Why I Voted For Gary Johnson
Disclaimer: I wrote the following story during the 2016 election cycle. This story was written at a time when conventional political wisdom stated that an inarticulate and impolitic businessman with no political experience and multiple fraud and sexual assault allegations pending against him could not possible best a former First Lady/former United States Senator/former Secretary of State in a presidential race — and the tone of the piece reflects that.
Aside from the occasional corrections to spelling/grammatical/syntax/factual errors, the story you are about to read is in its original form.
Before I write anything else, let me tell you a few things about myself. I am a HUGE Hillary Clinton supporter; in addition to relentlessly advocating for her on this blog, I’ve done phone banking for Hillary for America and donated (a very small amount) to her campaign. And I am not an ambivalent namby-pamby “lesser of the two evils” voter, either. I’ve wanted to see Hillary Clinton hold court in the Oval Office since 1992. And although I happily voted for Obama in 2008 (and 2012), I was deeply disappointed that Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign crashed and burned so spectacularly, eighteen million cracks notwithstanding.
So why, you may be asking, did I waste a vote on an incompetent third party candidate who is never going to win the general election, let alone a single Electoral College vote? I did it for Hillary.
You see, I live in deep-blue New York State — New York City, to be exact. Hillary Clinton can get hit by a bus, struck by lightning, and have a baby grand piano dropped on her head from twenty stories above and still effortlessly carry the State of New York in the upcoming election. While it is wonderful to be surrounded by so many like-minded people, living in New York means that my vote doesn’t count for much. Because of the vagaries of the Electoral College, the election of 2016 will be decided by the few million people who live in swing states. And entirely too many of those people, disenchanted with the two party system and disgusted with the state of American politics in general, are casting votes for third party candidates.
Remembering the election of 2000, I am terrified of the prospect of Donald Trump winning the White House due to the vote-siphoning effect of third party runs. At the same time, I have been around long enough to realize that there is a certain segment of the population who will vote for purely ideological reasons, no matter how disastrous the outcome.
So I decided to swap my blue state Clinton vote for a swing state third party vote. My attempts to find a vote swapping buddy on the #NeverTrump app failed; there were way more Clinton supporters than third party voters on the platform. So I took things into my own hands. Via Facebook, I contacted an old friend of my brother’s, a Gary Johnson supporter living in New Hampshire, a swing state. I proposed a swap, dropping a link to a blog post explaining my position. He got back to me a few days later, stating that he was willing to switch. I received my absentee ballot sometime later and filled in the bubble near Gary Johnson.
As much as I would have liked to have voted for Clinton, I feel good about my decision. The race is unfairly tight and Clinton needs all the help she can get.