Exercising Public Voice

This two-party system mindset is getting real old these days. Let me make something perfectly clear before I get moving further into this post: I am not going to be preaching about a specific third party, nor will I be talking trash about the two major parties. I am talking about the mindset that much of America has; this defeatist attitude that the machine is too big to change and that no third party could ever possibly win an election.

You hear it all the time, “if you don’t vote Democrat or Republican, you’re throwing away your vote!” While I can understand the basic idea of statements like this, this attitude is why third parties generally aren’t elected. It seems that many people are so focused on winning and so afraid of losing that they only vote for the two major parties, regardless of whether or not they fully believe in their choice. So, the same thing happens after every election: people complain about the way things are and talk about how something has to change, but when the time comes to use the privilege of voting in order to actually make a change, one of the big two is elected again and the cycle starts over. Look, there may be no perfect system, or maybe there is. Either way you look at it, we can take a different direction than the two most popular options.

Third party candidates have won smaller offices in this country; it’s really not out of the question that a third party candidate can take a seat in a major office in the future. If people decide that they do indeed want something different, it can come true. Whether the result will be good or bad is unknown at this point, but making a change can be guaranteed. If you do not fully agree with either of the two major parties and you want to see a third party have a chance, it's okay to take an unorthodox step and vote for something a little more nontraditional.