this post was submitted on 21 Nov 2023
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Voting a third party is not throwing your vote away. It’s actually often the best way to make your vote matter.
Third parties in the US tend to run on smaller platforms pushing their key issues. Typically, these issues attract voters on one side of the spectrum more than the others: in other words, some third parties attract liberal voters while others attract conservative voters. This means that they compete with one of the major parties more strongly than the other for votes.
Votes for a major party typically do not have a huge effect on the presidential race unless you’re in a swing state. For example, the last time my state voted Republican was 35 years ago, and since then a Democrat has one by more than 10 percentage points. A million Biden voters could have switched their votes to a third party last election and he would have still won my state.
But a million votes for a third party would have been noticed by the Democrats, especially if similar numbers were posted across the US. The Democrats would have had to figure out why they were losing votes, and amend their platform in the future to win those lost voters back.
For example, major work reforms in the early 20th Century (including ending child labor, the 8 hour workday, and the 40 hour workweek) and the focus on the federal budget in the last 30 years have both been due to third parties pushing their pet issues into prominence and forcing the major parties into taking stances on them. A vote for a third party is a warning sign to the major parties that they need to amend their platforms in the future to avoid losing more votes, and that pushes change way faster than blindly voting a single party’s status quo.
I strongly disagree with this.
Elections are simply a case of math. If you abstain from voting, write in some random name, or otherwise vote for a candidate who is statistically incapable of winning, then there are only still only two outcomes for your vote:
Personally I always plan around the worst case scenario when making important decisions, and so I don't believe in the concept of the "protest vote". Especially since so little concrete information can be derived from "reading the tea leaves" of 3rd party votes. (A big part of your premise revolves around the idea that someone out there will somehow get whatever message you're trying to send by voting for a 3rd party candidate. And that's obviously a very indirect and abstract form of protest even in the best case scenario. )
Also I think it's a strech to attribute easily 20th century work reforms to 3rd parties as they exist today considering two points: (1) there was a radical shift in political power, generally towards progressivism, at that time and (2) it can be argued that many of these reforms could be attributed more to labor unions in general than any one political party.
Vote how you want, or not at all, but we can't escape math in the end. Statistically speaking, a protest vote is at best a benign waste of a vote and at worst the cause of undemocratic election outcomes via the spoiler effect. So I'll continue to recommend against it, and recommend for more democratic voting systems that are less prone to manipulation and spoilage.
The simple math is that a +/- 500,000 votes for Joe Biden in 2020, who got 81,283,501 total, would have barely noticeable. However, +/- 500,000 votes for Jo Jorgenson, who got 1,865,535, or Howie Hawkins, who got 407,068, would have been much more noteworthy.
Your vote simply has a bigger impact when you’re voting for a smaller candidate.
And yes, third parties do pressure major parties to alter their platforms, and this is well documented. The clearest example is Ross Perot getting 19% of the vote in 1992 and pushing his pet issue (the federal budget) into every election since then, still persisting today over 30 years later.