Seen threads for Kerry and threads for Bush, but I know we have a fair chunk of Dopers who’ll be voting for neither this fall. So here’s your chance to convince me.
I’m a college student in a swing state who plans to vote for Kerry. Why should I consider a third party candidate?
There’s two ways to go with this.
Are you fond of a particular third party ideology? If you are in agreement with Libertarians, or Greens or some other group then like minded people could try and convince you of the worth of that parties cause.
Or, this could be a discussion of in general why voting for a third party is worth doing.
I think both are fairly good reasons. The point of voting, IMHO, isn’t to vote for whoever is going to win. It’s to vote for the choice that you would want. I live in Massachusetts. I look forward to my next chance to vote against Ted Kennedy. There is no real possibility of him not being reelected, but this won’t change people like me don’t continue to try. Maybe some day enough people will vote against Ted (say 30% or so) that it will start to become a possibility that he could lose. Then a viable candidate could make a run against him.
There is also the attitude that you simply never know what’s going to happen. No one was predicting that the ballot question to eliminate the entire MA state income tax would come within a few percentage points of passing.
Also, by voting for a third party candidate, you can actually affect policy much more than by voting for a candidate directly. For instance: If Kerry knows that Nader is going to take a portion of his voters, Kerry might take some of his ideas in order to swing those voters back in the next election.
You know that 28% of the people voted against Kennedy in the 2000 election, right?