Mostly I liked this article, but this here is an obvious straw man. Many of those who didn’t vote in the primaries may well have cast a vote for Clinton or Trump if they had participated. Besides, not everyone who voted for Sanders is now reluctant to support Clinton. By ending the article this way you’ve missed the opportunity to highlight the more important point: the way the two-party system filters out candidates so that potentially great candidates rarely enter the race. For instance, look at how the DNC “filtered out” Lawrence Lessig in this election cycle by changing the rules before the second debate.
Bernie Sanders managed to slip through the filter, but he has been in Congress more than 20 years, just as Obama was a senator before he challenged Clinton in 2008. But reaching the Senate costs many millions of dollars. It’s so difficult to raise enough money from poor and working-class Americans that there is only a single member of congress that raised the majority of his funding from donations under $200. That means the number of D and R candidates that don’t focus mainly on fundraising from wealthy donors is vanishingly small.
Also, like virtually all political articles, this one doesn’t account for the “Stockholm Syndrome” experienced by voters in the two-party system. I don’t think it is well understood that the polarization of the American people into left-wing and right-wing orthodoxies is not primarily a grassroots phenomenon, but a long-term top-down shaping of affairs by elites and the media on the left and right. These days the two big parties have strayed so far from practicality and respectability that many voters want to break free, but the fact remains that voters have divided themselves into conservative and liberal groups, each with incompatible beliefs shaped by decades of D and R messaging, and each with a lingering fondness for those parties.
Perhaps these divisions are as old as the U.S. itself, but they have intensified in recent years, and the differences in values between the two factions makes it very difficult for voters to unite to defeat the Republicrats.
Besides that, we have a single-plurality voting system that strongly discourages third parties. If there were a single “independent” party that used a different voting system, its primary process might be able to locate a truly inclusive pan-American candidate, one that isn’t isn’t picked by elites, one that isn’t entirely left or right.
Instead, we have not one but two “independent” parties, each catering to roughly half of Americans, so that the “independent” vote is guaranteed to split.
Therefore, I can’t agree with your conclusion. For anyone who believes there is a lesser of two evils in this election — and the majority of people do — it still makes sense to vote for Trump or Clinton.
