these early movements, Peyton said, “Those were all people who fought for causes that weren’t really popular at the time. … We wouldn’t say that [their constituents] wasted the vote by voting for those people. We wouldn’t say that they wasted the vote by fighting for those causes.”

On Monday, Aranas returned to the office after a day of handing out materials and lending visibility to the campaign in Wrigleyville. “It’s rough at times, then you get the takers who are very enthusiastic,” he said.

Nader is on the ballot in 45 states and the District of Columbia, up from 34 states in 2004 and 44 in 2000.

Simpson said a third-party candidate needed at least 5 percent of the vote to affect the electoral college outcome, though a small margin of third-party votes could be significant in closely contested states such as Color