Now that the full horror of our choice for 2020 is before us, time for a little reminder of voting tactics.

A thread.

If you are in a blue state or a red state, your vote for a Trump/Pence or Biden/Harris does not matter. The probability of it affecting the outcome is approximately zero.

In other words, your vote for the "R" or "D" is meaningless.

So, how to give it some meaning?

The usual dig against voting 3rd party is that it is "throwing your vote away." However, as I just pointed out, if you are in a blue or red state, voting D or R is mathematically "throwing your vote away."

Conversely, if you vote for a 3rd party (specifically the @LPNational in my case) you actually have a shot at influencing policy meaningfully.

The LP will never win a national election in my lifetime. But the Ds and Rs are coalitions. Their policies are agglomerations.

The objective is to get the LP up to a level of voting that the Ds or, more likely, the Rs have to "bid" for these votes by incorporating libertarian policies. Therefore, by the standard of influencing policy, a vote for the LP is actually a clear signal and a meaningful vote.

If you are in a "battleground" state (eg., Florida, Ohio, etc), it's trickier. On the one hand, your vote has a greater, but still very small, chance of influencing the outcome, so you might be tempted to vote for the lesser of two evils.

On the other hand, adding your vote to the coalitions is more valuable to the Ds and Rs, and therefore they are more likely to "bid" for your vote with policy changes.

If I lived in a battleground state, I would still vote LP, but that is because I don't see a huge difference between the Ds and Trump's Rs. Above all, though, I would vote for gridlock in Washington since, given how crazy both the Ds and Rs are, this is our best hope.