Oh, good, Ralph Nader is in the race.  All we need to do now is figure out why.  Until then, here are some thoughts on what the effect might be. 

The impact of other candidates coming from the left will likely be minimal, if recent trends are any indication.  A little more than half a million voters backed Nader’s independent run and the official Green nominee in 2004, and these tended to be concentrated in strongly Democratic states.  As we all know, the fear of Nader playing the spoiler again suppressed support for him and diverted many one-time Nader voters into Kerry’s column.  Greens have flourished best at a statewide level in states where siphoning off votes from Democrats typically does not normally affect the outcome.  However, Greens have sometimes acted as spoilers in several New Mexico elections, the most important of which was the gubernatorial race in ’94 when Roberto Mondragon weakened Bruce King’s bid for re-election and helped ensure the victory of Gary Johnson.  (Johnson probably could have won without the help of the Greens in a very good year for Republicans, but 1994 was one of the first elections when the Greens made a large difference in the final Democratic vote tally.)  The potential exists for Greens to sap Democratic numbers in New Mexico and deliver a swing state to the other party.  Even so, in federal elections many Greens in New Mexico typically fall in line and back the Democrat, and this year the pressure to do that will be greater than usual, especially when the Green nominee is the sad Cynthia McKinney. 

It is undoubtedly true that Nader is wasting his time, but I have to wonder whether the progressives who find Obama’s hope-and-unity act insufficiently radical and bold would be willing to throw in their lot with Nader or with the Greens in some effort to prove a point.  It seems unlikely that any campaign could gain much traction by trying to say that Obama is not progressive enough, but if that perception of Obama takes hold on the far left it could conceivably have an effect.  If people inclined to vote Green as a protest or as an expression of their disagreement with neoliberalism in the Democratic Party are already likely to view the Democratic Party as not significantly different from their opponents, might they be even more strongly inclined to support a third party on the left when they hear Obama’s rhetoric that emphasises all the things the two parties have in common?  The kind of people who have voted for Nader and the Greens in the past are not interested in bipartisan cooperation–they see this as a, possibly the, problem, not something desirable that has been lacking in recent years.  The things that are supposed to make Obama an appealing “post-partisan” figure are exactly the sorts of thing that drives potential Nader and Green voters crazy.  Strongly ideological and protest voters don’t want “post-partisanship.”  Ironically, the more the GOP is able to show that Obama is a left-liberal the more they are likely to help him keep these voters in his column. 

Obviously, in terms of substance Obama and McCain are actually fairly far apart on many major policies and Obama is not politically anything like Al Gore, but if there is a sizeable number of progressives objecting to Obama’s style, particularly his lack of combativeness and his preference for consensus-building, then that could contribute to a largely unforeseen, minor but still potentially meaningful rebellion on the left.  In the event that the election turned on New Mexico, which is not terribly likely but could happen, the Greens and Naderites could tip the balance again.