believing your state is hard locked in one party is exactly the mindset that makes it hard locked. My state is ‘hard red’ but it wasn’t always like that. California was a solid red state but no longer is. Until we have ranked voting, we’re stuck with two parties at the federal level. Voting 3rd is only serves to signal to the majority parties where to not waste their energy.
Donald Trump actually showed up to the Libertarian National Convention, I don’t think such an arrogant dickwad would have bothered if he didn’t think it was important to appeal to third party voters. They already spend less time in their ‘safe’ states.
He got booed almost the entire time, except for the two statements he made that were libertarian-friendly (free Ross Ulbright and put a Libertarian in his cabinet). Libertarians sure aren’t voting for that clown, especially this year since he ditched pretty much everything that libertarians actually care about and added on an extra helping of tariffs and closed borders (both of which libertarians hate).
Biden was invited, he just decided not to show, which was probably for the best because he would’ve been booed as well.
Oh he totally had it coming… must felt odd to him considering how most of his audiences are MAGA true believers
Voting 3rd is only serves to signal to the majority parties where to not waste their energy.
No, voting 3rd shows that voters are more willing to “throw their vote away” than support either major party candidate. If the minority candidate wants to snap up some of those votes, they’ll need to adjust their policies to at least bring in some of the top third party candidate’s views. The closer they get to those third parties, the more of those votes they’ll get.
If my state gets within a 10% spread, I’ll probably start voting for the lesser of two evils (in this case Harris). But when the spread is going to be something like 4x the total votes for all third parties combined (something like 5%; vote spread for major party candidates is typically >20%), there’s literally no value in supporting either major party candidate.
