So I know a lot of you might not be old enough to vote yet, but for those that are, or will be soon, I present the concept of "strategic voting". Many people often debate who and what people should vote for based on merits and ideology, which is great, but there is another angle too. Aside from directly voting for the person or bills that you support, your vote has powerful strategic properties as well. Let me explain, and then I'd like to open up the discussion to how you all think about this idea, whether it's ethical, if it should or shouldn't be done, and how effective you think it might be. Say you live in a country where party politics have left you with maybe 3 or 4 party options (green, blue, yellow, and red), and only 2 of those (lets call them red and blue) have any real hope of winning. If you happen to identify as yellow, you are sort of in a tricky situation because no matter what you do you aren't even close to getting your first choice. It's not that your vote doesn't matter, but the way that first-past-the-post voting works, 2 party politics are inevitable ~ barring some major society flipping event or radical legal changes. CGP Grey has an excellent video explaining this: http://youtu.be/s7tWHJfhiyo. So what are you to do? well, even tho you support yellow, you still prefer red over blue, so "strategic voting" would dictate that you should vote for red so that blue, who you really don't like doesn't win, (the lesser of two evils approach). Once you are now focused on the two major parties there are further complications too, and so more opportunity for "strategic voting". Each party usually has a series of elections that take place before the "big election" happens. These are called primaries. So way before the election, a handful of Red candidates and a handful of Blue candidates all run against each other within their own party to select who will be the official candidate for the big election. So, say you like all of the Blue candidates and you don't really care if any of them win. You now have the opportunity to vote for whichever Red candidate you either like the most, or think will have the least chance of beating a blue candidate. In the primary, you purposely vote for someone you think will lose, from the party that you don't support. Then for the general election you vote for the person running against them. This way you have double the voting power and get to influence both sides of the election. Now, If we lived in a perfect world, I would think that this "strategic voting" would be unnecessary and everyone could just vote for who they actually supported, but unfortunately we don't have that and so in the meantime these are just tips for using the current system to the best advantage you can. I'd love to know other people's thoughts on this or even the elections system in general if you'd rather talk about that.
A lot of people do the things you've described. While it's not an uncommon ideology, I thank you for putting it out there.
I dislike the two party system. Even though my ideals are more closely associated with the Pacific Green Party, I usually find myself voting Democrat so as not to waste my vote.
I'm in the exact same position; I usually end up voting Dem just to maximize my vote's power against Rep candidates. In the 2012 race tho, I'm proud to say I stuck to my principals and voted for Jill Stein. Ultimately, I'm glad Obama defeated Romney, but he didn't do enough to sway my particular vote away from the Green Party.
