8,000 Rally for Nader in Seattle

Ralph Nader, the Green Party presidential candidate, drew more than 8,000 paying supporters to a rally here Saturday night, a turnout that far exceeds daily crowds drawn by the major party candidates but that seems to be doing little to shore up Nader’s position in voter polls.

The event was the third in a series of Nader “super rallies” that have been drawing some of the largest crowds of the presidential campaign. Nader drew 10,000 in Portland, Ore., last month, and Friday night in Minneapolis he spoke to an estimated 12,000--the largest rally of the 2000 race outside of the national conventions, his aides said.

“Nader is the only candidate speaking to issues I care about, and he’s the only one with any credibility,” said Mary Cavanaugh of Poulsbo, Wash., as she waited for the speech. “If we don’t get big money out of the system, we don’t have a democracy.”

Saturday’s rally in Key Arena, a Seattle sports auditorium, took on the air of a progressive revival show with comments by Nader, a video-fed speech by running mate Winona LaDuke and an appearance by populist social critic Jim Hightower, the former Texas agriculture commissioner. It also included a brief performance by Eddie Vedder, lead singer for the rock band Pearl Jam.

“This is a great turnout,” Nader said. “This crowd is bigger than my whole hometown in Connecticut. We are atttracting more people than Bush and Gore. They have to pay people to come out and see them.”

Nader’s campaign touts the events as a rally, but they also serve as fund-raisers. Nader’s staff declined to say how much money has been raised at the events, but attendees pay from $7 to $10 to get in.

Additional rallies are planned in October for Boston and Chicago.

Even without an entry fee, aides for the major party nominees--Democrat Al Gore and Republican George W. Bush--say they have not drawn crowds to a rally that are near the size of Nader’s recent events.

Jano Cabrera, a Gore spokesman in Nashville, said the vice president’s largest post-convention crowd was 8,000 at a Labor Day rally in Pittsburgh, followed by 5,000 in Moline, Ill. Bush officials have said his largest post-convention crowds came during his train trip through the Midwest, which they claimed drew 5,000 to 7,000 people.

On Saturday, rally-goers said they were drawn both by their support for Nader and their opposition to the major parties.

“Voting for Bush or Gore is like throwing my vote away,” said Frank Jackson, 23, of Tacoma. “I want to get the ball rolling for an alternative party.”

The crowd Saturday was enthusiastic and largely under age 50. An undercurrent to the event was the demand that Nader and Reform Party candidate Pat Buchanan be included in the upcoming debates between Gore and Bush.

“It is very important that Nader participate in the debates,” said Bill Morris, 48, of Issaquah, Wash. “Without him, you have two people who are a lot alike talking about things they agree on.”

At a news conference before the event, Nader focused on local issues that dovetail into his broader positions. He registered his support for a moratorium on logging in national forests and for breaching dams on the Snake River that have threatened salmon habitats.

Nader also called for genetic testing and labeling of food in the wake of the recall of Kraft Food’s Taco Bell Home Originals taco shells that were found to contain genetically altered corn not approved for human consumption.

Scott Royder, Washington state coordinator for Nader, said the campaign is striving to reach “the people who are so fed up that they don’t even vote.”

Nationally, his poll numbers have hovered around 3%. But if there is Nader country, it is in the Northwest.

In the 1996 presidential election, Nader received less than 1% of the vote nationally but picked up 4% of the vote in Oregon and 2.6% in Washington. Recent local polls have shown him running as high as 8% in Oregon and 6% in Washington.

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Times staff writer Scott Martelle contributed to this story.