Nobody likes voting for the “lesser of two evils.” Casting a vote in favor of someone who is diametrically opposed to your viewpoint(s) absolutely sucks. The shitty reality is that we aren’t going to change the electoral process in the next two months.
If you don’t see either major candidate as a champion that you can support, it seems more beneficial to see it as selecting your enemy for the next four years. I would rather fight against someone that I have a chance of changing. At minimum I would rather protest against someone that I think has a lower chance of authorizing lethal force against a march that I attend.
Voting for a 3rd presidential candidate (or not voting at all), is letting someone else make that decision for you.
That said, we have got to get out of this constant cycle of only having two options. There’s too much money at a national level to start there. We’ve got to start local and get third party candidates into offices at a city level, then state, then national. It’s going to take a long time and it should have happened so very long ago. We can’t change the past, we can only change the future. The only time to start changing the future is in the present.
Why not vote for the lesser of two evils and still protest them in office?
Why protest if you aren't going to hold them accountable in any material way? Why would they care?
Yes! Literally this is what I’m trying to say!
Somehow I, and everyone else here, read your post as "vote for the worst of two evils to shift the general political landscape by protest and making the lesser of two evils have to work extra hard to be less evil than the slightly-less evil greater of two evils". Re-reading, I can see your point, but somehow we all misunderstood it
Well you worded it absolutely awfully, because the conclusion I came to was that you are trying to encourage people to vote for Trump