. The only message you send to the two parties -- who control the government -- by not voting is that they don't have to pay attention to you.
If there's nothing the democrats can do to win your vote, then yeah, you have no voice.
But if there's nothing the democrats can do to lose your vote, you also have no voice. They have no reason to listen to you if you will back any candidate they throw your way. In order for the fringes to have a shot at influencing electoral politics, they have to be willing to walk away from the table.
And if we do end up getting a proto fascist, it will be entirely the fault of the Democratic Party, who nominated someone unacceptable to wide swathes of the population, who has worse favorability ratings than Walter Mondale and Barry frickin Goldwater, not the people who refused to vote for the dud they tried to foist on us.
I voted Obama in '08, Johnson in '12, and now am planning on Johnson this election. Close to straight ticket Democrat downballot. I don't know how any better to signal that I'm persuadable but you're gonna have to do better.
What I'm reading here is someone who will never vote an incumbent into office. There's going to be blood on every President's hands. There has been a huge surveillance apparatus for years, and it's not going away. Hell, it's why Presidential Immunity exists in the first place.
If you only want 100% of what you want, you're never ever getting it. You're never ever getting what you ask. If you elect someone into office on that promise. It's a promise they won't be able to keep.
So... why do you even vote in the first place?
I think the CIA should be dismantled and that anyone who has ever worked for it should be barred from holding a position of public trust ever again. There's probably some room for prosecutions, too, starting with a few presidents.
I still voted Obama in '08. He didn't promise as much as I'd like, but stopping torture and shutting down Guantanamo was good enough for me. All I'm asking for is a candidate that has not literally violated the Geneva Convention. That's well within the Overton Window, or it would be if people gave enough of a shit about the issue to base their votes on it. Sanders wanted to keep the drone program, and I would have voted for him, too. I'm perfectly amenable to compromise. When the Democrats decide to throw their civil libertarian wing the slenderest bone, I'll be there.
I'm trying to be civil here, but it's like... are you guys even reading my posts? Are you listening to what any of the third party voters are saying? You want so desperately for this to be a matter of personal purity vs. compromise, but it really isn't, or at least it's not for me. I'm not withholding my vote from Clinton because I think voting for her would give me cooties. I'm doing it because I think if the Democrats suffer no consequences from spending eight years defecting against one of their key constituencies then that constituency is going to be ignored.
For hard nosed realists, you guys sure have an odd case of tunnel vision. And yeah, if for some reason I was only concerned about this election cycle, probably I'd bite the bullet and vote Clinton. But look, you're not in a one-shot prisoner's dilemma, you're in an iterated one. You can either vote for the main party candidate and cooperate or third party and defect. And the party can either make good on its promises to its base and cooperate, or tack center and conserve political capital and defect. But you're playing that game every election, and if there's any lesson you can take from the scholarly literature about the prisoner's dilemma it's that cooperate bots get roasted. The dominant strategies are usually cooperate until the other side defects and then defect right back. And on civil liberties, the democrats have done nothing but defect for eight years; this isn't a tit for two tats, it's a tit for a hundred tats.
When the democrats look like they're willing to cooperate again, they can start earning my vote.
