This question has come up a lot, obviously, in the discussion of the last couple of presidential elections and the “lesser of two evils” vote. Obviously, most of the people who say that the Nader/Sanders voters bear at least some responsibility for what Bush/Trump did in office are going to be those who voted for the Democratic candidate, while most of those third party voters are probably going to disclaim any responsibility.
Who do you think is “more” right? Or is this simply a matter of perspective, with no objective answer?
Depends on whether you live in a swing state. I have no issue with it if you don’t live in a swing state. If you do then it’s better to vote for the more moderate candidate so the worst one doesn’t win.
Nader helped cost gore the election in Florida. But the gop purging black voters, butterfly ballots, the Supreme Court, etc played a bigger role.
Also if the democrats keep blaming the left every time they lose, the democratic party has no incentive to take its voters wants into account.
Why shouldn’t I vote for the person I think is the best candidate? Why shouln’t I vote for the person who I think has the best policies? It’s still a free country and I can vote for whoever I want. I wouldn’t feel responsible if the worst option got in, it woud be the responsibility of whoever lost the election for not running a better campaign in the first place.
Some. When I vote 3rd party, I’m taking a calculated risk that the polls for my state aren’t badly off, and that my assessment — namely that if the Dems are losing New York they’re so badly hosed nationally that it aint’ gonna matter — is also accurate.
Your turn. Let’s say you vote for the lesser of two evils, ignoring the better (3rd party) candidate, whose views you actually prefer. Over the course of a decade, the Overton window keeps sliding to the right, to the point that we have a far-right party and a center-right party. (Or, if you’re a conservative, then for the sake of argument assume instead that the nation veers in a socialist / nannystate direction and the Republicans are all RINOs now). Do you take responsibility for the effects of your failure to vote for the best candidate?
No one alive has voted for a 3rd party for president as anything more than a protest. If they end up being miserable under a Trump, Bush or a Reagan, then too bad, they got to feel smugly superior for a few hours. If they voted 3rd party in 2016, they even got to tell everyone on Facebook about it.
If Republicans have to worry that Libertarian candidates (or Reform Party candidates or whatever) are going to lure away a few percent of their natural constituency, then to lure them back the wily Republican may opt to start supporting issues that those parties push for. If Democrats have to worry about Green (or Citizens or Socialist Worker or whatever) candidates doing the equiv, the strategic Democratic candidate may opt to embrace those issues.
Not at all. I’m amazed with 330 million people in the US we are stuck with 2 bad choices. A mentally ill moron vs. a guy who seems to have 1 foot in the grave and he’s never had a real job outside politics since the early 70s.
Personally, it’s my opinion that people vote third party to avoid feeling responsible for what the presidential winner might do in office. They always get to say- “not my fault, I didn’t vote for him.” I’m sure not every single person voting third party feels that way, some may genuinely believe in Libertarianism or Greenism or whatever. But I think they feel like they should vote but don’t want to make a choice that actually matters.
That’s not true. All those Green Party protest votes in 2000 really showed the Democrats. They nominated John Kerry. 2016 protest votes for Jill Stein because ‘Bernie got screwed’ results in Joe Biden.
So, no. 3rd party votes are protest votes and a purity orgasm.
I was married to someone who voted for Nader so “the Democratic Party would get the message.” They didn’t. And why would they? It makes no sense to try to please the 2-3% (max) that might go for the third party candidate and alienate the other 97% that thinks the third party candidate is too extremist.
If you vote your conscience, your conscience had better consider the costs of doing so right now. My state isn’t a swing state, but I’m not supporting anyone who thinks it’s OK to draw votes away from Trump’s opponent in swing states. There’s just too much at stake.
There are a lot of ideas that were not on anyone’s radar; then they became elements of the Green Party platform: a serious initiative for environmental responsibility called the “Green New Deal”; and universal health insurance coverage of the “single payer” variety.
I’ll give plenty of credit to candidate Bernie Sanders for the latter; he probably had more to do with pushing it into the mainstream than the Green Party did although he did benefit somewhat from our own independent PR efforts to promote the concept. But “Green New Deal” was ours. It was drawing attention and people were liking it. People were casting Green votes because of it. To fend us off, the Democratic Party started talking up their own “green new deal”. 'twas a bit watered down but still, in all fairness, a responsible push in a direction that things needed to go.
Meanwhile, as I’ve said before, New York is reliably blue. We aren’t going to turn it green. Nor will our votes make it possible for the Republicans to put it into the red column. Not gonna happen. If that were even a remote possibility, it implies that Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Florida, Wisconsin, Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, and Georgia are all going Republican, which kind of makes it moot whether or not NY does so as well.
Don’t speak to me as if I were a lulled simpleton. Consider whether you yourself are one.
Isn’t Thomas Friedman the first to come up with the idea of a Green New Deal? And, single payer has been talked about since at least the end of WWII.
It’s just real hard to take such a party seriously with Jill Stein partying it up with Putin and Michael Flynn in Moscow and Cynthia McKinney going on a Holocaust denial kick.
Suppose the worse candidate wins by ten votes, and ten voters reason like you. Do they absolve each other? In your thought experiment, take it down to just TWO voters; assume you and the other voter are friends. When Trump wins by two, do you link pinkies and pledge to hold each other blameless?
Or take the “thought experiment” up to 11,000 voters. In Michigan 2016 Hillary lost to Trump by less than 11,000 votes; while Johnson got a whopping 172,000 votes; Jill Stein got 51,000. All innocent, hunh? The same thing was going on in Pennsylvania: Since Hillary needed both those states, do the Michiganders absolve the Pennsylvanians and vice versa?
A related matter: The magnificent albatross is endangered by plastic debris in the ocean. Should a person feel free to throw plastic into the ocean if he reasons that his vote to pollute isn’t the specific vote that renders albatrosses extinct?
