Oh Puh-leeeeze. Nowhere did I say that I based my vote on one idiot comment. Only that it reinforces my decision with a certain degree of emotional satisfaction, which your comment has doubled.

I mean honestly, do you think insulting people who refuse to march in lockstep is a good strategy? Are all unity-criers this tactless? It boggles the mind.

Saying a vote for a third party is a vote for the other guy, under the above conditions, seems to be missing the point of why third party voters cast their votes in the first place.

Good comments and thanks for bringing up the “us vs them” dynamic or the “you’re for us or you’re against us” which pervades these kind of remarks. THAT is more responsible for being ONE of many, many, many reasons I vote third part and to have it written off as responding to a blog posting is just dismissiveness and paternalism which is symptomatic of that mentality.

Really, it’s disappointing to hear this mentality from so-called progressives and feminists. Because the place I usually hear it the most is from cops.

Saying a vote for a third party is a vote for the other guy, under the above conditions, seems to be missing the point of why third party voters cast their votes in the first place.

Yes. If you vote to make a “statement” about how you view the world, it makes all the sense in the world to vote third party.

If you vote based on what the concrete, measurable impacts of one of the two possible winners taking the election will be, voting third party is dumb as a box of rocks in a close election.

I’ll vote third party if an election isn’t close at all, and if that third party has a clear strategy for winning their goals. I think building viable third parties is very important for America, and we should work for instant runoff voting to make more viable parties possible. If a third party isn’t spending the majority of their time working toward instant runoff voting, I tend to think they’re full of crap.

To get specific. In this presidential election, if McCain wins, I know that more people will die than if Obama wins. The dead people will generally be the most oppressed people. Very poor people, people in colonized nations, etc. So, probably not me.

So, since those people aren’t me, I could choose to ignore them and make my vote a statement.

Or, I could recognize that people’s lives are more important than a hissy fit about my political ideals.

If I want to make a statement, I’ll write a book or create a piece of art. That’s not what voting is for.

I might like to shake things up a bit. Though I haven’t voted for a winner since the first time I voted (’96).

So it doesn’t make any freaking sense for voters who sincerely want their major party to win to complain and treat third party voters like they should just suck it up and deal or else they’ve as good as voted for McCain. It’s not the fault of the third party voter, but the fault of the major party for not giving the third party voter a good policy reason to stick around.

Oh, I certainly agree that its the fault of the party and not the third party voter. I also agree that attacking third party voters is illogical and divisive. I think a lot of the problem is that logic doesn’t always factor into human decision making processes as we would like to believe it does. Politics is about big, important, sometimes literally life-or-death issues and people get passionate. I’ve noticed that the people most likely to say “A vote for third party X is a vote for opposition party Y” are the people who get sucked into the us vs. them mentality fostered by the two party system. To that mindset, of course a third party voter should suck it up and vote for the lesser of two evils. They’ve already sucked it up on a variety of issues, they’ve already invested so much into their choice, and they’re so terrified of the immediate threat of losing that they see any deviation as being either stupid or disloyal. It doesn’t make sense, but then again human motivation rarely does.

The reality is that voting is kind of a ridiculous idea anyway. The impact of any one person’s vote is so dilute that it rarely makes a difference because of the sheer number of votes cast and the electoral college discouraging outliers, and on the rare occasions when a few hundred (or thousand) votes might make a difference the result goes to court because counting votes is imprecise and corruption universal. Even if you can get past the fact that individual votes are unlikely to get through the noise, the people you’re voting for aren’t that different. Obama and McCain (or really any two major party candidates for any elected office) agree on far more things than they disagree on. They agree on the basic tenets of government and social interaction that many third party voters reject, they agree on the status quo because they’re generally people who’ve done well under it, they agree about social order and cohesion, they agree about the big issues that most people with social influence or power agree about (for better or worse). If, by some chance, you manage to suspend your disbelief long enough to get through the issues of noise and similarity, you run into the fact that our government is designed to be conservative. A president can be overridden by congress (stacked with hundreds of people who went through the same vetting process as presidents do to ensure their loyalty to the status quo) or by the courts (staffed by their rivals over the course of generations).

Saying a vote for a third party is a vote for the other guy, under the above conditions, seems to be missing the point of why third party voters cast their votes in the first place.

Anyone who bases their vote on a fit of pique over something someone said on a blog instead of what’s going to create the best outcome for the country really needs to reevaluate their priorities.

Oh Puh-leeeeze. Nowhere did I say that I based my vote on one idiot comment. Only that it reinforces my decision with a certain degree of emotional satisfaction, which your comment has doubled.

I mean honestly, do you think insulting people who refuse to march in lockstep is a good strategy? Are all unity-criers this tactless? It boggles the mind.

What I do not understand is why so many bright, politically-active people think the problem is with third party voters. With the presidential campaigns, the major parties can count on at least some third party members voting for their candidates for whatever reason. (They really like that candidate, they don’t like the other major party candidate, the list goes on.) When the major party starts losing votes to the third party, the major party is the one with the problem. They need to woo their base back, or they won’t be able to win with just “the base plus some” because the base just shrunk. It doesn’t pay in that situation to act like you can make up the difference with the political center, because you’re competing with the other party and it’ll be too difficult. But nobody’s going after those third party voters.

So it doesn’t make any freaking sense for voters who sincerely want their major party to win to complain and treat third party voters like they should just suck it up and deal or else they’ve as good as voted for McCain. It’s not the fault of the third party voter, but the fault of the major party for not giving the third party voter a good policy reason to stick around.

Why would rank and file Democrats look at Nadar’s role in the election and conclude that they should shame anyone considering a third-party candidate instead of looking at their own policies and asking how they can attract some of those third party voters? I don’t get it.

Because, sadly, the system we have right now makes 3rd parties a largely Pyhrric situation. The two major parties in this country are both essentially populist parties with very slight ideological leanings; both contain extreme and radical members, but the Dems and the GOP pretty much spend most of their time seeking the votes of people in the middle 68.2% of the population. People who fall a little farther from that middle chunk end up being the base, and people who are a bit further out than them from the mainstream end up voting 3rd party.

It isn’t an accident that most third parties in this country are either very extreme or single issue parties. They’re formed by the handful of people who are so disgusted with the mainstream pandering of the big two that they strike out on their own. The Greens started out as basically a one issue party and have now become a broadly progressive party, the Constitution party is pretty much the party of the Rapture, the Libertarians are minarchists, but what they all have in common is that their views sound a little crazy to the people in the middle and their actions seem treasonous to the party elites.

A lot of Democrats have disdain for people thinking about voting Green for the same reason that a lot of Republicans hate the Ron Paul people: they see the primary purpose of elections not as being a forum for the voice of the people but as a means of deciding who’s voices will be heard. People who say a green vote is a vote for McCain (or Bush) could very well be identifying a likely outcome, but what they fail to see is exactly what you’re failing to see in them: that some people might not hold the same basic assumptions of what the purposes of political engagement are

Anyone who bases their vote on a fit of pique over something someone said on a blog instead of what’s going to create the best outcome for the country really needs to reevaluate their priorities.

Especially since the recent mess with Texas- only Bob Barr was on the ballot because neither the Dems nor the Reps submitted their application to get on the ballot in time, and the state of Texas just decides to let them on anyway??? It is absolutely not acceptable for the two party system to dominate political life so completely that the law no longer applies to them. When the institution does not fear for its life, it’s not going to be receptive to change from within or outside. Why would rank and file Democrats look at Nadar’s role in the election and conclude that they should shame anyone considering a third-party candidate instead of looking at their own policies and asking how they can attract some of those third party voters? I don’t get it.