I am so excited for this election to be over, and moving on from this chaos that is Trump vs. Clinton. Trump and his cronies are a joke; Clinton and her crew are, well… the lesser of two evils. I am not really super excited about her, but she will do. Truthfully, this having awful candidates and boiling it down to who sucks less is nothing new, but not voting or third party voting seems like a dangerous endeavor to me, but you are free to do whatever you want with your vote.
The way I see it, if you vote for a third party, or not at all, you are essentially voting for the greater of the two evils—the Ralph Nader effect. The Ralph Nader or more commonly known as the spoiler effect in this election is dangerous to the democratic party—the lesser of the two evils—because Jill Steins platform is similar to Clinton's, just as Nader’s was similar to Al Gore's in 2000 and we all loved G.W., right?
Nader won nowhere near enough votes to win the presidency, but he did win enough to take electoral votes away from Gore, which ultimately cost him the election. Would Gore have been a better president than Bush? There is no real way of knowing that, but this election is frighteningly similar to that election—a chowder head republican, and a democrat that resembles a republican with a blue shirt—two evils, one obviously the lesser.
Now I don’t really know too much about Stein, but does anyone really think she has a shot of winning—a real legitimate shot? I don’t; I don’t think she will even come close but what she will do is take votes away from Clinton—votes she cannot spare. Partly because a great percentage of republicans will vote republican regardless of the candidate; it appears that Trump has been trying to run off voters and he just became the official GOP nominee and partly because Clinton just isn’t that likeable.
Now I am not trying to tell you anyone how they should vote, that is not my place. What I am doing is asking you to think about what your non-vote, or your third party vote would mean for the lesser of the two evils and what it could potentially cost our nation. I would rather have the lesser of the two evils over the greater of the two evils any day. I think it is painfully obvious that neither of the candidates we have to choose from is a stellar choice, but what else is new?
