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Scott being against Trump is one thing. Scott willing to support Harris is another. Scott was canceled by the establishment she is the titular head of. He is a traitor to himself, in the sense of adhering to his own enemies and giving them aid and comfort. That's a horrible thing, and the next time he gets canceled, I will not be in the least bit upset.
There are many valid criticisms of Harris, but if you dislike Trump more than Harris you must support Harris and vice versa. To act otherwise in the US electoral system is to act irrationally.
But, anyway, all these comments trying to relate this to his cancellation are truly baffling to me. How can you all be so tribe-brained? The NYT and some weird anti-rats with vendettas trying to cancel him is completely orthogonal to Trump being a horrible person, a horrible leader, and an initiator of democratic backsliding in the US (with a possibility he will become even more of one, whether he wins or loses). Harris and the DNC did not pen articles about Scott being problematic, and even if they did I suspect he would still (rightly) support Harris and the Democrats in the 2024 election, because their opponent is Trump.
No, this attitude is 100% Molochian. The odds of your one vote altering the outcome of the election are infinitesimal. Treating your vote as a strategic move in a game assumes a completely unrealistic degree of personal agency and impact. The psychological impact that voting (or not voting!) has on you is almost certainly (>99%) the only impact your vote will have on anyone, anywhere. In distant second place, your protest vote for a third party might contribute to making an impression on someone in power, such that they shift their policy priorities slightly toward your expressed preferences.
Of course, from the perspective of an American political party the most important voters to persuade are precisely those voters who are least likely to cast a vote for either major party candidate: the ones not already ideologically captured by either party. Consequently it is in both the Democrat and Republican parties' best interests to perpetuate the idea that because third party candidates are not "viable," it is a waste to vote for the candidate you prefer; you must vote only for the major party candidate you hate least!
Everyone should vote (or not vote!) as seems best to them, without regard for "picking a winner." To behave in any other way is to make of oneself another simple tool of party political machines.
If you're not voting with reference to the outcome, why bother going at all? If it's just a question of making yourself feel better, stay at home and throw darts at a picture of Kamala Harris, and let the people who actually care about who becomes President do the voting.
What are you talking about? I didn't say people should vote without reference to the outcome. I said people should vote as seems best to them.
If you think your vote will affect the outcome, you're probably just bad at math. What do you think it means to vote "with reference to" the outcome? Here's my take: a vote is your opportunity to express a preference to the public concerning how the public should be run. There is presumably some outcome that you desire, and voting is a system we have in place to allow you to express that (or not). So of course you vote "with reference to" the outcome, if you decide to vote at all--you just don't vote in a way that implies you actually have some control over the outcome. If instead of expressing your desire, you try to influence the outcome in a strategic way, then again: you're probably just being bad at math. It's not a big deal, you being bad at math is fine, and even your imagining that your vote matters to the outcome is a relatively harmless delusion.
But if you cast your vote because you think it will influence the outcome, then you'll influence the outcome equally well by staying at home and throwing darts at a picture of Donald Trump, and letting the people who actually care about public discourse do the voting.
In one sense obviously yes, one vote will not determine the outcome of the election, but think about it like this. If one side in the election all suddenly came to this realisation and freely discussed and acknowledged this fact, while the other still maintained the fantasy that 'every vote matters', then side B would win a landslide, and in a sense they've almost willed their fantasy into being. What I mean is that both for democracy at large and for your preferred candidate, it's pretty important that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered to be true, even if it isn't. And insofar as each individual contributes to keeping up the delusion, 'every vote matters' almost becomes true even while it is obviously strictly false.
Indeed. And if everyone were to suddenly come to this realization all together, and realize that everyone else had reached this realization, then we'd almost certainly elect many more "third party" candidates. This is why I always push back against the "you must pick one of these two" argument: because it is false, and we'd all be better off if everyone treated it as false. Far better for people to simply vote to express what they think is genuinely best, than to imagine themselves strategically selecting a particular outcome.
So close! It's pretty important for the Republican and Democrat parties that the general proposition that every vote matters is considered true, even though it isn't. Democracy at large is better off without building a consensus around falsehoods.
Has this ever happened anywhere? FPTP always collapses into a two-party system (at least in individual races/regions, if not always country-wide as in the US). It's better that way though, and that's why I said it's better for the fiction to continue for democracy at large - if we all selected our favourite candidate among, say, twenty options all spread around various mixtures of ideology and policy the winner would have a) no legitimacy, as they'd have won a pathetic plurality of votes, and b) would on average be no closer than the median winner of two-party elections to the median American. After all, in such a scenario the winner would be pretty much randomly decided based on which candidate had the fewest spoilers in and around their ideological position. Multi-party countries only work with multi-party electoral systems, otherwise you get Belfast South. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belfast_South_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_2010s
But all this is entirely beside the point. If it seems best to you that you should vote for a major party candidate, then do it! And if the emergent pattern is a "two party system," okay, that's the emergent pattern! What's completely bonkers is telling people that
That's just bullshit, and someone declining to vote for either is much more likely to have a positive effect, insofar as it has any effect at all, than forcing oneself to pick a "lesser of two evils" instead.
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