They do. My party has won local elections and state elections and hold office.

Great! So the next step, then, would be to push those candidates into senate / house seats, while protecting the presidency from the candidates who are interested in a fascist takeover of the country and its voting process, because that isn’t going to help your candidates get elected anywhere.

Why would I vote “strategically”?

Because our (deeply flawed) voting system necessitates it to get good outcomes.

What you should be doing is pushing hard for your 3rd party of preference to run (and win) elections on the local and state level, not the presidency. You’d see far more actual, tangible change if you started getting those folks elected in smaller elections than just losing the presidential election with 2% of the votes every 4 years. Look at Zohran Mamdami - he’s doing a great job in NYC and actually doing a lot of positive things. If he’d run for president, do you think he’d have won? Not a chance in hell.

However, once candidates like that start doing good things at the local level, then they become more palatable candidates to elect to the House / Senate. And once we start getting Senators / House Reps from those parties, they become more palatable candidates on the national level.

Let me put it another way, using your logic: Should I blame you for my candidates loss, since you voted for Harris instead of my candidate? Should I say that Trump only won because of people like you not voting for my candidate?

There were exactly 2 candidates who had a chance of winning that election. You know that. Pretending otherwise is disingenuous. See the above for how to change that.

The Democratic party lost to Trump, twice. Twice. That’s on you all, not me. Maybe the party should come up with a better candidate this time around.

See, this right here is what I take issue with. You’re grouping me in with the group that “lost to trump”, but you’re not acknowledging that you contributed to that loss by not voting strategically. You’re putting blame on people who voted for Harris despite her not being our ideal candidate, but not accepting any yourself. Your shit stinks, too, just like everyone else’s.

To put it another way, your candidate, or “you all”, to use your terms, also lost to Trump, and in fact performed even worse.

they are both equally bad.

Well, I think this is a delusional take, but you’re welcome to your opinion.

Again, that’s fine - you’ve got every right to do that. Is Trump closer to what you want in a president than Harris would have been, do you imagine?

Sure. Not arguing against the fact that it’s your right to vote for whomever you want. However, if we look at the most recent US election, there were a lot of principled people holding that same belief either abstaining or declining to vote strategically, and now we have Trump. If you were one of those people, thinking you are not in small part responsible for the current administration is refusal to take responsibility for your own actions. Just like it would have been in small part my responsibility if Harris had won and decided to do what Trump is doing now.

As a heads up, in almost all cases, turning on Reader Mode in your browser and refreshing the page will bypass these paywalls (including in this case).

You do you, it’s your vote obviously. I hope you’re in a safely blue state, though; know that any time the republicans win your state / county / town / whatever, you contributed to that outcome.

If democrats ran on a hard stance of “We will prosecute the fuck out of everyone involved in the current administration”, they’d sweep the midterms. Then if they actually followed through on it, they’d also sweep in 2028, but we all know they won’t do either.

If he got a Vance pardon, that’s exactly when I’d expect him to do it. He’s just narcissistic enough to be like “Ha! I won and you losers lost. Here’s all the names of the people who were fucking kids right alongside me, but I got pardoned and I’m untouchable. Good luck, losers.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if he gets Epsteined. He knows a lot of things, or at least has access to a lot of information, and he has a bad habit of running his mouth. All it’d take is one unhinged tweet where he throws everyone else under the bus to put a lot of political careers into question.

If we hadn’t let hour+ long commutes in places with no reasonable public transport become normalized, it’d be much less of a problem. Americans routinely drive distances that would make Europeans slackjawed and for no good reason.

I’m fully convinced that the people who promote that sort of rhetoric are either astroturfers trying to convince people to waste their vote, or just don’t understand how the voting process works in the US.

SatansMaggotyCumFart has the right of it: Push progressive candidates in the primary, but don’t let perfect be the enemy of good in the general. If you vote third party in the general because the neither of the two viable candidates perfectly aligns with your desires, it’s every bit as bad as a centrist deciding to vote for the GOP candidate. Vote for whichever of those candidates is better.