@LadyMarissa I’m with @Dutchess_III—the way you are writing you seem very amped up. You did the same thing to me on another Q where I felt like you were trying to BEAT ME DOWN. Reread your posts, all the CAPITALIZATION you use, and so many exclamation marks, translates to ANGER and SHOUTING!!
Facts are facts. People voting third party, or not voting in the most recent presidential election helped give the ejection to Trump, because there wasn’t a third party candidate in sight who had a chance. If maybe someone extremely popular had run then maybe you could argue it was worth the risk this election.
Maybe you’re in a very red or very blue state so you feel your vote doesn’t matter much, but if you are in a swing state your vote matters very much. More and more states seem to be becoming swing states. Plus, every vote counts because it tells the country where the mind of citizenry is, which affects the message in the messaging and the mindset of the country. What if Hillary had won the popular vote by 30 million not 3 million?
The most important vote to get the person you want is the primary. The time to vote your conscience is the primaries. If the person you wanted didn’t win the primary, or if no candidate was there that you liked, then when it comes time to vote for the big winner, you (and others) need to deal with the reality of the situation. You can’t be a pie in the sky idealist, or hold a grudge, that’s cutting off your nose to spite your face. I know quite a few people who wanted Bernie who didn’t vote for him in the primary, I think that was a mistake. I was always a Hillary supporter, but I encouraged my friends and family to vote for Bernie in the primary if they believed in him, and a lot of them didn’t. I encouraged my Republican friends to vote their conscience in the primaries too, most of them liked Cruz, who I couldn’t stand.
The next presidential election I predict every single vote will count in every state. I think it will be very hard to predict who people will vote for.