Wasted Votes

I've thought about "wasted votes" a lot this week.

I voted for (and worked for) Ralph Nader when I was in my 20s. People gave me shit about it, not only at the time, but for years. My reasons were many, but the primary one was that I saw a Democratic party that had been retreating from its principles for so long that it was, on virtually every key economic issue, to the right of Richard Nixon by the time I was old enough to vote.

George W. Bush was proclaimed winner of the 2000 election by the Supreme Court, with a deciding vote cast by Clarence Thomas, whose son worked for one of Bush’s law firms and who declined to recuse himself despite that conflict of interest. A full recount later proved that Al Gore won Florida, and should have won the presidency.

In the years since, people have often asked me — usually with a very angry, bitter tone — whether I regretted the choice to vote for Nader. I have invariably said, no. Again, there are many reasons. One is that I live in New York State, and have never cast a U.S. presidential vote that “mattered.” There are others, but I don’t really want to get into the weeds about how and why I voted the way I did decades ago.

The point I’m coming to is, despite intense social pressure from centrist Democrats around me, I never regretted voting for Ralph Nader. His record as a public citizen working on behalf of the American people was more impressive than that of most career politicians at the time, and in the unlikely event that he had won, the country would have been a better, stronger place.*

Everyone has always said that people move to the right as they age, but that has not been the case for me — at least not yet. I’m in my 40s and there’s still time, I suppose. In any case, while my personal politics have only become more entrenched, I have been more likely to support Democrats than third-party candidates in most races in recent years.

A lot of that is just as simple as gamesmanship. Some of it is a lack of appealing third-party candidates.

The gamesmanship aspect is simple: the Republican party in the United States has become an existential threat to Americans’ rights, and to the very notion of free and fair elections. Its most notable faces are also people who are profoundly incompetent and often actively hostile to expertise of any kind, from science to history to journalism. I have compromised on important issues in order to vote for Democrats, because they were the only viable alternative to a party that is actively trying to destroy our country.

I have, in fact, given up on Republicans wholesale, and have been voting straight down the line for Democrats, outside of some local races where I know who the faces are.

And that’s where regret sets in.

Living in New York State, my vote in the Presidential election might not matter, but I do vote for my own Senate and House representatives. So, yeah — I have voted, I think twice, for Chuck Schumer. I’ve also voted at least twice for Kirsten Gillibrand, who is basically just as bad, but who doesn’t have Schumer’s visibility.

Schumer’s cowardice over the last two months — and especially his decision to cave on the Senate spending bill — show me that he is failing to do the one thing that I supported him and other Democrats for: stand up to Donald Trump and the far-right takeover of the federal government.

I have been disappointed in the spineless Democrats for as long as I have been politically active. I voted for Nader three times. I turned to them for one reason: to be the last line of defense against a radical, dangerous agenda. Their weak, neoliberal policies are…bad…but they’re obviously better than what we have now. Their entire argument in the 2020 and 2024 presidential elections was predicated on it. But now that the worst-case scenario is here, they’re doing…nothing. A few performative protests, but really it’s everyday Americans who are making a difference right now.

So, yes. I can affirmatively answer the question I’ve been asked so many times over the last 25 years: I do, indeed, regret my vote. Just…not that one.

“There can be no daily democracy without daily citizenship.”

- Ralph Nader

*That’s partially why I haven’t voted for the likes of Jill Stein since; she’s a crank and has extremely limited understanding of U.S. politics. In the event she won the Presidency, she would be very bad at the job.