A while ago I wrote about the futility of voting for third party candidates, and I’d like to clarify/modify what I said now that the primaries are starting to come in. When the primaries come around, if you don’t vote for your conscience then you’re not only hurting the candidate you’d like to see win, you’re also hurting the direction the race may go in.

Let me explain.

One of the biggest points I had brought up then was that if you vote based purely on who lines up with your positions and ignore chance of victory, then it’s entirely possible that someone who is far removed from your interests will win while the person who may have been closer to you will lose. What I had neglected to consider was what happens even when your “lesser of two evils” candidate wins.

Let’s take a look at two graphs, each showing hypothetical primary turnouts for the Democratic candidates.

Now, both of these end up with the “main frontrunners” winning in the end and both end up with Clinton taking it. That the end results are no different in either case is exactly what I wanted for my purposes.

Primaries are more than just a selection of the candidate for the national race, they’re also a gauge of national opinion within the party. Take a look at hypothetical situation A, where Clinton squeaked out a victory with a scant 17% of the vote. Yes, when November comes around she’ll be on the ticket and there’s a good chance that Edwards or Obama will take Veep position, but the undeniable message is that Clinton’s platforms were the most popular, but not by much.

By having nearly a quarter of the vote go for Gravel/Kucinich and another 29% for the other “unwinnables”, the candidate will have to realize that half of the Democratic electorate supports those positions, and a significant chunk is simply not going to stand for more “yes we should get out of Iraq, but not that soon…” rhetoric that amounts to zero change.

Now on to Hypothetical Primary B. Clinton wins again, but this time with more than a third of the votes, and nearly all of the votes went for the “big 3”. Gravel and the rest got almost nothing at all because their supporters shifted up into the “guaranteed winners” in order to avoid throwing their vote away on a “loser”.

What’s the message this time around? That people simply don’t support the “radical agendas” of Kucinich et al. When it comes time to set an agenda down, Clinton will have no reason to think that anyone cares about universal health care or other radical reforms along the lines of what the further left candidates espouse. Why? Because no one voted for them.

In the end, by not supporting any smaller candidates we are implicitly showing no support for their positions. The mainstream candidates will then feel no compunction for continuing along the same way we’ve been going.

In 2006 the Democrats took over Congress. Over the past year, none of the things we wanted to see happen came to pass. We’re still in Iraq, the deficit’s out of control, and we’re still being spied upon. Unless there is an outpouring of support for the only candidates who have voted contrary to the GOP’s failed agenda, why in the world can we expect anything different to happen in 2009?

This goes for Ron Paul folk who I was previously criticizing. If that’s what you truly support, then by all means vote for him even if you don’t think he can win. You’ll be showing the Republican candidates that you don’t support their imperialist agenda while still pumping for the more “free market” ideas and whatnot.

The primaries are going to be an important chance to make a stand, and if views are compromised in order to avoid a “wasted” vote, you’ll be spitting in the face of democracy and doing yourself a disservice. Now, the elections themselves are another matter, but I’ll tackle that in another article…