When I lived in London my junior year of college, I learned about tactical voting. It was also the fall of 2000, so I got to watch a presidential election in a foreign country coming off a summer working for NYPIRG listening to soft Nader rhetoric (except for the one day we went to the park and our field director told us Bush and Gore were the same thing, never mentioned Nader though). I would have voted for Nader, but never got my absentee ballot. I’m from New York, so the state wasn’t in play.
Which leads me to tactical voting. The UK has three national parties, Labour, Conservative, and Liberal Democrat. Conservatives are, as you would think, our Republicans, with less God and guns. The split on the left is not easily translated into the wings of the Democratic party. At the time, Labour was in power with Blair and was playing the centrist third way card after an eerily similar period of Thatcher winning decisive elections followed by Major who lost after the years of incumbency caught up to the conservative cold warriors (Regan=Thatcher Bush=Major Blair=Clinton). Labour was the technocratic party relying on the votes of the working class while Liberal Democrats were the party of liberal professionals who had no problem raising taxes on themselves. To my American eyes, Labour the Democrats, Lib Dems the Greens. Thing is, both parties win seats in the legislature. And combined their votes are higher than the Conservatives in a lot of districts. So in a lot of districts the voters would figure out who was the more likely to win between the two and vote for that candidate, just to beat the Tory. In districts where the two parties were the main rivals all bets were off, as were districts were all three were legit players. But most districts favored one party or the other. I thought it was great tactics working on behalf of the larger strategy.
This year there are two different presidential races that make me think about tactical voting. I know there’s been a lot of angst on the part of Hillary supporters and the FP about party loyalty, which I agree with to a degree. If you support Bernie Sanders and his message and you live in a state that is up for grabs, you cannot call yourself a progressive and not vote for the Democrat in the election. I know that sounds all condescending and whatnot, but if you’re coming onto a partisan website and can’t handle some partisan whipping, then what the fuck are you doing here exactly? That’s the entire fucking point of engaging on a partisan goddamn website.
That said, notice I used the caveat “live in a state that is up for grabs” and have been talking about tactical voting. I live in a blue city in a blue state. I can vote for the Green party at my leisure, the Democrat still wins, and I do it all the time. When I do vote for Democrats, I do it on the Working Families Party line whenever possible to show my support for unions. So by all means, if you are in a position to vote for another party do so. It shows the Democrats that there are votes to their left.
The other race, the one that made me think about this topic at all, is the Republican primary. Mitt Romney outlined the absolute best way to deny Trump the nomination: vote for the candidate most likely to win the state. The primaries are really just a huge insider exercise, a sort of months long convention. What with communications the way they are, the campaigns and their core voters could totally combine forces and screw over the Trump mob and throw it to the convention. But there are too many players between the three candidates and their staffs to do something like that. I wish they could get their act together, I think there is an anti-Trump majority in the Republican Party and I’ve been rooting for Cruz the entire time. He’s obviously the best candidate to defeat. We would wipe the floor with the face of the nihilist wing of the Republican Party once and for all. Repudiating Cruz would force the Republicans to at least consider being a governing party instead of a whining party.