[appplication]

We don’t have that luxury in the US. It’s not that voters don’t want it, it’s that there is no feasible way to get there (without structural change to our voting system). Sure, US voters like the above comment have generally developed strong political identities to one of the two parties. But there is no chance for any third party under the current system. It allows for overwhelmingly entrenched party lines.

Should you as a voter choose to vote for a third party candidate, you’re basically voting against your second choice and for your last choice. “Voting for a third party is throwing away your vote” is a very real phenomenon, to the point here it is an actively exploited political strategy to promote third party candidates with overlapping views to your opponent to siphon off votes. See Russian interference promoting the Green Party in 2016 as an example.

And sure you could wave your ideals around and say “but you absolutely must vote for what you think is right, that is how change happens”. But in reality, under the US system that’s how you end up ensuring the least palatable party (to you) ends up in power. There are thousands of elections every cycle, and we have overwhelming empirical evidence that third party candidates are completely inviable at basically all levels of government.

[hereme888]

Exactly.

In the US it's not as simple as "voting for what you think is right", but being strategic in using your one vote to cause the most impact.

Since a 3rd party candidate with no chance to win by polls is a waste of the vote, it becomes a game of "the lesser of two evils", "the greater of two goods", or something like that.

[remram]

This is such a wrong take. Sure, you have to vote for a single party, but that doesn't mean you can't support specific ideas no matter where they come from.

And not even that, mostly voting does nothing either, because winner-takes-all: the way to be heard is packing up and moving to another state. Make a blue state bigger demographically because voting blue in a red state does nothing (and vice versa).

[appplication]

I’m not sure I see how my comment is at odds with yours. As you point out, voting and ideological support are orthogonal concepts, if intertwined. I agree with you there.

As far as voting not mattering, it both does and it doesn’t. Your individual vote may not matter, but convincing large groups of people their vote does not matter does matter and has also been historically exploited as a voter suppression technique.

There’s a lot of game theory one could reason about optimizing your ability to participate in the US democracy, but unfortunately the outcomes of that exercise are generally quite depressing.