In 2000 I voted in my first presidential election. In that election I voted for Ralph Nader.
(Waits for the booing to stop...)
So I’ll explain myself and my vote. I lived in Kentucky, there was NO way Kentucky was not going to go for Bush in that election. Had Kentucky been a closer election (like Florida, New Hampshire, etc...), I would have voted for Al Gore. You may recall in 1994 the Democrats were obliterated in off-year elections; resulting in the first of many successive GOP lead Congresses. As a result, many Democrats moved to a Republican-lite approach. If not Republican-lite, Democrats were certainly afraid of being, you know, Democrats. Al Gore’s Social Security “lockbox” did nothing to warm the cockles of my 18-year-old heart. So here’s Nader saying things about corporate influence in politics and generally liberal things, so I made a protest vote in the hopes that the greater Democratic Party would hear me.
So what happened with all those Nader protest votes? Well the margin of Nader victory was sufficient to flip New Hampshire and Florida for Bush. The result was the worst administration on nearly every front since the Gilded Age. And did Democrats hear the siren call of its base? Nope. Want to see some vitriol? Just say you voted for Nader in a comment thread somewhere on this blog, that will sum up the effect those votes had for the Democratic Party. And look I get it, Bush was terrible. And again, if my vote “counted” I would have voted for Gore.
So let’s fast forward to today, 2016, and Clinton v. Trump. There are still some folks eyeing a third-party vote and this PSA is directed to you. Don’t do it. Seriously just don’t. First, the candidates: anti-vax moonbeam loon Jill Stein and Gary “the bong” Johnson. Really? What statement are you trying to make here? Look, if you want the failed economic policies of the Bush administration, with the incoherent foreign policy of a Rand Paul, and pot, then this is your dude. If you voted for Bernie Sanders and now you are going for Johnson, did you ever actually pay attention to Bernie Sanders? For Stein, honestly I doubt I can communicate with you seeing as how I am not a druid that can speak the language of nature and rainbow farts.
Second, you actually had a chance to make a protest vote: Bernie Sander! Hey, I made that very same protest vote. And you know what happened? Hillary Clinton started on the left and moved further to the left. The DNC platform is the most progressive in history. Clinton is running on a platform of assistance for childcare, paid family leave, tuition assistance, higher taxes on the wealthy, a massive infrastructure initiative, and the list keeps going.
Third, in 2000 you could see that Bush would make a pretty terrible president; however, could you honestly say he was not qualified to be president? He was a two-term governor of the second largest state. His father was president and he surrounded himself with people who had significant government experience. Now Trump, he started his campaign calling Mexicans rapists and only went down from there. He recruited his team from, presumably, Mos Eisley and on every single “policy” he is worse than Bush, and Bush was an all-time bad president. If running a campaign is a controlled experiment in how you would handle the presidency, then Donald Trump’s parade of advisers has been one long succession of stepping on rakes.
So there are your choices. A third-party protest vote when you already had a protest vote. A Democratic Party that has been more responsive to its base, and Donald Trump. The more you know!