Do you think I’m wrong?

I mean, I think you and I feel very similarly. We are disillusioned, angry, we feel hopeless. I’m not 100% in favor of my strategy. Because it means supporting someone I don’t actually support. But, having weighed the pros and cons, I just feel like there is so much to lose for vulnerable communities. And, on the whole, I feel most peoples’ true intentions in advocating for this are ultimately selfish. I’m not saying that is your motivation at all. You could very much be an idealist. But as a fellow idealist feeling the need to give into my realism as I get older, I find its best to sacrifice yourself and your own sense of idealistic purity for others—again, I’m not saying you’re doing the opposite. It’s a super complicated and shitty lose-lose scenario.

I think I see this news article a little differently than you do…

I agree that not all third party votes would otherwise be votes for Biden. But it’s been proven over and over and has been a Republican strategy for a long time to suppress turnout. Because they aren’t popular. Their ideas are terrible and no one actually likes them. Their supporters are just angry and want to hurt others.

So my thinking is, if it’s a Republican strategy to push third party candidates, and it’s the third party candidates’ campaigns’ position that they are the only hope to defeat a vote against the fascist…I mean…they’re not like you and me basing our opinions mostly on rough approximations. They are looking at data that shows how this changes things. There are few things I trust republicans and antivax nutjobs on, but this subject is one of them—probably the only one.

Doesn’t this with us or against us rhetoric feel odd to you?

I get where you’re coming from. But that’s not the way I look at my position at all. If I were a democrat pushing this type of thinking with the motive of getting more votes for my preferred candidate, yeah, that’d be my problematic position.

But I’m a leftist that has gone back and forth on this issue and debated it in my head for more than half of my life. I get what you’re saying, and sometimes I feel exactly how you feel.

It’s just…a complicated issue and we are both looking at the same thing, seeing the same issues, and coming up with different answers. Literally, after your post I was thinking to myself, “well…I’m in NY. I…could probably do this.” But after 2016, I felt so much guilt, for the first time in my life, for voting third party. And that threw my entire view on the subject into doubt.

I dunno. I don’t have the answer. And apologies if I seemed to have assumed you were a cishet white guy. They’re just usually the most likely to throw everyone else’s caution to the wind to advocate for their own ideas. Not that that’s what you were doing. Just that they always feel the most comfortable in being reckless with others’ safety and well-being.