I have no idea honestly.
I'm not going to reply to everyone's response, and I'm not going to try to persuade everyone to vote any particular way. But I found Townhallsavoy's response particularly interesting and wanted to wade through it. Maybe it'll help.
I do only want to vote for someone who is actually running for president, so just writing in someone's name doesn't seem worth it to me.
The more protest votes the better from where I'm sitting, but I agree that voting for someone with at least an actual chance of showing up on the ticker on election night is much less "throwing your vote away". Even if they choose not to show the percentages on election night, if a significant chunk of the vote is going to neither major party candidate, that is in and of itself newsworthy and should spark a national conversation.
I also would rather not vote for someone who has religious beliefs that I don't respect, but Evan McMullin seems like someone I should check out. Too bad he's only a write-in for the state of Alabama, so again, why waste my time?
So, two things here.
1) I agree and it's a shame that Alabama (and many other states) excluded him from the ballot. The more legitimate candidates on the ballot, the better for democracy, IMO. That's one of the main things you're fighting for when you "throw your vote away" on a third party. Legitimizing the fact that we need other options. That said, if you
are going to write someone in, McMullin's the guy to do that for. He is the most likely of anyone
not on your Alabama ballot to leave a significant mark on the election.
2) What don't you respect about his religious beliefs? He's the only candidate who has been consistently pro-"religious freedom" in regards to de-funding Planned Parenthood and opposing laws like those that required the bakers to bake gay wedding cakes and businesses to allow men in women's locker rooms.
Is it because he's a Mormon? Did that preclude you from voting for Mitt Romney in 2012? Odd to me that that only becomes a disqualifier when he doesn't have an (R) after his name.
I would like to vote for a third party candidate but who? I know Chad will say Johnson, but the Aleppo comment, his not-so-long-ago stance on vaccines, and his climate change policy don't mesh well with me. I also am not a fan of some of the policies and values supported by libertarians.
I've defended these statements from him in the past so I won't waste too much time here, but I will try to be as brief as I can. But brace yourself cause I'll probably fail at that goal.
1) The Aleppo comment was a
deliberate attack by the media as directed by Hillary Clinton and her staff. This is established fact. I had read a whole lot about the Syrian refugee crisis before and after that "gotcha" moment and had never once heard that Aleppo was the city at the center of it. I'd never heard of it either and neither had you or 99.9% of anyone else.
What everyone else saw as "OMG WHAT AN IDIOT!" I saw as refreshing honesty. Trump people talk a big game about wanting someone who doesn't "think and talk and lie like a politician" and then when someone like Johnson is completely honest and just says "I don't know what that is" instead of bullshitting and changing the subject and giving a non-answer to confuse the issue, like any other politician, including Trump, he gets universally bashed for it. Subsequent appearances on MSNBC twisted the knife. They asked him to name a leader he respects and he came up blank. Not "name a foreign leader". Name one you respect. Those are two very different questions and I 100% agree with him when he tweeted the next day "It's been 24 hours and I still can't name a foreign leader that I respect." But the headlines were all "OMG what a dummy, he can't name a single foreign leader". That is just a gross misrepresentation of what took place in that interview. Then they put the nail in his coffin asking him who the leader of North Korea was, and he just goes "Seriously? I'm not answering that." If you actually watched it, it was clear he was just pissed off at that point for condescending him. I 100% know that he knows Kim Jong Un is the leader of North Korea, because I've heard him talk about the specific danger he poses time after time after time. Doesn't matter, the media used it to push Hillary's directive to disqualify him as a serious candidate and it apparently worked.
2) His "old" stance on vaccines was that he emphatically recognized their importance and everyone's civic duty to get them. He never, ever pushed any unscientific bullshit like they cause autism. His stance was that it's not the government's place to
force people to take injections against their will, but up to individuals, parents, and doctors instead to decide that. Like you said, he has since changed that stance to thinking they should be government mandated, and I have to say I agreed more with his old stance.
His position on climate change is simpatico with mine, which is heaven forbid, nuanced. He believes it's real and scientifically proven to be so, but also is not hysterical about it and doesn't think much can or should be done to quell it, especially at the expense of government waste and damage to the economy. He (and I) thinks we probably
should slowly and conservatively turn to some new forms of energy where it is reasonably efficient to do so, but also isn't trying to get everyone on Teslas and windmills ASAP like a goddamn hippie.
Additionally you mentioned "some policies and values" of libertarians in general, you didn't agree with. Since you weren't more specific, I won't speculate as to what those "policies and values" are, but I'd be curious to know.
Sorry, that was me trying to be brief.
Jill Stein is bold but has some outlandish, radical, and dangerous views.
She makes Bernie Sanders look like Ronald Reagan. She may be pulling some of the most radical leftists of the disaffected Bernie voters, but nothing significant.
So who else is there? How bad is it to protest vote by leaving the president spot empty?
IMO voting for Johnson > voting for McMullin > voting for Stein > any other write in > leaving it blank > Hillary > Trump.
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