Why I Voted Third Party: Or How Desperate Attempts to Stop Trump Let Him Succeed

Let me begin by saying that I’m horrified with my countrymen. My ancestors died to make this country possible, and to invest in this Great Experiment. Yesterday, the descendants of those, and the inheritors of their legacy, threw all of that away because they felt like they, as the “underprivileged class” had to rise up against their oppressors—namely the educated. They began to compare themselves, and decided that the reason they weren’t rich or powerful was because they had been robbed of something. And so, they voted for someone who was extremely rich and powerful because he had appealed to their jealousy. Yes, that’s how I summarize Donald Trump. To quote Lady Bracknell, “Which reminds one of the worst excesses of the French Revolution, and we all know what that unfortunate movement led to.” 

Really, the problem in this country isn’t the people in power. It’s the belief that they have to stay in power.

Last night, I jeopardized my mental health and went on facebook.  There, I encountered someone who posted a quote which said, “Voting 3rd Party is a good way to let marginalized groups know that your abstract principles are more important than their very real lives.”

I so disagree with this. But I didn’t to get into it, so I simply made my opinion heard by posting. “I disagree.  That’s all I’m going to say because we can’t agree on this.” Well, that’s not all I’m going to say. Because I need to respond to this.

People are always saying that the two-party system is bad, and we should get rid of it.  The truth of the matter is that you can’t.  A two-party system will always emerge in any democratic system.  It is lessened in countries where there’s proportional representation in a ruling body, but if you have any one leader in your system, two parties will emerge. The reason why is that no matter how many parties you start with, eventually parties will merge to create the highest chance of someone close to their thinking winning.  This is unchangeable. 

 What is NOT unchangeable, however, is the parties.  This is what people seem to forget. Yes, there have always been two parties in the US.  Even though Washington told us not to, we quickly developed two parties.  What hasn’t always been there is Democrats and Republicans.  There have been Whigs, and Federalists and Democratic Republicans, and Know-Nothings (a political party based on keeping Catholics out of power of all things, and yes, they actually legitimately won offices). Except for the Know-Nothings, all of those have held the presidency. The parties can change.  And how you do this is third parties.

I voted for Evan McMullin.  And I am not ashamed of that.  Yes, I’m an Ohio voter, who voted for Evan McMullin. And it was the first time in my voting life that I have been able to say, “I stand by who I voted for 100%.”  There has not been anything brought up to me about Evan McMullin or his policies that I do not support.  The only thing that made me consider not voting for him is that he is third party. 

Last presidential election, I voted for Mitt Romney.  I agreed on most things, but definitely not all things.  I had reservations in his policies, but it was close enough. This year, I was repulsed by Republicans who I had classically voted for (though I’m not a straight Republican voter in any election I’ve ever voted in, and I don’t agree with them on everything by any means).  But I was equally repulsed by the rhetoric of Democrats that taught me that I had to vote for someone who I disagree with on most everything in order to keep a snake from winning the White House.

When people talk about how third party politics made Hillary lose, I just have to explain one thing.  Not everyone who voted third party would have voted for Hillary Clinton without that third party option.  In fact, if Evan McMullin hadn’t stepped up, I don’t know that I would have voted at all.  And if four years ago, you had told me I would say that at one point in my life, I would have called you crazy.  I would never not vote.  But that's probably what would have happened. I was procrastinating changing my driver's license to Ohio just so that I could have an excuse to tell people when they asked if I had voted.  Because I don’t believe in Hillary Clinton. 

In the end, I couldn’t vote for Hillary Clinton. I can most accurately explain it as this:  I do not trust Hillary Clinton as far as I could throw her. She is a conniving snake, and I don’t actually believe that she protects the people that Donald Trump attacks. I don’t think she cares about the poor, and I don’t think that she even begins to understand the issues that real Americans face. And all the things that she has promised.  I think she’s writing checks that she can’t cash, nor would she if she could.

I don’t believe that Hillary Clinton protects women.  I have long made no secret of the fact that I bristle at the implications that protecting me as a woman means that you make sure that I can safely have a man stick his penis inside my vagina whenever the urge strikes and I either won’t get pregnant or I can conveniently chuck that baby in the trash can with the rest of my menstrual blood (sorry for getting graphic, but that’s really what people are saying).  I think that abortion is an affront to womanhood, and I am proud to call myself a woman, and believe that means more than sexual liberty/promiscuity. 

Yes, I agree that Trump threatens women.  He is a misogynist who in short believes that women exist for his sexual pleasure. Yes, I agree that Trump threatens immigrants. But Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a political history of protecting them.  Yes, I agree that Trump threatens Muslims.  But Hillary Clinton’s shoddy job as a Secretary of State led to actions which destabilized the Middle East and didn’t exactly make the world a grand place to be Muslim.  

As an unrelated side-note, I could have voted for Bernie Sanders.  Yes, I agree with him on basically nothing, but I find him to be an honorable human being, and I trust him.  He has a good political record, and if he was up there against Trump, I would have to say that even though I disagree with him, I could trust him. 

And instead of saying that if people hadn’t voted for third party, Trump wouldn’t have won, check your thinking and consider this instead: if more people had voted for Evan McMullin in Utah, he could have cost Trump the presidency.  Trump was declared the winner when he passed 270 by 4 points, 6 of which came from Utah.  I don’t live in Utah anymore, but I did until very recently, and I know that there were a lot of people in Utah who were voting for Trump to block Hillary, and also a huge patch voting for Hillary because they were blocking Trump. I also know, from talking to them, that a lot of them admitted they agreed with McMullin, but found it more important to make sure either Clinton or Trump didn’t win.  Let’s pretend that all of the people who voted for McMullin in Utah WOULD have voted for Clinton. Let’s even pretend that Clinton had won Utah. She still wouldn’t have won the election. But McMullin could have sent it to the House of Representatives.  Yes, I’m also falling into the trap of if we added all these votes here, then this would have happened, making a huge assumption. But, all those who say that the 3^rd party would have ruined it, consider for just a moment, that if more people had been willing to vote their conscience, then maybe the 3^rd party could have saved it.

See the enemy isn’t Clinton.  The enemy isn’t Trump. The enemy is those who would lead you to believe that consideration of who will probably win has anything to do with who you should vote for. If people had gotten into that thought, then Lincoln wouldn’t have been elected.  Hitler would have taken over Europe (he was most likely going to win that war until the US came in).  The American Revolution would have never happened.  If people just voted for what they believed in, we could end this deadlock.  We could actually get a president who represents the majority of people!

I will say right now that I believed in Evan McMullin.  I still do. And I stand my decision to vote for him.  I don’t feel guilty about it at all. I will not be bullied by the current Two Parties.