Why I Regret Voting For a Third-Party Candidate

Michelle Niedziela voted for Ralph Nader for president in 2000 and regretted her decision "pretty immediately." Depending on who you ask, Green Party candidate Nader may or may not have cost Al Gore the election. Though Nader took only 2.7 percent of the vote nationwide, he received nearly 100,000 votes in Florida, where George W. Bush beat Gore by only 537 votes. One of those votes was Niedziela's.

This election feels like déjà vu to those of us who were old enough to vote in 2000. As the third-party candidate, Nader mobilized young people much the way Bernie Sanders did in this year's primaries. Many young voters felt invigorated by the possibility of voting for a viable third-party ticket, especially since the major-party candidates, Bush and Gore, left us feeling cold. While thousands of young people are planning to vote third-party this November, voters who remember the tumultuous 2000 election know how dangerous that can be.

For me and most of my friends, the Gore/Bush/Nader showdown of 2000 served as our first election and one of the wildest in recent history. Gore won the popular vote, but a manual recount in Florida left my home state's electoral votes undecided. When we awoke the next day and realized the results still weren't in, we never guessed we'd have to wait until Jan. 6 to find out our president. After 36 days of lawyers, recounts, name-calling, and demonstrations, the Supreme Court halted Florida's recount, and Congress officially certified Bush as the winner.

Whether or not Nader actually contributed to Gore's loss, the 2000 election had an indelible impact on me and my peers, particularly because we cast our votes in the two red counties — Escambia and Santa Rosa — that make up the greater Pensacola, FL, area, which hasn't supported a Democrat for president since John F. Kennedy in 1960. That election had an even deeper impact on Niedziela, a neuroscientist, mother, and friend of mine who now lives in the suburbs of Philadelphia. She voted for Nader in Santa Rosa County in 2000 and wishes she hadn't. What follows is her story, as told to me in a recent interview.

I grew up in Gulf Breeze, FL, up until I graduated high school. I moved to Atlanta and attended Georgia Tech for a year, but then I came back, went to Florida State University, and moved to Tallahassee. And that's when all the sh*t went down. I was 21 years old, and this was my first presidential election.

My driver's license was still in Gulf Breeze, so I voted absentee in my home county of Santa Rosa. North Florida is quite red, even in Tallahassee, which I think does lean more to the Democratic side. Most of the people you meet are military or ex-military, definitely evangelical. Everybody leans very red. My parents were very Republican. Santa Rosa County is kind of like the more rural version of Escambia County [where Pensacola is]. There are two military bases in Santa Rosa, a lot of retired military, and a bunch of small, rural towns. It was even a dry county up until a few years ago — it was that conservative.

Everybody we hung out with tended to be rather liberal, and I tended to be rather liberal through high school, even more so when I went to college. In my senior year of high school, I worked with environmental groups, doing canvassing to prevent drilling off Pensacola Beach. So I was really involved in environmental movements, even before I moved to Tallahassee.

In one ear, I had my dad with a mouthful of very red and Republican recommendations, and I also had a boyfriend who was very liberal and quite vocal about it. At the time, I wasn't vocally political. I am a lot more now, but at the time, I tended to keep stuff to myself. Because of all the noise from my dad and my boyfriend at the time, I just didn't want to tell them who I was voting for. And I never did. I never told either of them.

I think how I voted had a lot to do with what my boyfriend was saying. At the time, I was impressionable, and I'd been with him for a very long time. I didn't realize this until after we broke up — which was shortly after the election — but I had been dating him so long, through my teenage years, that I wasn't quite a full adult on my own. I was always part of this couple. I'm fairly certain that when I made the choice to vote for Nader, it had a lot to do with him. Which sounds so stupid now, especially after the fallout of that election. It seems so not feminist and not strong, but that's kind of what happened.

I was living in Tallahassee [the state capital], and following the election, the weekend of Nov. 17 was also the weekend of the big University of Florida/Florida State University football game. People already had all their hotels booked, because people book hotels for those games like a year in advance. Then all the reporters came in, and they had nowhere to stay. All the reporters were camping on the street. There were reporters everywhere; you were stepping over people just to get to campus. It was a really weird time.

I stayed up all night arguing with my boyfriend on the phone, because I was telling him I thought the outcome was going to change. You could see the results coming in, and I remember watching television and watching all the counties turn colors and thinking, "Oh my god." It was kind of horrific. In the morning, it was still not resolved, and I remember thinking, "This is crazy." At that moment, I also realized how much votes do matter, which was quite a revelation.

Voting absentee in a very red county, I didn't really think my vote would matter. There's a very strong possibility that it didn't. Most people tell you now that if you voted for Nader, it didn't have that much of an impact, especially voting in Santa Rosa County.

But the experience did stick with me in later elections. Realizing that votes do matter and also that I needed to think more critically. Since then, I participate in midterm elections too. I think that's really important. I'm always telling people, the presidential election is almost nothing compared to everything else that you need to also vote for. I learned my lesson, that you need to participate, you need to vote at all opportunities, because it does count. It was a learning experience.

The crazy thing now is that they are actually saying that women in the suburbs of Philadelphia might decide this election. On Saturday Night Live, they even had Tina Fey and Jimmy Fallon dressing up like Philadelphia suburban women who were undecided voters.

The county I'm in now, Bucks County, is pretty divided. It's interesting here for sure. This year is really weird as well, because all over the place there are lawns that have [Donald] Trump signs, and there really aren't any that have Hillary [Clinton] signs. I think those of us who are more left or liberal are kind of afraid of the Trump signs. If I were to put a Hillary sign in my lawn, I feel like I would be targeted. I know a lot of people in Bucks County and Montgomery County, which is just outside of Philadelphia, who are planning to vote for Hillary, but none of them have put up any signs. It's pretty serious around here.

And yes, I'm voting for Hillary.