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If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all? If it's just a question of making yourself feel better, stay at home and throw darts at a picture of Kamala Harris, and let the people who actually care about who becomes President do the voting.
What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.
If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.
But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.
In one sense obviously yes, one vote will not determine the outcome of the election, but think about it like this. If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being. What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't. And insofar as each individual contributes to keeping up the delusion, 'every vote matters' almost becomes true even while it is obviously strictly false.
Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.
So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.
The problem being that voting for your third parties splits your vote, and that only has a good outcome when everybody on all sides are doing so. If one side defects then they win because their vote isn’t split between several different parties, it’s concentrated in one party. So if conservatives choose between Reform, Constitution, Libertarian, and Republican, each gets 1/4 of the total conservative votes available. If democrats all vote for the Democratic Party, they get all available democratic votes. If you assume that the parties are roughly equal in support, the democrats will win even though the6 don’t have more votes.
When I am arguing against the efficacy of individual strategic partisanship, "but then a group following this advice might cause the wrong party to win!" is not a meaningful response. Yes, if one side is collectively strategic and another isn't, then that other will lose the election. But (presumably) you don't have any control of either side, collectively, and your defection or cooperation will basically never make any difference, so you have no compelling reason to behave as if it it would. If everyone could be counted upon to behave as I am suggesting, it would actually be good for our election processes. If they can't be so counted upon, then you lose nothing by behaving better anyway.
I disagree because if the vote on the side you actually like cannot win, not only are you not getting what you want, but often moving the country in the opposite direction. In fact, this is the theory behind stocking horse candidates— run someone very similar to the mainstream candidate that you want to lose, split that vote and cruise to victory.
This is just simply power games. The thing that a lot of people don’t get about politics is that it isn’t in the least about being right, no matter what system you’re trying to get power under. The person with the right policies is a nobody. The guy who has power gets to decide what the right answer is. The correct answer is thusly form a very strong tribe that votes as a bloc. Then use that power base to essentially hold the political party nearest to your own side to account for not voting your way. Vote out bad politicians in the primaries. This is how the GOP was gradually moved rightward. If someone didn’t vote right, they were prinaried out of office. But the GOP was still winning because people were still with the Rightist party so they won elections. That would be the optimum strategy— vote as you please in the primaries, then vote GOP in the general election. You take power because the vote isn’t split, but you’re also to be feared because rinos get removed from the party.
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Has this ever happened anywhere? FPTP always collapses into a two-party system (at least in individual races/regions, if not always country-wide as in the US). It's better that way though, and that's why I said it's better for the fiction to continue for democracy at large - if we all selected our favourite candidate among, say, twenty options all spread around various mixtures of ideology and policy the winner would have a) no legitimacy, as they'd have won a pathetic plurality of votes, and b) would on average be no closer than the median winner of two-party elections to the median American. After all, in such a scenario the winner would be pretty much randomly decided based on which candidate had the fewest spoilers in and around their ideological position. Multi-party countries only work with multi-party electoral systems, otherwise you get Belfast South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
But all this is entirely beside the point. If it seems best to you that you should vote for a major party candidate, then do it! And if the emergent pattern is a "two party system," okay, that's the emergent pattern! What's completely bonkers is telling people that
That's just bullshit, and someone declining to vote for either is much more likely to have a positive effect, insofar as it has any effect at all, than forcing oneself to pick a "lesser of two evils" instead.
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