don’t get me wrong — i’m not necessarily defending a 2-party system. I think it feels actually very limiting — nonetheless, I have become convinced over time through approaching the electoral question from a number of different angles (history, experience, psychology, sociology, anthropology, political philosophy, game theory, decision science, etc) that regardless of what I would like, that is the system we have because it is the way the republic was designed by the people who founded the country (& that’s a whole rabbit hole i wrote about elsewhere and need to do better justice to at some point).

Now, because those folks believed strongly in pluralism (which was still an entirely radical idea on the planet at that time) but were also concerned with the very real possibility of temporary emotional trends sweeping the nation in a heated direction prematurely, or extremist minorities holding up the process of governance by splintering factions too broadly, they designed a two-tiered system that awarded each state’s electors as a total block based on the popular vote winner. It’s called a “first-past-the-post” voting system and mathematically it has implications for the likelihood of any political party arrangement terribly far from the normal distribution to be very low. The Median Voter Theorem is the politically- and empirically-flavored version of this realization (which is not to say that We The People cannot change this voting system — of course we can. That’s what this whole system was designed for. It’s just: we can’t do it in the middle of an election. We would have had to show up sooner to act in favor of electoral reform).

Blah blah blah math whatever — the intuitive version of this concept is basically that, without a lot of extant support already for a third party’s party at the Congressional, state, and local levels, it’s very difficult to see how under this specific model we have in the U.S. that suddenly a candidate from way out past a couple of standard deviations is gonna swing in from the sidelines and snag the highest office in the land. The even more colloquial version of this idea is that, “you can’t have a ‘grassroots movement’ imposed from the top.”

It’s possible one can be for a third party and imagine there may be some wild sea change in opinion between now and November 8 — even though there aren’t any Green Party office holders at any level of government — but knowing anything about human nature it becomes hard to justify.

Even those of us very close in beliefs and/or goals can maintain opposing positions to the bitter end — so it’s hard to see why we would at the same time entertain the notion that tens or hundreds of millions of people will relatively suddenly have a “revolutionary” awakening within the next month. And if you agree that likelihood has a low probability, then we probably get to the “voting as self-expression” vs. “voting as concerned for outcomes” debate which is a whole other rabbit hole. How one feels about that questions tends to have a lot to do with how recently one gained suffrage, but by no means exclusively so.

I would argue it’s most useful to think about “voting as concerned for outcomes” because really, who would i be kidding if i imagine that my hanging chad somewhere is a unique expression of all my human essence. I sure hope it’s not. To me my vote represents, “all things considered, how can i best promote the most objectives and values i personally believe in?” which has to include a factor for Effectiveness — and I’m sure Jill Stein’s advisors are entirely smart people, but I’m pretty also convinced that Clinton has amassed a world-class team that has actually been road-tested, over a lifetime of public service, in a way Stein’s crew has not. Simply by virtue of having heard of and fondly remembering many of them, before even getting into any other credentials.

Here’s the thing, ultimately: I just turned 40. I have fond memories of the Clintons in the White House (and objectively even in 20/20 hindsight, those years are still conspicuously good for the nation out of the past 4 decade romp of conservatism), and fond memories of Hillary as a Senator for New York during a time when I also lived in the state (and we all lived through 9/11, and she was a fucking champ, and gets zero credit for what she did getting health coverage for the first responders & having to basically beg GWB for appropriations to rebuild the country’s largest city). I’m not voting for her as a “lesser of evils” sorta thing. I’m voting for her because I find her a rare, shining breed in a gigantic shitstorm worth of corrupt mofos who would slander their dead grandmothers for a chance at lower taxes and i’m at this point really pissed off that the professional smear campaign waged by a number of political operatives over the past ~40 years — many of whom made their entire careers on baseless Clinton hit jobs — has some small chance of sinking this brilliant woman’s chance of being the leadership America needs to take us far, far away from this dark and terrible hellscape we’re in where the nation hangs on a knife’s edge of fascist dictatorship, but half the country is sorta like “whatever.” In any other age Clinton would be a shoo-in. We thought Romney was an evil Smithers-type! It’s highly disturbing what’s happening on the world stage right now. Regardless of who wins, America has hit a new low when one nominee threatens to throw his opponent in jail. I can’t be impervious to that.