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Gonna reiterate something I said after super tuesday - voting is not a spiritual act, it is a material act, and you should treat it as such.
Thinking about "the lesser of two evils" still makes voting into something akin to prayer, as if your chance to get into heaven will be determined by who you vote for. That is just not a useful way to think about voting, especially if you consider yourself a materialist.
The question is, when you go to the voting booth to vote for all the different things in a given election, what does each choice you make do (or, better, what are the chances that what you do will matter if others like you do the same thing).
Consider: you are a Bernie supporter living in New York or California or any other state that every democrat has won by 15 points for decades. When you go to vote, voting for down-ballot candidates and then skipping the presidential vote or lodging a protest vote does very little
The chances that your vote will matter beyond the margin of victory for the democratic candidate is slim and thus your choice to not vote for Joe Biden is an act to slim the margin, not a vote for Donald Trump.
However, if you live in a state where the margin is already very tight, your considerations have to be different if you are a materialist. If you don& #39;t vote for Biden, whether by spoiling or voting third party, the chances that you are having a tangible effect increase
And if you reason that Donald Trump should not be president any longer, it doesn& #39;t really matter who the democratic nominee is, you should vote for them because your vote will do something that a New Yorker& #39;s or Californian& #39;s won& #39;t.
Turning voting into a spiritual act is a very powerful rhetorical tool. It& #39;s also the reason that the centre left has just kept losing so goddamn always to the right.
You might think that republican voters voted for Trump because it was this kind of spiritual decision, but that is a mistake. They have anti-choice, anti-queer, anti-black, anti-woman, colonialist policy goals and their vote had a tangible effect on progressing those goals.
The right so often understands the practice of politics better than the left does, and as long as we keep thinking about voting in terms of "the lesser of two evils" we will continue to lose.
Where I live, no conservative candidate has received more than 25% of the vote since 1988 therefore I vote for the most left leaning candidate I can that has a shot at winning (thus, NDP).
Both places I used to live have been long dominated by Conservative-Liberal battles. There I voted liberal because I would rather have a liberal than a conservative if the NDP has no reasonable chance at winning there.
The last Ontario election changed things because the NDP had a shot of winning in my home riding, and my dad voted NDP even though he is much further right than me because he did not want a conservative MPP. I would have done the same because that& #39;s what the information justified
Voting does not make you a member of a party nor an advocate for their views. It is a choice at a moment in time that has a marginal but tangible effect on the life of your community and we would all be better off if we treated it as such.
