The 12th Amendment is the reason why it will never be time for a third party (at least, until the Electoral College is repealed)…if no candidate gets a majority of electoral votes, then the House of Representatives gets to choose between the top three electoral vote-getters, with each state getting one vote. The only time we had to resort to that was in 1824, when the Democratic-Republican party splintered between four candidates…the House got to pick between the top three (Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and William Crawford, in that order), the fourth-placed candidate (Henry Clay, who was the Speaker of the House at the time) got to play kingmaker and swung the election for Adams.

In this election, do you seriously think that this House (and its 33 Republican-majority state delegations) wouldn’t put Trump in the Oval Office, even if he’s the runner-up? That’s why we have to get behind Clinton as progressives, because even the best-case scenario that doesn’t include that course of action will set our cause back by decades. Criticize her all you want — gods only know that I will be, the closest candidate to my political outlook is Mimi Soltysik — but Donald Trump is the kind of existential threat to the Republic that simply hasn’t happened in this country before…it has happened in other countries though, with the kinds of results that are likely to get me (a transgender person) and everyone I love killed. I wish I were wrong here…but you only have to look to the kinds of people who Mike Pence has made a career from the support of to find the truth in it. If you truly believe that Black Lives Matter, and if you truly value the lives of LGBT people, then you’ll get off this privileged nonsense and support the only candidate to the left of Reagan who has any chance of even getting on the ballot in enough states to win this election.