I am personally not a fan of the Green Party, but as a point of fact they are more than just Jill Stein. My ballot had Green Party candidates running in three races.

Yup. In the context of the election, survivorship bias would be Democratic strategists looking at the Trump campaign and saying “we gotta get more racist”. Considering at their position on immigration, that’s apparently what they did.

If you’re trying to argue that any candidate other than Harris had a chance of beating Trump in this recent election, you’re kidding yourself.

I’m not trying to argue that. I’m saying that it’s becoming apparent that the Democratic party is in such bad shape that they had no chance to beat Trump either. If they fail to make significant changes, to their personnel and their platform, they are going to keep failing in subsequent elections. If they’re going to lose anyway, then there’s got to be a point where progressive Democrats start voting with some dignity for third party candidates.

Yes, but as it turned out, Harris didn’t have a prayer either. If you weren’t voting for Trump (I assume you consider him to be the bigger asshole) it didn’t matter if you voted for Harris or any other candidate. So unless the Democrats make big changes to their platform and the people running their campaigns… well, it’s insanity to expect a different result. There’s got to be a point where progressive Democrats decide that they might as well vote with some dignity for third party candidates.

My question isn’t about morality.

The responses I’ve been getting so far don’t seem very warm to third party voting at all.

I’m not sure what you mean. We’re looking at the wreckage.

It was actually self-defeating to run on a platform that got an (enthusiastically received) endorsement from Dick Cheney.

Despite a billion dollars in funding, the Democrats campaign didn’t have a prayer either. And I have a hard time calling their platform progressive at all. Anyone who liked it more than that of the Greens or the PSL would have just voted Republican.

That’s fair, but if the Democrats are also running candidates that aren’t viable or not running viable campaigns, then you’re just compromising your principles for nothing.

Okay, but the party permitted Biden to campaign for reelection and then decided to run Kamala without a real primary.

I tend to agree, but the people I’m asking aren’t ready to consider anything but electoralism.

Please relax. I don’t claim to have special moral purity or whatever. Opposing genocide just seems like an obvious baseline. Besides, from the perspective of the individual voter (or eligible non-voter) there were no options of statistical possibility. The election was going to go the way it did regardless of what you or I decided to do with our single ballots. The voters who compromised on genocide got nothing except self-imposed damage to their minds and souls. The only way it would have gone differently is if the Democrats ran a better campaign with a different platform and probably with a different candidate.

Bake some cookies. Apart from that, maybe find some colorful wall art and rugs. How about painting the wall behind the sink a fun, warm color to break up all the white?

I like your kitchen very much, btw.

I’m not saying that in the US system, at the presidential level, the loss of one of the two main parties doesn’t ensure the victory of the other. I’m saying that that doesn’t matter to a regular individual who is eligible to vote. That person only gets one ballot and their choices are what is printed on the ballot as well as leaving some or all of it blank.

This one or the other correlative is actually the purview of the campaigns. They have the power to sway enough votes to matter by adjusting their messaging, strategy, and, for the incumbents, actual policy. Instead of looking at what they were up against and eschewing the status quo, the Democrats decided to make the following threat to voters: give us permission to keep exterminating Palestinians or the other guy might take away your various rights here at home. The continued massacre of Palestinians wasn’t their only demand, but I’m just trying to stay on-topic. It’s darkly humorous that the voters who made the choice to acquiesce to that threat ended up morally compromising on genocide for a candidate that apparently was going to lose anyway.

“I voted for the genocide lady in the hopes of rewarding her and her party with four more years in the White House and blocking anyone who hasn’t had a material role in the Palestinian genocide .” That’s what you sound like. You cannot morally justify voting for Harris unless you can justify her ongoing role in the genocide. No one else running for president came close to playing such a role and, of course, there’s nothing immoral about abstaining.

Anyway, I’m just answering the OP. One does not have to vote on the basis of morality. People make immoral decisions all the time. It’s just easily understandable why many people wouldn’t cross that line.

To an individual voter in a large electorate the idea that a Harris loss would ensure a Trump victory isn’t relevant except as an excuse to vote immorally for Harris, the genocide candidate. The only moral choices were to abstain or vote for an explicitly anti-genocide candidate.

The moral argument against voting for Harris doesn’t imply that one has to vote for Trump instead.

California is Kamala’s home state, so I guess it tracks.