John McCain is not the only presidential candidate who might benefit from the Democratic Party’s internecine struggle. Some polls are suggesting that some share of Democrats—especially the younger ones—may cast their votes for the Independent candidate Ralph Nader if they are unhappy with the Democratic Party’s eventual nominee.
In recent polls conducted in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Indiana before their primaries, the Suffolk University Political Research Center found about a fourth of likely Democratic voters under the age of 36 saying they may vote for Mr. Nader if the candidate they prefer does not get the nomination. David A. Paleologos, the center’s director, cautioned that the number of young voters sampled in each of the polls was small enough that the young-voter results were not statistically valid for any individual poll. But, he said, the findings from one poll to the next were consistent enough for him to conclude that young Democrats are much more likely than older ones to consider Mr. Nader if they are unhappy with the outcome of the Democratic selection process.
Mr. Paleologos said his surveys’ findings for all age groups suggest that “Obama’s voters have a higher propensity to vote for Nader than Hillary Clinton’s.” Among other polls suggesting that Mr. Nader will fare better in a Clinton-McCain race than an Obama-McCain race are national polls by Zogby International—the most recent of which was conducted late last month—and a poll of likely Michigan voters conducted in early April by the polling firm EPIC-MRA, based in Lansing, Mich. In a national poll of 18- to 24-year-olds conducted back in March, Harris Interactive found 7 percent of the voters in that age group favoring Mr. Nader if Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain are the major party choices, and 4 percent favoring Mr. Nader if Mr. Obama is the Democrats’ pick to go up against Mr. McCain.
Bruce E. Cain, a professor of political science at the University of California at Berkeley, says he interacts with undergraduate students from 10 campuses in his capacity as director of the University of California’s center in Washington, D.C. His sense is that students who support Mr. Obama “would be horribly disillusioned and upset” if Mrs. Clinton became the Democratic nominee through the support of superdelegates. “I think Ralph Nader would have fertile ground to go after their votes,” he says.
Mark Saigh, one of the Nader campaign’s point people in dealing with colleges, says he is not actively going after disillusioned young Democrats, but their defection to Mr. Nader “is bound to happen” as the fight between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton drags on.
The likely impact of youth support for Mr. Nader on the election’s outcome is anything but clear.
Clearly, youth support for third-party candidates has been a factor in other recent presidential elections. The Independent candidate John Anderson got about 11 percent of the under-30 vote in 1980, and H. Ross Perot received about 22 percent of the vote from this age group as an Independent candidate in 1992 and about 10 percent as a Reform Party candidate in 1996, according to exit polls conducted by Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement, a nonpartisan research organization housed at University of Maryland. (In all three elections, the outside candidates received the support of significantly smaller shares of over-30 voters.)
Ralph Nader received less than 1 percent of the vote from people under 30 in the 2000 and 2004 elections. But some Democrats insist that his presence in the 2000 race contributed to George W. Bush’s victory, an assertion Mr. Nader strongly denies.
