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A Vote Is a Terrible Thing to Waste
“But I don’t want to waste my vote.” This retort came from both my wife’s mother and my father in separate conversations as they lamented their options served up this year by the Republicans and Democrats but refused to consider a third party candidate. Even when we pointed out that as former two-term governors Gary Johnson and Bill Weld are not only more qualified to serve as president, but that their actions more closely match our parents’ values, they resisted on the grounds they won’t win.
Wikipedia defines a “wasted vote” as “any vote which is not for an elected candidate or, more broadly, a vote that does not help to elect a candidate.” I note that no citations are provided for this definition, probably because nobody will admit to writing that a wasted vote is simply a vote for a losing candidate. Strictly by the numbers, every vote has a vanishingly small impact. The average voter in a presidential election has lottery-ish odds of one in 60 million (1/60,000,000) of casting the deciding ballot in a presidential election. Playing the lottery is a waste of money, but surely there is something more to voting than getting your candidate in office.
It can be hard to pick the winning side when one casts a ballot. Right up to the Brexit vote most of the analysts, the polls, and perhaps most credibly, the gamblers, thought that Britain would vote against exiting the European Union. A vote for Harry Truman was a “wasted vote” in 1948. Even Ronald Reagan was behind in the polls for most of the year before the 1980 election.
Even if a cause is lost in one election, it may be won in the next election or years later. A “wasted” vote for the Republicans in 1856 led to the elimination of slavery, and the new party dominated American politics until 1932. A vote for Barry Goldwater in 1964 did not pay off until 1980. The media did it’s best to demonize and marginalize Reagan in those years as a racist warmonger who wanted to take away your grandma’s social security. But the stance taken by Goldwater generally and Reagan in his “Time for Choosing” speech took hold in the public imagination until it was finally able to express itself in a cascade of votes in 1980 and 1984. Bill Clinton’s insincere “the Era of Big Government Is Over” speech in 1994 is surely a grudging homage to Goldwater’s quixotic 1964 campaign.
Voting can pay off, even if your candidate or party never wins. Ross Perot ran unsuccessfully for president in 1992 and 1996 and his Reform Party’s only win was Jesse Ventura’s election as Minnesota governor. Perot’s big issue was the national debt (when it was four trillion dollars). Remember the charts? The major parties took notice of those so-called “wasted” Perot votes. The Republican congress deftly co-opted the issue and became the party of fiscal responsibility, passing multiple balanced budgets and actually getting Bill Clinton to sign them.
If you still are not convinced, just follow the money. Nearly a billion dollars has been spent on the Presidential election so far. Some estimates are as high as five billion for the 2016 election.
“Some things are up to us and other things are not up to us,” the Greco-Roman philosopher Epictetus wrote nearly 2,000 years ago. He taught that valuing things that are not up to us brings frustration, anxiety, and disappointment. Valuing what is up to us brings tranquility. Our opinions, choices, actions, and votes are our own. Don’t sacrifice your tranquility by not choosing the candidate most closely aligned with your values.
Published in General
https://fee.org/articles/how-not-to-waste-your-vote-a-mathematical-analysis/
I was going to make a similar point. If Trump is going to almost certainly lose, a vote for Trump means you both wasted your vote and voted for Trump!
Not something I’d ever want to look back on.
If you vote for a third party, and the result is a Hillary presidency, is your vote wasted? Technically, No. But it did nothing to stop the Democrats from continuing their national transformation, now did it?
I for one will not take any chances that the choice I make will assist Hillary to be president in any way. If I had any evidence that a third party candidate had a BETTER chance to beat Hillary, I would vote for that candidate. Since Trump is running far ahead of all the rest of the not Hillary’s, I will vote for Trump. Best chance I have to stop Hillary.
Note, I didn’t say Trump WILL win. I just said that out of all the non Hillary choices, he has a far better chance than the others. I have to do what I can within the boundaries of my influence (one vote).
Thanks for this.
There, fixed it for you.Sorry, that was rude. Do you see how the above substitution doesn’t change the logic of your statement?so then please lay out your path to victory to stop Hillary that includes voting for third party candidates?
The exact same thing can be said if you vote for Trump and the result is a Hillary presidency.
(Whoops. Mike beat me to it.)
SMOD
not so. Voting for the candidate with the BEST chance of beating Hillary is not the same as voting for a candidate with an extremely lessor chance of beating Hillary.
If I vote for Trump and Hillary wins, I did what I can. If I vote for Johnson and Hillary wins, I didn’t even try…
OK, that makes some sense. But first you gotta get SMOD on the ballot.
As I recall it, Perot’s big issue was the NAFTA. Without Perot’s influence, it seems somewhat likely that Bush would have won and the NAFTA would have failed (it was Clinton’s genius move of packaging the trade aspects with environmental and labor side chapters that purchased enough Democratic votes to get it passed).
Of the four biggest bills leading to the 1990s budget surpluses, by far the biggest was the 1990 OBRA, in place long before Perot’s campaign took off. Like the Green Party’s torpedoing of environmental reform in 2000, the Libertarian Party’s passage of Obamacare in the 2008 Minnesota Senate election, the Democratic Party’s rejection of Jim Crow after the Dixiecrats, the near collapse of Republican Progressivism after the Bull Moose Party, third parties always kill the things they love.
Could I ask what aspects of Johnson’s platform your parents agreed with?
Fiscally, did they support his expansion of Social Security to include a new government death benefit?When they hear that he will spend more money on infrastructure, the FBI, on government supported job opportunities, government supported education opportunities, and any number of other things, is that what they look for in a candidate? Is the “I support NAFTA/ I would veto NAFTA/ I support NAFTA” whirl something they look for?
On character, when they hear him talking about the border fence and suggesting that it’s like the Berlin Wall or Weld’s similar failure to distinguish between murder and law enforcement in suggesting that Trump’s deportation force would be similar to the Gestapo searching for Ann Frank, do they think “that’s the sort of values that I endorse”? Does the guy who named his company as a reference to a boast about the size of his genitals, and regularly campaigns on the basis of claims that his physical prowess is greater than other candidates and that this will “make balancing budgets easy”, who regularly promises that he’s quit pot, but regularly resets the date on which this occurred, who derides the victims of genocide as complaining about “people being mean to me”, who thinks that we should have invaded Afghanistan but isn’t sure about WWII, who continually lies about his strength in the polls, his record (he didn’t have eight balanced budgets as governor; he had no balanced budgets, leaving the state with 250% of the debt he started with thanks to a spending explosion), and anything else to hand is a Presidential sort of a guy?
On individual liberties, do they share his opposition to religious liberty, the Johnson/ Weld belief that the FBI should not drop domestic violence cases when they lack sufficient evidence to go forward, their support for gun control, their belief that campaign finance regulation should override political speech more often and that opposing federal funding for planned parenthood is terrible because “abortion is a fundamental right”? Do they look at Johnson’s list of approved judges and think “that sounds about right to me”?
A Johnson vote is not a meaningless vote, because if he gets 5% in the polls, he’ll get a hundred million dollars for 2020. If you think that too much money is spent on elections, though, there is literally no worse vote that you could cast. Reasonable people can differ about whether voting Clinton, Trump, Stein, or McMullin is the best way forward, but the defense of Johnson always comes down to his party label rather than details; if it wasn’t for Trump, Johnson’s support of Putin would probably come up more often, too, but Johnson supporters can’t do that this cycle because they’ve spent too much time deriding Trump for the same position.
SMOD may be polling at 13%, but is not on the ballot in all 50 states.
Read the link @misthiocracy posted above. It argues how it practically always makes mathematical sense to vote your conscious.
No offense taken… No, I do see how it changes the logic. It is either supporting the one candidate with a snowballs chance to beat Hillary, or not. Voting for the candidate with no chance has, well, no chance…
To take @Misthiocracy ‘s lead, SMOD has as much chance of defeating Hillary as do all the other third party candidates. Trump may in your estimation have very little chance of winning, but you must see it is a greater chance than all the others, including SMOD, combined?
Sure, but then we come to the part where it’s non-obvious to many people who has the better chance to do less total damage.
Now you are talking Hillary Vs Trump, and if your choice is Hillary, I really don’t know what I can say to you. I never supported Trump in the primary, but as I say, I will support whomever has the best chance to beat her. If you are OK with her, by all means, vote that way…
James, I’m afraid from my perspective you are a victim of your own intelligence and debate skill when it come to politics this election season. You argue so strongly and exhaustively against specific positions (or rather, persons, most recently) that I could see you doing a similar take down of almost anyone.
So, while you make some good points, your posts come off as a ultra-sophisticated variation of “how can you be so stupid!” And they have similar effect when it comes to convincing me.
No one has answered this question for me. If we lived in the world where Hilary was the Republican nominee and Obama was the Democratic nominee, and I think it could be argued that Hilary is to the right of Obama, but if you disagree, switch the parties, who would you vote for?
Some problems with this:
a: For any individual, they are, as a unit, casting their vote for a third party candidate in preference to a specific major party candidate.
b: For groups, it is true that math that assumes that 100% of the vote from a particular block will go to another block is endlessly tiresome and that it is shameful that it is so frequently published. That said, it is also true that blocks also tend not to split entirely equally. In this cycle, analysts often try to pretend that Johnson pulls equally from both parties by noting that third parties pull equally from both parties. This ignored the fact that Stein does not pull equally from both parties and ignores the polls that specifically ask, which come to the same rexult that you find when you get Stein and Johnson pulling equally from both parties with Stein pulling essentially entirely from Dems and getting a half to a third of Johnson’s vote (S+2-3J=0, S =-1, ergo J=+.5 to 0.333. J is composed of pluses and minuses, so J must consist of two thirds to a half more Republicans than Democrats, and waddaya know, polls that ask get about twice as many Republicans as Democrats in Johnson’s vote).
c: The founders absolutely understood that most elections would come down to the lesser of two evils (or the better of two imperfect candidates, which is the same thing). There is, of course, a need for the public to be able to select from a broader range of candidates than two, which is why a primary system exists. If a candidate has the support of more than a quarter of the American public, it is likely that they will be a major party nominee.
d: The “voting out of fear” stuff is not, for all the pretenses of the author, a matter of math. It’s also not particularly smart; any thoughtful comparison of two alternatives, in any realm of life, will include the strengths and weaknesses of both options.
e: It’s simply not the case that we’ve never had third party candidates do well at the Presidential polls, but that if they did they’d suddenly take over. The Bull Moose Party did well. Did that mean that people were galvanized to replicate the success? No, it meant that people were horrified by the stupid decision they’d made and resolved never to do that again. The Dixiecrat party won states. Did that awaken people to the power of third parties? Yes, it did; it told them that this was a stupid idea that they should not repeat; just about everyone involved returned to the Democratic Party. There weren’t enough people involved in the effort to decisively learn from it, though (only 2.4% of the population voted for the Dixiecrats and unlike Nader they weren’t decisive), so they had to learn it in a bigger way in 1968. Did Perot’s electoral success in 1992 lead to a bigger showing in 1996? No, it led to a much smaller showing, and to almost nothing from 2000 onwards. Did Nader’s success awaken the masses to the need for revolution? Of course not. Did the Populist Party’s 1892 “success” in delivering the White House to Cleveland, who disagreed with them about their core concerns, over Harrison, who agreed with them, mean that in 1896 their 1892 five state victory became a ten state victory? Of course not, because this article is horse puckey. Did the Democrats who split their party in 1860 or the Whigs in 1836 decide that they’d shown the error of the ways of two party thinking, or did they return to the two party paradigm? Did the Know Nothings capitalize on their success in 1856 by dominating in 1860, or did they dissolve? Did the Free Soil Party decide that their success in 1848 meant that they should continue their independent ways, or that they should merge with other parties to become the second party in the US system (admittedly after continuing with half the vote share in the 1852 election)?
It’s almost like we’ve run this experiment on a regular basis and consistently found that third party success, even success beyond the wildest dreams of Johnson or Stein supporters, in no way means that the two party system is broken. It’s possible that there’s some mathematical reason that a two party system with competitive primaries is rational in a first past the post electoral setting that lacks a Single Transferable Vote, run off, or similar adjunct.
f: It’s true that if Johnson won New Mexico, and Trump won Nevada, Florida, Iowa, and Ohio, there would be a House of Representatives based choice. The problem with this is that (f.1) there is no plausible scenario in which Johnson wins New Mexico (f.2) If Johnson was winning New Mexico, he’d be doing incredibly well elsewhere and Trump would thus lose not just NV, FL, IA, and OH, but just about everywhere and (f.3) The House would choose Trump; this seems like a needlessly complicated way to arrive at that result. It’s as if instead of turning up to a job interview, you went to a Starbucks nearer your home than the interview on the off chance that your potential boss also decided to skip the interview, travelled to that Starbucks for the first time, and you got to have a cosier chat there instead.
I don’t see a critical difference with the current cycle; as with this one, reasonable arguments could be made for voting for Clinton or for her major party opponent, but no reasonable arguments can be made for voting for the greatest evil.
But he’s not saying his choice is Hillary. He’s saying it’s not obvious to many who is worse. That is not denying that Hillary could be worse. It is not even denying that, given the knowledge one has, and a risk-neutral valuation, that one assigns Hillary the worse expected value, just that one is not very confident about that estimate.
The danger to democracy is never from the bad liars who patently fabricate for self, but from the sophisticated and progressive good liars who lie that their untruth is truth because it was all made up for us.
This is pretty useful feedback. I find that the near universal response to arguments laying out specific ways in which Johnson/ Weld plan to increase spending, decrease personal liberties, or otherwise behave poorly is to suggest that these are the exceptions, and that generally Johnson/ Weld will be great on these. My response has been to paint the forest by going through the trees, hoping to get rebuttal on specifics that could be engaged with. This has not been particularly successful and I think that you may have identified the cause. I’ll have to do better at sounding less sneering.
********
In my defense, I don’t think that I could do a similar thing for others. While I believe that Cruz is a bad guy, my complaints about him were generally restricted to character, strategy, and his not being as conservative as other candidates; his promise to “abolish the Department of Commerce”, for instance, was a promise to cut it by 0.5%, substantially less than the sequester. These things are all weaknesses in Johnson, too; Johnson’s failures to get libertarian reforms instituted even in those areas where he wanted them stems from a Cruz-like approach to reform in which talking to activists is very important and working with the legislature not so much. The promise to abolish departments while retaining the function is a signature of both.
With Johnson, though, my arguments are that he wants to massively expand the state, which was not an argument I could generally make with Cruz. Outside his tax plan and foreign policy, which are admittedly foci of mine, I didn’t generally think that Cruz’s policies would take us far in the wrong direction. Believe me when I say that I would have argued that his domestic policies were to the left of Sanders if I thought that they were, but Cruz simply didn’t give a basis for that kind of criticism in his domestic policies. There were policies that I thought were unwise in the primaries, and not just from Cruz, but not on the same scale.
With Stein, I could make some similar arguments. As @catiii pointed out to me, Stein has the same affection for federal jobs and education programs. She has plenty of crackpot views and her VP has some ethical issues. Other than Stein, I really don’t think that I’d be able to pull up a list of policy awfulness of the scale that I can with Johnson. Clinton certainly has her problems but, as with Cruz, my indictment of her would be for milder offenses on policy.
I’m glad I could help. I think you are on the right track now. Your argument against Johnson will probably be much more effective if it was made more subtle. It tends to come off as a personal vendetta rather than a dispassionate argument on the merits.
It also suffers from the perception that you would do the same thing to even a completely legitimate libertarian candidate with your argument that voting for Libertarians will hurt the medium term prospects of the more libertarian republicans. Many libertarians believe it’s as likely to make the Democrats more libertarian, as well as the Republicans, your arguments to the contrary notwithstanding.
My counterargument to the idea that 3rd parties don’t cause changes in the party nearest to them is your examples could be viewed by the threatened party as statistical anomalies rather than a persistent and continued threat. It seems reasonable to believe that the latter case would result is an appreciable change in the host party, and maybe even a lesser chance to change the other party.
I am trying to figure this one out:
A computer science researcher at UNC ran the Banzhaf power numbers for the 1990 U.S. Presidential election and determined that the state of California had the voters with the highest power index: 3.3. This index is measured as a multiple of the weakest voting state, which was Montana (1.0 voting power).
The 1990 presidential election?
From the source paper, it’s obvious he misquoted “1990 U.S. census”
I’m not sure how one makes the suggestion that it is neither libertarian nor wise for us to advocate for an “emergency” federal government program to provide jobs and education for African American men a subtle suggestion. I try to refrain from humor (eg., when Weld claims that large clip rifles are WMDs it makes him the only person in the race to argue that Saddam had WMDs) because I fear that that would make it sound personal, but it is genuinely hard to talk about Johnson’s policies without sounding as if you’re talking about a crazy pastiche.
This is also fair. Again, I’m not sure that there’s much I can do about it; I would oppose a principled libertarian candidate on precisely the grounds that you mention. Indeed, my irritation with the claims made on behalf of third parties on this very thread would apply equally if Harry Browne or David Koch were the nominee. I would be restricted to making those kinds of arguments, though.
I agree that there are people of all stripes, in all parties, whose response to losing either frequently or, in some cases, once *coughJayNordlingercough*, is to cease participation in the political process and that in a majority of those cases they will argue that they have more influence by not participating than they would by participating. It is a non-trivial point in favor of the deGrasse Tyson like “math” article above that it does not make this argument (unless I missed it). The belief is not limited to minor individuals; the Korean War remains exceptional in being endorsed by the UN because the Soviets engaged in a similar genius calculation. It’s why the Klan left the Democrats in 1924. The list of historical occasions on which this sort of move has been counterproductive has been long, though, and I am not aware of a counter example.
There is a separate argument that having a candidate in an election encourages debate about their policies, even if they do not get elected and those who think like them do not get elected in the future. When a candidate’s policies are either carbon copies of Sanders’ policies or straight up nuts (I have never knowingly met someone who thought that Johnson’s new nationalized life insurance was a good idea, for instance, at any point on the political spectrum), it doesn’t seem obvious that there’s a benefit to discussing them. Neither Republicans nor Democrats, on discovering that support for Sanders’ position on campaign finance is the “libertarian” position is likely to be moved by this discovery to adopt the actual libertarian position. I would like to understand more about this position, though; if you could put forward an argument that Johnson helps move the Ds to a limited government position on something, I’d be grateful.
Indeed, although they’ll be defensive about it in the concrete, in the abstract most libertarians understand that having the most prominent definer of the term “libertarian” being non-libertarian runs a substantial risk of corrupting the political language, in the same way as the corruption of the term “liberal” cuts free market types off from their history and their heroes.
Again, obviously, that’s not a risk that would be presented by a libertarian running on an LP platform. I recognize that my opposition to LP candidates on the basis of my general opposition to right leaning third parties* makes me a poorer critic of Johnson on other grounds. Regrettably, I can’t fall back and instead support others. Until I did the research that showed that he was a [less than wholly honest person], Johnson used to claim that he’d balanced eight budgets. In the entire country, it appears that there was not a single journalist who thought that it’d be a bright idea to look at his budgets. Even now, although he’s stopped with his earlier claim, he talks about his final budget being great without it being an issue that it was passed over his veto. Journalists and pundits on both left and right seem extraordinarily uninterested in providing even superficial levels of research into his claims and positions. As such, a far from ideal choice though I may be, I feel like this is useful. Maybe no one will pick it up, but if they did I’d be doing more good for the world than I’m likely to through other means.
*I fully support the existence of left leaning third parties; the UK was saved by Thatcher’s plurality being enough to win huge majorities because of the blessing of third partyism.
I don’t believe that I follow your language. Could you provide either a case study of a real third party (ideally) or a fictional example that you create, a parable, if not and talk me through how it works?
Thanks for this. I am glad to see FEE out there.