Last week, I wrote about my denouncement of Donald Trump, which in the grand scheme of things isn’t really something noteworthy. All things considered, it is probably nothing more than a mean YouTube comment on Donald Trump’s racist, sexist video of a campaign. At this point, I’m not even the most noteworthy Borges that has been irked by Donald Trump in the Ohio area, and when you can’t win something that narrow, you haven’t really accomplished much of anything.

But within that article, I mentioned that I both don’t care for the third party candidates of this election cycle, but wouldn’t lambast anyone for voting for one of these individuals. And I believe that many people who know about politics would disagree with me, and would say that if you or I do not vote for Hillary Clinton, you vote for Donald Trump. But I find that argument ludicrous, as it both ignores Clinton’s flaws as both a candidate and a politician, and discredits the third party candidates more than they deserve.

Now, I understand their logic, in that Clinton and Trump are at this point the only two people in the nation with more than an outside shot of winning the White House. If you vote for Clinton, you decrease the chances that Trump would win. However, at this point, Hillary Clinton, according to RealClearPolitics, is polling at around 46%, Donald Trump at 38%, and the two leading 3^rd party candidates, Gary Johnson and Jill Stein, make up about 8%. At this point, Trump, Johnson, and Stein would have to combine their numbers to even tie Clinton. And if Clinton does manage to lose, it could hardly be blamed on the third party voters, and more on her ineptitude as a candidate. Clinton has failed to attract the young vote, and whether these voters are angry at what appeared to be an unfair primary against Clinton’s biggest opponent, Bernie Sanders, they legitimately do not like Clinton’s proposed policies and plans, they do not trust Clinton to carry out some of her proposed plans due to her ties to Wall Street, or they cannot vote for Clinton due to her past failures in office, they seem to prefer the third party candidates to her. Blaming these candidates as reasons for Clinton not having as big of a lead as many believe she should have shifts the blame off of the failures of both Clinton herself and the Democratic Party, and enforces a status quo that America is on the precipice of rejecting.

Throughout this election cycle, I’ve seen Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson scrutinized heavily, and while this is to be expected, as this is may be the first time that the New Mexican governor has entered the public eye, and anyone who has a legitimate chance of becoming the President of the United States should be properly vetted. However, instead of focusing on his actual policies, the media has instead chosen to focus on his gaffes, such as Aleppo and his failure to name a world leader he admires (he blanked on the name of the former Mexican leader Felipe Calderon). I realize that the President of the US should be able to know these things on the fly, but I’d rather know more about Johnson’s proposed solutions rather than his ability to name things. This says nothing of Green Party Candidate Jill Stein, whose policies I know absolutely nothing about. You’d think that at this point, someone would have asked her about those, but aside from a REDDIT ASK ME ANYTHING , I haven’t seen anyone ask her about, oh, I don’t know, quantitative easing, which I don’t think she knows too much about. And now we have Evan McMullin in Utah, who is doing just as well, if not better that Clinton in polls.

These three candidates deserve much more respect than simply being seen as “taking votes away” from either of the two main candidates, and should not be disrespected for attempting to do what many perceive to be an impossibility at this point in time.