I have taken it upon myself to show why it is ludicrous to vote for Nader if you are a genuine progressive in this country. Despite his ridiculous chances of winning; his acceptance of GOP money, support, and signatures in Arizona, Oregon, and Michigan; and his pathetic performance in his debate against Howard Dean to name a few indications why Ralph Nader is not a viable progressive candidate, I'm going to throw the Nader contingency every bone they've asked for and then some.
To start off, let's make a few generous assumptions about Ralph:
- Nader is the perfect, archetypical progressive candidate (in spite of my reservations above).
- Nader will make it onto every state's ballot (though even he doesn't expect this).
To show why voting for Nader is mind-bogglingly anti-progressive, I will calculate some very generous expected values with the above assumptions in mind. What is an expected value?
If you've ever walked into a casino or played the lottery, you have encountered expected values. As a matter of fact, it is the very expected values which make casinos and lotteries so profitable.
An expected value is simply the probability of an event occuring times the sum of the value of all the favorable outcomes. The expected value of a lottery ticket, for instance, is the probability that you win times the amount you would get if you win. Lotteries make money by raising the price of a ticket higher than the expected value of the ticket. In the long run, they will make boatloads despite occasional losses. Make sense?
To pick the best progressive candidate, it behooves us to calculate the expected progressive value of each candidate. Since George Bush clearly does not fit the criteria of a progressive candidate, we'll use him to standardize Nader and Kerry. To express the outcome value of Kerry and Nader, I assigned each a proportion difference from George W. Bush.
Let's start by evaluating John F. Kerry. To appease all the Nader supporters here (and throw them a huge bone, as promised) I'll go along with the Nader meme that there is very little difference between Bush and Kerry (even despite the DOMA, FMA, the tax cut, healthcare, foreign policy, military service records, outsourcing, Halliburton, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft, and the PATRIOT act to name a few differences...). For Kerry's outcome value I'll assign Kerry just a 10% difference from Bush, or .1. As you'll see by the end of this exercise, even a 1% difference would justify voting Kerry over Nader, but we'll get back to that later...
For Nader's outcome value, I'll give Ralph a difference 10 times higher than that of Kerry, or 100%, 1.0
Now we need to determine some probabilities for each candidate. What this really comes down to is the oomph of your vote; the liklihood that your vote affects the election. Of course, this varies from state to state, so I'll just focus on the states that matter; the swing-states (perhaps in a later diary I will go into the non-swing states and why it's still better to vote for Kerry).
By definition, a swing state is one in which two of the candidates are in a statistical dead-heat. Now here's the reality; Bush leads Nader by over 40 percentage points in every swing state; that correlates to millions of votes per state. The difference between Kerry and Bush in these states is just a few points (<5% and usually <3%) correlating to a few thousand, at the most 10-20 thousands votes.
Let's take things to an extreme: Let's assume that Bush is leading Nader by only 1,000,000 votes in each state (insanely generous of me, but ok) and the difference between Bush and Kerry is 20,000 votes (which is absurd since Florida and New Mexico were determined by less than 1,000 votes each in the last election). To determine the "oomph" of your vote, you simply take the inverse of the vote differential. Thus a Kerry vote has an oomph of (1/20,000) and a Nader vote has an oomph of (1/1,000,000). This is extremely, outrageously generous of me since I scaled up the Kerry differential and scaled down the Nader differential significantly. Even so: watch what happens when we calculate expected values with these unrealistically skewed inputs in favor of Nader.
The expected progressive value of a Kerry vote becomes
(0.1) * (1/20,000) = .000005
The expected progressive value of a Nader vote becomes
(1.0)*(1/1,000,000)=.000001
Thus even when we give Nader every benefit of the doubt and doubt Kerry for every benefit, a vote for Kerry contributes 5 times more to progress than a vote for Nader under our current plurality system.
QED and Game over, Nader.
Update: My back of the envelope calculation shows that, even with the unreasonable assignment of .1 to Kerry and 1.0 to Nader for their progressive outcome values, a Kerry vote is several hundred to a thousand times more progressive than a Nader vote.