With regards to your response to Jase99, I respectfully disagree. The notion that “until there’s a good chance of success, I’m not going to get involved” is the reason we haven’t gained traction as it is. Last election, I pushed the people I knew to vote for Gary Johnson. None of them wanted Obama or Romney to win, but they were all so afraid of the other guy winning that they were afraid to “throw their vote away.” There was not a single person I talked to who actually wanted the D or R candidates. I encouraged everybody to vote Libertarian, explained the platform to them, and most of them indicated that it was a platform they would support; however, they just couldn’t see throwing their vote away, and to quote one person, “I’m terrified of X winning.”
It’s a small sample, yes, but if the 15 people I talked to were somehow representative of the rest of the country, how many votes were wasted voting for the lesser of a turd sandwich or a giant douche out of fear when they could have voted for someone who at least purported to have a platform they liked? If the trash is full and everybody says, “when somebody else takes it out, it’ll be empty,” the trash never gets emptied. It’s time to take out the trash in Washington, but it’s a big job: those of us who voted 3rd party last election can’t do it by ourselves, as evidenced at the polls. My small survey demonstrates that there is at least some part of the population out there that ended up voting for the D or R candidate even though they didn’t want to. Yes, getting the 3rd parties to have equal money would certainly help, but I’d be curious how the election would have gone if people actually voted the way they wanted without fear of throwing their votes away. I cannot claim the 3rd party would have won; however, like many things in politics, I think if people would give it a chance, they might be surprised. It takes a leap of faith and the help of those who are afraid of wasting their votes to clean up this mess.
In the end, even if our votes don’t amount to much, I can at least sleep at night knowing that I didn’t vote for somebody whose platform I despise. Small consolation, but it’s a tiny silver lining. I may not have emptied the trash, but I at least picked up the soiled napkin that spilled out and took it out.
With regards to your response to Jase99, I respectfully disagree. The notion that “until there’s a good chance of success, I’m not going to get involved” is the reason we haven’t gained traction as it is. Last election, I pushed the people I knew to vote for Gary Johnson. None of them wanted Obama or Romney to win, but they were all so afraid of the other guy winning that they were afraid to “throw their vote away.” There was not a single person I talked to who actually wanted the D or R candidates. I encouraged everybody to vote Libertarian, explained the platform to them, and most of them indicated that it was a platform they would support; however, they just couldn’t see throwing their vote away, and to quote one person, “I’m terrified of X winning.”
It’s a small sample, yes, but if the 15 people I talked to were somehow representative of the rest of the country, how many votes were wasted voting for the lesser of a turd sandwich or a giant douche out of fear when they could have voted for someone who at least purported to have a platform they liked? If the trash is full and everybody says, “when somebody else takes it out, it’ll be empty,” the trash never gets emptied. It’s time to take out the trash in Washington, but it’s a big job: those of us who voted 3rd party last election can’t do it by ourselves, as evidenced at the polls. My small survey demonstrates that there is at least some part of the population out there that ended up voting for the D or R candidate even though they didn’t want to. Yes, getting the 3rd parties to have equal money would certainly help, but I’d be curious how the election would have gone if people actually voted the way they wanted without fear of throwing their votes away. I cannot claim the 3rd party would have won; however, like many things in politics, I think if people would give it a chance, they might be surprised. It takes a leap of faith and the help of those who are afraid of wasting their votes to clean up this mess.
In the end, even if our votes don’t amount to much, I can at least sleep at night knowing that I didn’t vote for somebody whose platform I despise. Small consolation, but it’s a tiny silver lining. I may not have emptied the trash, but I at least picked up the soiled napkin that spilled out and took it out.