Thanks, Dio! 
Hey! Did you read the secomd paragraph in my post or note the smiley in my first paragraph? Throw a little love in this direction, man!! 
Lord, you know I love you, John. But neither your first nor your second paragraph addressed the alleged wasting of votes for third parties.
You may extrapolate from that that I believe this to be a rational strategy, in any state in which Bush is showing an insurmountable lead; it is a rational strategy because it’s a foregone conclusion that your vote won’t affect the total under such circumstances, and so inasmuch as your vote matters, it matters because it sends a message. Third-party votes send messages just fine, and therefore aren’t wasted under these circumstances.
Your observations differ from mine. I’ve never seen Bush act like he enjoys a mandate; I have seen him act like he doesn’t give a shit what anyone else thinks of his actions. Given his cavalier disregard for what folks want in his first term, I see no reason to suspect that he’ll soften his policies in a second term, even if he gets only ten percent of the vote.
Votes can send messages, but only to folks interested in hearing them; I see no evidence that Bush is interested in what I say.
Daniel
Third party votes are not wasted votes.
The third party can get enough votes to earn credibility, make a statement and possibly sway the outcome of the election. The third party can also prevent one of the two other candidiates from getting a strong mandate and hopefully arouse the attention of the major parties/players.
There is a common sense vote and a heart vote. Common sense should tell you when to vote with your heart, if you get what I mean.
An unprincipled vote is the only wasted vote.
Did you listen to Arnie’s speech? I thought it thoroughly libertarian.
Damn. How about this: Don’t look at the national polls, just look at your state poll. Unless you live in one of the closely contested states, a vote for a 3rd party candidate might well be in order. I live in CA, and that’s a real possibilty for me.
How supremely arrogant. Please forward a list of your principles so that I may know if my vote is wasted or not.
The only wasted vote is the one that is never cast.
Pollingreport.com provides a summary of recent Presidential polls here. The results of the recent samplings are all over the place.
Also, since the outcome of the US Presidential election turns on the vagaries of the Electoral College, one candidate or the other can be ahead or behind by 20 points in the polls, and it won’t matter, if the trailing candidate is able to win 51% of the vote in states with 270 electoral votes.
If the most recent state polls are accurate, Kerry wins the election if he can swing a handful of votes to him in PA, MN, and IA.
Maybe the election will come down to the wire; maybe it will turn out to be clearly over after the last Presidential debate. If it’s close enough that your vote might make a difference, the gulf between the fundamental philosophies of the two parties has never been larger in my lifetime; it shouldn’t be too tricky to figure out which direction you’d like to help pull the country in. (According to the WaPo, the business world isn’t bothering to hedge its bets anymore.) But if November 2 dawns with us looking at a landslide, then send all the ‘messages’ you want.
Damn, that was funny!
Isn’t it sort of the other way around? As long as the election’s competative, it makes sense to support a minor party candidate, but as long as one of the two major party candidates looks certain to win, it doesn’t. Here’s the way I see it.
First, lets agree that a minor party candidate can’t win the presidency in this country, with the way the electoral system is now. I think that’s a relatively uncontroversial statement. However, what a minor party candidate can do, if the election is close, is prevent a major party candidate from winning. Something like that probably contributed to Bush’s loss to Clinton in 1992, as well as Gore’s loss to Bush in 2000. So, in a close race, this gives the minor party candidate’s supporters a good deal of power to “punish” the major party candidate by not voting for him. If there’s a landslide, though, that power disappears.
The point of this OP is not to discuss third party voting. Libertarian’s post is meant to establish “Kerry cannot win” as conventional wisdom. He’s just doing his part to perpetuate the meme like a good little soldier.
Yeah, the Dope would be a good place to launch an anti-Kerry meme, you dumb fuck. You can give Miss Cleo her mind-reading crystal back.
I suppose it’s possible, but if you look at Liberal’s posts on the board, he’s been pretty consistantly anti-Bush and seems to believe that Kerry is the lesser of two evils.
And, of course, looking, I see that Lib put it more succinctly than I could. (Isn’t Miss Cleo out of business, anyway?)
[QUOTE=Liberal]
Yeah, the Dope would be a good place to launch an anti-Kerry meme, you dumb fuck. You can give Miss Cleo her mind-reading crystal back.[/QUOTE
I had a dumb fuck once. Looking back, though, she wasn’t half bad.
Dude, if your political convictions were so strong that voting for Kerry was morally repugnant to you, then you should say fuck the polls and vote for the candidate you believe in. You should do that regardless of whatever some bullshit poll says.
This isn’t Vegas, or a horse race. It’s an election. You can’t go in “playing the numbers” and then complain about how you’re going against your ideals.
The ideal in this case is to unseat a tyrant. It simply must be done. It is a chore akin to unclogging the toilet — something you don’t look forward to, but something you can’t shirk.
All we disagree on is the method to unclog this particular toilet. You seem to think the only way to do it is sitting on the toilet for untold years, sending thousands of young men & women into the pipes to die, and saddling the homeowner with a crushing debt that will take years for his children to pay off.
There is a better way; hire a better plumber!
Then there’s your answer: vote for Kerry. Your third-party candidate has absolutely no chance of unseating the “tyrant.” (I hate Bush as much as anyone, but I think that’s being more than a little melodramatic.) The Democratic Party nominee does have a chance.