Poll choices: why would 1% vote "Other", but 5% vote Nader?

[MoonRiver]

It's totally illogical. "Other" includes Nader plus Camejo, and, well, all candidates "other" than Kerry & *. Therefore, in my mind at least, this category should be higher than Nader alone! Die hard Naderites would vote "Other" rather than Kerry or *, wouldn't they?

:shrug:

http://www.pollingreport.com/wh04gen.htm

[fujiyama]

1. Nader

won't do nearly as well as he's polling.

I remember in some states, he was polling as high as 10% last time. On election day, the highest he got in any state (other than AK) was around 5%.

I hate the SOB as much as anyone else, but I won't waste my time worrying about him too much. The only ones voting for him on election day, are those that wouldn't have voted at all...and probably those trapped in his cult of personality.

[mitchtv]

6. Nader...

A totally owned subsidiary of the Republican party.

[ayeshahaqqiqa]

2. Putting Nader in there seperately

is part of the media spin that puts Nader up as the third party candidate to beat. If I were the Libertarian, Constitutional, or Green Party candidate, I'd be ticked off. Nader is not a candidate of any national party; if anyone deserved to be called 'other', it would be him.

[SheilaT]

3. Recently I was at a political thing

and a well-known politico (Joe Trippi, if you insist) said that his worst nightmare was that going in to election day Kerry would be ahead by quite a bit -- I forget now exactly what numbers he was projecting. Because then, he said, all the Nader people would feel free to vote for Ralph, and all the Dean people and Kucinich people and the others who really aren't all that enthusiastic about Kerry would feel free to stay home. And then there'd be a chance that Bush would actually win in a fair way.

Remember that among the reasons Dewey lost in 1948 was that he seemed so far ahead in the polling that a lot of his supporters didn't bother to vote.

[Myrina]

4. Name recognition

Can anyone on the street name the candidate for the Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Constitution, Socialist Worker's and/or Communist Party ??? I know I can't.

The only reason Nader got 5% is because people remember him as a civic activist and from '96 and 2000.

'Other' is a catch-all "none of the above" category that Nader should be part of, since he's not even associated with a party at this point (I'm not sure if he truly joined the Reformer's or not) ...

[MoonRiver]

5. Yes, there's more reason to list the Green candidate separately than Nader

Just shows what the REAL agenda of most of these pollsters is. :mad: