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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.
I honestly don't understand how anyone could actually believe this. Sure, it's a common argument. But the only effect it has en masse is to ensure that people who don't like either party, never have any impact at all. And responding as if I just didn't understand the math is insane, because the whole point is that if you understand math at all, you already know that your vote is exceedingly unlikely to matter.
I'm sorry if I sound like a broken record, but I've lost track now of how many people I have to remind of this:
Your vote is more than 99.9% likely to make no difference at all.
The idea that your vote might bring about your preferred policies is mathematically absurd. For the same reasons, the idea that your vote might "mov[e] the country in the opposite direction" is also absurd. Indeed, it is more absurd, since the major American political parties agree on more than the disagree on (e.g., neither is monarchist, neither is communist [yet], etc.). Whether you vote, or do not vote, and who or what you vote for, will very nearly never alter the outcome of an election.
"But if enough people believe that..."
It doesn't make any difference! Yes, strategically, you want as many people who agree with you, to believe their vote makes a difference and to cast it accordingly. Yes, strategically, you want as many people who disagree with you to believe their vote makes no difference and thus stay home from the polls or vote in a way that does not otherwise hurt your desires. But statistically, if a lot of people understand that their vote doesn't matter, they are very likely to be more-or-less evenly distributed across both "sides!" Furthermore, you probably have no influence over the voters of either "side" anyway, so talking about voting in this manner is an exercise in pure imagination; it is a power fantasy. Now, granted: if you're Donald Trump, or you're Kamala Harris, or you're Taylor Swift, or even if you're maybe Scott Alexander, and you have the power sway voting blocs? Sure, this is a great piece of rhetoric, a potentially useful lie to tell, etc. I don't deny that major political parties (and their partisans!) have every reason to peddle this claptrap.
But as a matter of fact, everyone has some actual reason to vote (or not) as seems best to them, and virtually no one has any reason to vote as a bloc (if that's not what actually seems best to them)--with the exception of vanishingly rare edge cases where their one vote actually makes a difference. This sometimes happens at the local level, so the fewer people there are voting in a given election, the more actual reason you have to cast your vote strategically. But also: in such cases, it's virtually guaranteed that you are actually voting as seems best to you, and not merely casting a vote to prevent the greater of two evils from taking office. (Many local elections are lucky to get two whole candidates in the first place.)
If making a difference in politics matters to you, then you need to secure political office for yourself, or become famous enough that a lot of people take their cues from you--ideally, many many thousands. At which point you will have some actual reason to tell this lie. (Just be careful not to fall for your own marketing--it's not your vote that matters, it is your influence over many votes!) Until then, the vast majority of people who say/believe the "you must vote for one of the two viable candidates" lie are merely someone else's useful tool.
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