Of all of the candidates only two have a chance of winning. If I vote for someone other than those two, the one that I think is the worst may get elected.
This perspective is self-fulfilling. Vote for your best candidate, Dr. Jill Stein and Gary Johnson are real candidates, and could win, just like Bernie Sanders (which no one expected).
We need to force the two parties to loosen their grip on the political machine in the US. The only way we do that is by supporting third party candidates.
If you want to vote Green, go convince a conservative to vote Libertarian. I did this just last week in PA, a conservative that I don't agree with is completely upset about Trump and is going to vote for Gary Johnson.
> We need to force the two parties to loosen their grip on the political machine in the US. The only way we do that is by supporting third party candidates.
May I suggest that you guys explore elections reform as an option to get fresh faces on the political stage and rejuvenate the whole political process?
What better way to do that then make the two primary parties afraid of losing ground to third parties?
In a race where two third party candidates can siphon votes off the two primary parties, it's finally in the interests of the main parties to move towards something like Ranked Choice.
Unless you can massively convince everyone to do vote for their actual best candidate, it's also very pragmatic.
From experience from other countries, the way shifts that allow a third party/candidate break a "duopoly" happen is slowly -- they incresingly get 5, 10, 15% of the vote, until a momentum builds and people start (rightly) feeling than voting for them doesn't just waste their vote and lets their least favorite of the 2 major candidates elected.
This is the year to do it. There is enough general dissatisfaction with the two parties that there is an opening for both the Green and Libertarian Parties to actually do something that's never been done before.
Which instead of spoiling one major party (Perot and Nader), they would spoil both.
Your wasting your vote if you don't use it to vote your mind.
The perspective may well be self-fulfilling, but it's a perspective held by nearly all voters, so it will self-fulfill whether or not I personally believe it.
Yes, if the entire electorate would just wake up and realize they can vote for anyone they want, then it would no longer be a two-party system. And if a benevolent immortal dictator spontaneously materialized in the White House, we wouldn't need to mess about with this democracy nonsense at all anymore. The second one is not substantially less likely to happen than the first, so it's pointless to consider.
The odds of you vote changing that is tiny. IMO, convincing others to vote for a 3rd party is a bad idea, but voting for them is just as 'meaningless' as any other vote in terms of changing who win. However, the power of voting is in the message not just who wins.
Defacto third party's scare the primary party's so they are quick to gain the talking points as soon as those party gain any traction. Most recently Libertarian message was somewhat co opted by Tea Party Republicans. Though in a very mutated form that for example ignored their drug stance.
