Should You Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils?
In America’s two-party system, we are often confronted with a choice between two candidates, neither of which we’re very enthusiastic about. Sometimes there are additional choices, but they are usually third-party candidates who have virtually no chance of winning. The dilemma: do you hold your nose and vote for the major party candidate who is somewhat less repugnant to you than the other? Or do you take the principled stand and vote for a third candidate you know will lose?
Here’s my answer:
An election is certainly important, but it’s not the end of the story. In fact, voting may be one of the LEAST effective methods that an individual can use to influence the government and society at large. A vote is just one vote. It has no chance of affecting anyone else’s views or actions. It merely contributes a miniscule drop to one side or the other of the vote total.
On the other hand, working actively to pressure elected officials to take actions you want them to take can have a much larger effect.
In an oft-cited incident in which a group of citizens was pressing President Franklin Roosevelt to take some action, FDR is supposed to have said “I agree with you, I want to do it, now make me do it.” There’s some question as to whether this conversation actually took place, but regardless, it reflects a political truth: By and large, elected officials can only do things for which there is significant and vocal political support.
Calling or writing to elected officials, publishing blog posts or letters to the editor, organizing campaigns, participating in rallies or demonstrations, contributing money, even talking to your friends and neighbors, all are things that have much more potential to change minds and exert a push toward change than casting a ballot does.
With this in mind, it seems to me that if you want to move the country in some direction or other, your best strategy is to vote for one of the candidates who has a reasonably good chance of winning, choosing the one that you are most likely to be able to influence in your desired direction once they’re in office. Voting for a candidate that has no chance of winning only makes sense if you actually feel that the major party candidates are equally far from your own positions and equally unlikely to be moved by any of your efforts once in office.
One final point: Let’s face the fact that the only person who will make every decision exactly as you would is you. No politician is going to conform exactly to your wishes on every issue. This is inherent in a representative democracy. Unless you’re running for office yourself, any vote amounts to a choice between imperfect options.
So yes: vote for the lesser of two evils. And then once that lesser of two evils is in office, work like mad to make him or her do the right thing.
P.S. If only we had Ranked-Choice Voting, we wouldn’t be faced with this dilemma in the voting booth. (But we would still have to push our elected officials to do what we want them to do.)
I disagree.
1. You can never get what you want by voting for what you don’t want.
2. It is better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don’t want and get it.
3. You can only influence a politician with your vote by actually being willing to cast it for somebody else. To take the current election as an example, suppose that guns are your most important issue, either because you think there should be more gun control or less. Both presidential candidates can be lukewarm on their respective sides of the question (and they are), because they have no fear that their respective constituencies are going anywhere. A hard-core gun-right guy voting for Obama? Somebody who wants to make guns harder to get voting for Romney? Not gonna happen.
4. I submit that both parties have failed us. Both have racked up unconscionable amounts of debt when in power. Both have gotten us into and continued futile, expensive, enemy-making wars. Etc. Choosing between then does nothing to fix the basic structural problem, which is that a political duopoly stinks. They vote themselves millions of public dollars to run their conventions and primary elections and establish ballot-access rules that keep others out.
5. Therefore, the best long-term strategy is to cast your votes for third-party candidates–whichever ones most closely match your perspectives. The most important long-term structural reform American politics needs is to break the two-party system, make third parties viable. That takes votes.
I explain how I’ve decided on this year’s presidential vote in more details here:
http://pokergrump.blogspot.com/2012/10/grumps-for-gary.html
Besides, my alternative to voting for Johnson would be to abstain from voting for anybody. I can’t vote for either Romney or Obama. Both of them want to continue spending us into fiscal meltdown. Both of them want to continue killing people overseas in our name. Both of them want to continue to expand the power of the executive branch. Both of them want to expand the continuous unwarranted surveillance of citizens. Both of them want to continue the insane drug war. Both of them want to continue corporate welfare. Both of them are enemies of the second amendment. Neither of them supports legalization of online poker.
All of those things are absolutely abhorrent to me, and on most of the precepts that are most important to me, they’re both just completely fucking repugnant. So I guess this puts me in the category you describe at the end of your next-to-last paragraph.
Good rant, Bob. And yes, that puts you in the “both are equally bad” category, so in your case, it makes sense to vote for the third party candidate who has no chance.
I appreciate your reasoned post David, and I agree wholeheartedly with your logic. I would add that perhaps even more important than who we vote for in elections is who we vote for at the grocery store, the gas pump, our cell phone provider, etc.. Monied interests owns most of the political landscape anyway, so if we want it to change, we have to change them.