AHC/WI: Ralph Nader deadlocks the Electoral college

I don't think it's really possible or realistic for him to win an Electoral Vote himself (ignoring faithless electors or any major PODs), but given the nature of the 2000 election, a better Nader performance (or a different distribution of his votes) has the potential to make Bush and Gore tie with 269 electoral votes each, sending it to the House...
 
Barring faithless electors, the only way I could see Nader making a breakthrough into the Electoral College is if some *large* state decides to award its electoral votes proportionately (not by winner-takes-all and not by congressional districts--even in 2000 Nader did not get better than ten percent in any congressional district) so that Nader's getting five percent of the vote in the state (which has, say, twenty electoral votes) would get him one elector from the state. But this is very unlikely to happen--big states are jealous of the power winner-takes-all gives them.

As for what would happen, the same thing would happen as in any other election where no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College--it goes into the House, to be decided by one-delegation-one-vote. In the actual 2000 election, this would result in Bush winning. But a country where Nader does far better than he did in OTL--and yet somehow this does not lead to an Electoral College majority for the Republican--is so different politically from the US as we know it that it is impossible to say what the composition of the House would be.
 
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Wallet

Banned
If Nader someone how won Florida, that deadlocks the electoral college.

Have him be born in Florida and have a Cuban wife. He is more populist. Both Gore and Bush make anti Cuban gaffes.
 
If Nader someone how won Florida, that deadlocks the electoral college.

Have him be born in Florida and have a Cuban wife. He is more populist. Both Gore and Bush make anti Cuban gaffes.

Florida wasn't even one of Nader's stronger states; he got 1.63 percent of the vote there, compared with 2.74% nationwide. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2000 There aren't enough Cubans in the state to give it to him even if somehow GW Bush alienated the Cuban vote (which is very hard to see--"Castro bad, bad, bad" was the standard GOP line, and one from which no Bush had any inclination to depart). Nader's views on Cuba were ofcourse standard for his kind of leftism: "that the U.S. press should make more mention of Cuban society’s achievements and positive aspects." http://www.counterpunch.org/2002/07/15/ralph-nader-in-cuba/

Actually, what is slightly more plausible--though still wildly implausible--is for Nader to carry Alaska, his best state (10 percent of the vote), thereby reducing Bush to 268 electoral votes! (Given that 58.62 percent of the vote in Alaska went to Bush, and that any additional Nader votes in the state would probably come more from Gore's vote than from Bush's, this is still, as I say, wildly implausible. But it's slightly more plausible than Nader carrying Florida.)

BTW, in 1992 Ross Perot got nineteen percent of the vote and still didn't break into the Electoral College! That shows how third party candidates, even if they get far more votes than Nader ever plausibly could, cannot break into the Electoral College unless their vote is regionally concentrated to a much greater degree than Nader's was.
 
It´s impossible to "deadlock" Electoral College. They vote just once, in their several States, without knowing how the other States vote. When their votes are counted, almost a month later, if they haven´t made a choice, it´s Representatives who would make it.
Now, the Representatives can be deadlocked. Happened in 1801, and could happen again.
 
Barring faithless electors, the only way I could see Nader making a breakthrough into the Electoral College is if some *large* state decides to award its electoral votes proportionately (not by winner-takes-all and not by congressional districts--even in 2000 Nader did not get better than ten percent in any congressional district) so that Nader's getting five percent of the vote in the state (which has, say, twenty electoral votes) would get him one elector from the state. But this is very unlikely to happen--big states are jealous of the power winner-takes-all gives them.

As for what would happen, the same thing would happen as in any other election where no candidate gets a majority in the Electoral College--it goes into the House, to be decided by one-delegation-one-vote. In the actual 2000 election, this would result in Bush winning. But a country where Nader does far better than he did in OTL--and yet somehow this does not lead to an Electoral College majority for the Republican--is so different politically from the US as we know it that it is impossible to say what the composition of the House would be.
Did a thread on this once, where all states allocate proportionally
https://www.alternatehistory.com/fo...l-evs-had-been-awarded-proportionally.392834/

Bush 269
Gore 263
Nader 6

GOP controlled most state delegations, meaning President Bush, whilst Democrats had 50 Senate seats + tie-breaking vote by Gore, meaning Vice-President Lieberman.

Calculation:
Candidates who didn't get enough for 1 EV were discarded from the calculation. EVs were rounded up to the nearest whole number, and winning a state ensured said candidate would have at least one more EV than his competitor - Ohio would have split 10-10-1, but since GWB got most votes and Nader was furthest away from the votes necessary for a whole electoral vote, it split 11-10-0.

... then have Bush choke on that pretzel and you get President Lieberman :p
 
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