Yet Another Open Letter To Third Party Swing Staters
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, I would like to say this: if you were a Jill Stein/Gary Johnson supporter but ultimately cast your vote for Clinton for the good of the country, God bless you. You had the foresight to recognize how dangerous a Trump presidency was for the country and you temporarily put your ideology aside in order to do the right thing. If you were a Jill Stein/Gary Johnson supporter in a solidly blue or red state, God bless you. You stood up for your political beliefs and didn’t hurt anybody. If you were a Jill Stein/Gary Johnson supporter who swapped votes with a Clinton supporter in a blue state, God bless you, too. While you may have despised Clinton, you too also foresaw the dangers of a Trump presidency and used some creativity in order to get what you wanted without doing something monumentally stupid.
No, this post is directed at all the Stein/Johnson supporters who did do something monumentally stupid, the ones who went third-party in swing states knowing full well what would happen if they did.
I have to call it like I see it. If you were one of the 270,026 people who voted for the Green Party or the Libertarians in Florida, you delivered the state to Trump. If you were one of the 191,765 people who went Green or Libertarian in Pennsylvania, you cost Clinton a victory there. Clinton could have turned Arizona blue (at least temporarily) if 105, 069 Greens and Libertarians had voted for Clinton. 36, 904 Greens and Libertarians cut into Clinton’s lead in New Hsmpshire, making the race unnecessarily tight there. And you Green Party supporters cast enough votes in Michigan and Wisconsin, two former reliably blue states, to put the two states into the Trump column. Clinton wins in those states would have secured her victory.
You did that because you just didn’t give a shit about how a Trump victory would affect other people. And guess what that means? That means you aren’t a true progressive.
No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who called for mass deportations, increased gun ownership, the revival of stop and frisk, religious testing, if not an out-and-out ban, on Muslims in the US, and tax breaks for the one percent. No true progressive would vote for a candidate who vowed to end Obamacare, a program that provided healthcare to twenty-two million Americans. No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who bragged about sexually assaulting women. No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who publicly stated that he believed climate change to be a hoax perpetrated by the Chinese. No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who called for the imperialistic Russian government to hack his opponent’s email account. No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who chose a virulently homophobic governor as a running mate, a running mate whose double barrelled assault on Planned Parenthood led up to one of the biggest outbreaks of HIV in Indiana history. No true progressive would vote for a presidential candidate who promised to name conservative judges to the Supreme Court, judges that will ultimately strike down Roe v. Wade and Obergefell v. Hodges, all the while upholding Citizens United.
And make no mistake, you did vote for Trump. What other effect would a third party vote from a swing state have? You knew very well that Stein and Johnson couldn’t possibly garner enough votes to get into the White House. For that matter, you knew that Stein and Johnson weren’t going to grab a big enough share of the vote to secure federal funding for the 2020 election, either. Stein’s numbers never crept up much beyond the three percent mark; Johnson, who enjoyed momentum early in the race, saw his numbers plummet in the wake of “What is Aleppo?
So let’s be real here. You knowingly voted for Trump and you did it out of spite, never mind your protestations that you weren’t spoilers. You are one of those “Bernie Bros”, those young privileged white male Sanders supporters who, enraged that Hillary Clinton beat Bernie Sanders by three million votes during the Democratic primaries, exploded with churlish rage and withheld your (much needed) support from Clinton. Or you’re a woman who, feeling a combination of internalized misogyny and jealousy, “just didn’t like” Clinton. Or you’re someone (probably a man) who just didn’t give a damn about the sexual violence directed at women or the fact that Donald Trump was accused of inflicting it multiple times after he bragged about perpetrating it. Or you drank the “Crooked Hillary” koolaid despite the fact that nearly thirty years of constant investigation of the Clintons never turned up any evidence of criminal wrongdoing on Mrs. Clinton’s part. Or you let a celebrity endorsement sway your vote. Or you’re someone who doesn’t know any blacks, Muslims, undocumented immigrants, Latinos, women, LGBTQ’S, or poor people. Or you’re someone who drew a false moral equivalency between mishandling email and forcible touching. Or you’re a hopelessly naive radical who thought that refusing to participate in the prevailing two-party system and ultimately allowing Trump to win would usher in a revolution.
There won’t be a revolution. Anyone inclined to fight in one will be getting harassed/killed by cops, cooling their heels in a deportation center, bleeding to death from a back-alley abortion, under constant police surveillance while they practice their religion or cultural traditions, ailing/dying from untreated illnesses because they can’t afford health insurance, or fleeing to Canada in order to marry their same-sex partner.
For that matter, there won’t be incremental change, either. You can forget about that $15 minimum wage. Legalized marijuana? Probably not. Clean renewable energy? As we say in New York, fuhgeddaboutit. “Right to vote” laws, the end of corporate financing of elections, and the end of felon disenfranchisement? Not gonna happen. Trump benefitted from voter disenfranchisement and suppression; no one ever changes the rules of a game after they win. “Simple progressive tax laws” that would close up all those loopholes Donald Trump took advantage of for decades? Uh, no. Free college? You might have gotten it from Clinton but Trump’s a no-go on that one. And given Donald Trump’s xenophobia, there’s no way you’ll get open immigration or freedom of movement.
In short, third party supporter who actually voted for Trump, you royally screwed yourself by refusing to compromise with a flawed but competent candidate who voted with Bernie Sanders more than ninety percent of the time when they both served in the Senate. Your sick desire to “burn it all down” will have long-lasting, maybe even permanent, consequences on everyone who isn’t a straight white cisgender man in the one percent. You can also abandon any hopes of converting left-leaning independents like myself to the Green or Libertarian Party, which is a shame as I agree with much of the respective platforms. While I eventually recovered from Gore’s loss of Florida in the 2000 election, I’ll never forgive you Greens and the Libertarians for ruining our country’s chances of finally electing a highly qualified and experienced woman into the White House. Don’t think for a second that I’m the only one who feels that way.
I hope you’re happy now because you’re going to be miserable, wretchedly so, for the next four years, watching all your progressive dreams turn to dust. And you’ll have nothing to show for your trouble.
I am going to paraphrase former Senator Gary Hart and say that “you get the leaders you deserve.” You most definitely deserve Donald J. Trump.