Okay: if the only vote acceptable to you is one that results in a win for that candidate or could feasibly result in a win for that candidate, you’re discounting a good portion of the outcomes of even the flawed American electoral system and how they effect the future.

Vote tallies are used to determine funding, ballot presence, debate opportunities, media representation and of course, public awareness.

It’s also important to recognize that we are not given the opportunity to vote against one or more candidates. There is no bubble on the scantron form that will indicate “I’m only doing this to keep the other guy out of office” or “I only support your platform on guns”.

We are given only the ability to voice support for candidates, their platforms and actions, with no room for nuance or debate.

Candidates and their teams and administrations aren’t shown weather or not you protested the arms shipments, spoke in defense of abortion or moved resolutions condemning the genocide forward in your local governments.

They will only see your vote.

Your vote for Biden is not a vote against trump, it is a vote of support for Biden and his fascist policy of genocide.

I am not making an appeal to emotion with that last sentence and hopefully the time and text spent to raise it to the level of logical and utilitarian shows that.

If you took all emotion out of your decision in November and purely cast your ballot based entirely upon utility, your analysis could very easily conclude that there is no acceptable option to support between the two major parties and that it’s better to be counted supporting a third party you would like to see more of in 2026, 2028 and beyond.

I’ve talked about red lines over and over in this thread and while I like the phrase because it’s something everyone can understand, I’m afraid it evokes the constantly shifting goalposts of our politicians own red lines and that limits its effectiveness. Instead of describing the hypothetical or real actions of candidates as red lines, I’ll use other phrases here to hopefully get the point across more clearly.

When giving support to either candidates platforms and actions is beyond the pale, a bridge too far, simply unacceptable to you using whatever methodology is appropriate to you, the only reasonable utilitarian, logical choice is to lend your counted and measured support to a party, candidate and platform you want to see next time.

If you can’t support the actions of the current regime or its opponent than this election is lost to you.

Now if we look beyond the actual votes themselves to the effect peoples discourse has on politicians platforms before the elections themselves it becomes even more difficult to defend saying “vote blue no matter who” or that you’ll be marking a straight ticket or whatever.

If we assume the pollsters and political parties are paying attention and using our discourse to modify their own platforms and actions in order to get support then it’s more utilitarian and logical to be posting about how you’ll never vote for the platform of genocide or that the democrats should dump Biden at the convention than it is to be speaking in opposition to those views because an administration that sees lots of people saying they need to change course or lose those votes come November is more likely to actually change course than one who sees lots of opposition to those voices in the form of “voting against trump”, “vote blue no matter who” or “harm reduction”.

That is of course if you’re against the genocide.