Conventional wisdom says a vote for a third party candidate is a wasted vote. The Free Agent posits that in New York this November, the only way your vote will count is if it’s cast for a third party candidate.
The Free Agent probably shouldn’t say this, spokesmodel that she is for the Manhattan Libertarian Party, but this November, New York will cast its 29 electoral votes for Mister Obama. The city of New York in particular absolutely adores him. Gothamites will pay forty thousand dollars just to watch the man chew groceries. The poor, immigrants, lower middle class, young people, old people, they not only love Mister Obama, but they are thoroughly conditioned to believe they are incapable of renting an apartment, seeing a doctor, or selecting a beverage without a politician’s guidance and a lawyer’s business card. Mister Obama will carry New York. If you vote for him, your vote is wasted.
If you don’t want Mister Obama to renew his lease on the Executive Mansion, you might be tempted to vote Republican, but a vote for Mister Romney says nothing. Are you demanding X% or X+10% growth in the defense budget? If you favor the repeal of Pee-Pee Ca-Ca, without replacement, Mister Romney has promised he will replace it, presumably with the not-uncoincidentally named Romneycare. Do you want an end to federal attacks on legal marijuana producers? Would you have the USA Patriot Act repealed? Would you like to see business and state as separate as church and same? Your vote for Mister Romney communicates none of that. Your vote is wasted.
The Free Agent suggests New Yorkers choose one of two candidates whose votes will actually communicate your desires (if anyone bothers to count votes in New York, which they don’t always do). A vote for Socialist Party USA’s Stewart Alexander loudly proclaims Mister Obama has not been aggressive enough in demolishing the constitutional limits to federal power, while a vote for Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson says you want the federal leviathan poked back into its constitutional cage.
You know The Free Agent will urge you to vote for Governor Gary Johnson, a candidate she has supported both with her limited resources and her shoe leather. A vote for Mister Johnson could not be more unequivocal—your vote says you demand an immediate end to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq (or did every single soldier return home by last Christmas as the current Commander-in-Chief promised?) as well as the devastating war the US has been fighting against its own citizens for the past forty years, Richard Nixon’s ‘War on Drugs’. Your vote will acknowledge that a third of the federal budget must be cut, and accept that many lives will be disrupted, but that living on borrowed money is passing unearned consumption of today onto non-consenting taxpayers of the future. Voting for Mister Johnson communicates that you jealously defend your rights and the rights of others, and want the natural consequence of those rights—peace and prosperity.
Still, The Free Agent would rather you vote for the Socialist than either of the major party candidates. If what you want to say is that all humans are part of one collective, that we should all reap the same rewards regardless of our ability to pay for them, if you favor “putting workers and consumers in control of the economy” and—to be fair—repealing USA Patriot Act—if you consider Mister Obama a traitor to the march of history for failing to create a political health-care monopoly, say it with a vote for Mister Alexander.
Can’t bring yourself to vote for either a Libertarian or a Socialist? You still don’t have to vote for a Republicrat. Tick or write in ‘None of the Above’, and your silence will speak volumes.