Why do you feel you have to vote for one of the two?
Say that state is Ohio. In 2012, the popular vote in Ohio was as follows (Source: Politico):
B. Obama 50.1%
M. Romney 48.2%
G. Johnson 0.9%
J. Stein 0.3%
Let's say you're much more aligned with the Green Party platform. Why wouldn't you vote for Jill Stein?
The answer is because your vote would likely otherwise go to Barack Obama, as the next closest candidate. So you're taking a vote away from Obama and putting it toward a candidate that has no chance of winning.
If enough people do this, the second place candidate would win, in this case Mitt Romney. As a Green supporter, this would likely be the worst case scenario result. And yet, unintuitive as it is, your vote contributed to the candidate on the opposite side winning.
"But if enough people voted Green, they would win," some cry. OK. Historically speaking, the Greens have averaged around this result... likely no more than 3% in any given state election. Do you really think that they're going to multiply their votes by several orders of magnitude by election day?
This isn't the case in every electoral system; for example, in a Parliamentary system such as Canada's, you vote for your local MP, who runs on the basis of a riding, for which there are usually several within a city. The party that wins the most MP seats gets to form a government (PM, etc.) So the election becomes a much more local affair, rather than being a winner-take-all battle among the entire province, and results in practice in a multi-party system. Unfortunately, that's just not how US presidential elections work. The ridings are the size of an entire state, so your vote has less of an impact.
Confined to a single election. I have a theory that lately we're seeing the longer-term consequences of limiting agency to large sections of the population.
1) There is a clear value to voting Green in terms of building the party. The more people vote Green, the more visible the success of the party, the better they do in future elections. Not all of what happens in an election need be about winning the current contest.
2) The idea of a linear political spectrum with candidates neatly arranged from 'good' to 'worse' to 'bad' is bunkum. In particular Libertarians are an obvious divergence from this model (and often emphasize this), and this strategic voting argument makes zero sense in their case. Greens also are generally quite different from Democrats ideologically (notably on war); the idea that a Democrat is a 'better compromise' is vulgar to many.
3) If a party wants your votes, generally they should take up the positions you favor, not refuse to countenance them on the belief that duty requires you to vote for them.
4) Mitt Romney is looking pretty good right now, even compared to Clinton.
That makes sense in the abstract. In concrete reality, Trump is going to do his best to persecute hundreds of thousands of Americans, notably Hispanics and Arabs. (I don't say "Muslims" because I don't think his policies, or the people carrying them out, will recognize a functional distinction.) Shall we tell those people as they're being persecuted and deported that their suffering is okay, because they're contributing to the Greens possibly having a chance at winning in 20 years?
I don't think we can reasonably ask that of people.
Of course I don't believe in elections so this whole debate is academic to me. In a world with ALEC and WPP, elections have nothing to do with governance.
But the idea that we have nothing to fear except Trump is bullshit. Trump didn't bring us here. Bush, Clinton and Obama did. Fifteen years of terror and violence in the Mideast did. Actually sixty years if you want.
I fought hard to stop the Iraq war that Clinton voted for. She has nothing to be afraid of personally. I've been afraid too long.
1) I agree that there is value in building strong third parties, but that value comes at the cost of the risk of the spoiler effect as I described. If presidential elections happened every year, or if there was a bigger push from the bottom (State and Legislative elections) to elect more third parties, then maybe the risk would be worth it to establish the base, but that's not the case, and a President can do a lot of damage in 4 years.
3) I think both Trump and Bernie have demonstrated a more viable way to accomplish that this election. Both have moved the Overton Window in a direction that the entrenched party candidates were unwilling to prior to this election. For example, Bernie pushed the Dem platform adopt "raise the minimum wage to $12, or maybe more", when they weren't strongly pushing for it prior.
4) I think that 2016 Romney sounds pretty good, but pandering 2012 Romney still sounds pretty awful. Similarly 2000 McCain sounds great in retrospect, but 2008 or even 2016 McCain sounds pretty awful as well.
My feeling on Clinton is that she, and many of the other people in government, are horrifying murderers and traitors. Obama has two main roles: fundraise for the Democrats and sell weapons to Saudi Arabia. Clinton has been paid millions of dollars by Goldman Sachs, a company that had a major hand in constructing the housing bubble whose bursting blanked $24 trillion in wealth from America.
I am just giving you a bare illustration of my disagreements with Clinton. I held my nose and voted for Sanders in the primary. I probably won't even vote for Jill Stein. There is no way for someone like me to even begin to express my antipathy to the current form of American political process and system of government.
To many people like me, you are asking them to vote for Al Capone because John Wayne Gacy is worse.
Perhaps you think people like me don't matter. But the truth is there are probably a lot of people like me. And there are probably a lot of people of a similar bent on the right (though with different stories for why we should hate and fear the same elites). And this political system doesn't reflect our desires, and, as you're arguing in this thread, by design it cannot; it seems lunatic to me to attempt to engage with it.
So, I won't be voting Clinton, nor Trump. But I am not a spoiler; the barrel is fully rotten.
I am normally quite chatty about this and other political topics online, but tonight I'm out of energy -- so thank you for summing up how I feel so well!
I don't personally think that way, and I believe there would be a huge difference between a Clinton and a Trump presidency, so I will vote strategically because I want to have an impact on the real election happening here, that between the two front-runners.
These Nader supporters of course had every right to vote how they wanted, but the prevailing argument at the time by Nader was that there was essentially no difference between Gore and Bush and it was time to send a message to the "establishment."
However you feel about Bush, I think history makes it plain that 1) there was likely a huge difference between a Bush and a potential Gore presidency, and 2) while it may be nice to simply send a message with your vote, we should remember that 0.0000895% of the electorate of a single state can determine the outcome.
But no matter how strong our emotions are about such things, should be extremely clear-headed about what our vote means. And, the point I try to hammer home, that we each need to take full responsibility for the result of our vote.
If you want to vote to 'let the world burn', as quite a few Bernie supporters are talking, so be it.
If you want to vote to 'send a message', so be it.
If things go very badly after November, then you're not allowed to say "my vote didn't really matter" or "I had no choice but to vote the way I did."
Own your vote; make it, and accept responsibility for your portion of the outcome.
537 out of 100,000 Nader voters in 2000 changed the world, and not in a good way, in my strongly held opinion at least.
You are not taking a vote away from Obama when you vote for Stein. It is far more likely that Obama is actually taking votes away from Stein, as Green party supporters vote strategically, because their 2nd choice is better than their 3rd or 4th choice.
Until such time as any US state implements a ranked-choice voting system, you have no way of knowing whether the candidate receiving the vote is actually someone's first choice, or a strategic vote for the second-to-last choice.
First-past-the-post voting essentially means that the 2 major parties are always stealing away almost all the votes that would have otherwise been cast for lesser parties. So a vote for Stein is actually "refusing to let Democrats steal your Green vote". You can't steal it away from the Democrats, because it wasn't theirs to begin with.
Parliamentary systems with FPTP also tend toward two-party systems locally, though there is somewhat more variation nationally sometimes. (The US also had some variation nationally, especially before the Missouri Farmer-Labor Party joined the national Democratic Party.)
IF you want multiparty elections locally as well as nationally -- if you want more than two meaningful choices when you go into the ballot box -- you need something better than FPTP as a voting system (IRV with single-seat constituencies is like the smallest and least meaningful step in a positive direction, but STV with multiseat constituencies does better.)
If you don't expect to die before the next election, it is never a waste to vote for the option closest to what you actually want.
If you are always voting between your worst choice and your second-worst choice, it may be wiser to reconsider strategic voting altogether, and just pick what you want every time.
I think there is a pair of words reversed here: it is not definitely wasted in terms of ballot access and public credibility for subsequent elections (that is, it is possible for it to have some impact on those things), but its most likely also wasted for those purposes, so "definitely not" is not accurate.