I don’t see any of this actually ever happening even in primaries.

I mean, I do see it happening from time to time. Bernie was a recent example. Jesse Jackson also a big one during the 80s. Even Obama had his moment in the sun, back in his 2008 run.

They never last, either because the party snuffs it out or because the candidates themselves turn milquetoast and lame by the time they get to office.

But, idk. Would Ralph Nader have governed any better or worse than Al Gore? Really hard to say without giving them both a shot at high office. But neither landed. Instead we got Bush and Clinton.

each vote is strategic

Votes can’t be deployed strategically if they have no weight. When voting districts are enormous, when elected representatives never have to face their constituents in person, and when all of the incentives of pursuing office tilt towards selling out to the wealthiest partisan activists, your individual vote quiet literally doesn’t matter. It cannot be deployed strategically on its own.

Only a coalition of voters can sway a candidate’s behavior. You have to be an active member in an organization that rallies other voters. You have to contribute to the bureaucracy of that organization, either through your money or your labor. And you have to be publicly vocal in your support for your candidate.

If you vote for a third party you risk the worst candidate winning.

If you organize with a third party campaign and rally people to its banner, you are doing more to influence the remaining candidates by expressing a threat to their potential majorities.

The clearest recent demonstration of this is the RFK Jr independent campaign. RFK was polling at around 10%, while Trump was underwater with respect to Biden/Harris. So what did the Trump campaign do? He onboarded RFK to his own campaign. He promised RFK a cabinet position. And he co-opted RFK’s platform, pivoting hard into vaccine denial and MAHA bullshit. By running independent of Trump, and racking up an election-winning share of indie voters, RFK forced the Republican Party to swallow his brand of pseudo-science bullshit.

Compare that to the Harris campaign, which tried to capture the #NeverTrump block through his courtship of Liz Cheney and Jeff Flake. The #NeverTrump voting base was barely 1-2% of the total voting pool. It paled beside RFK Jr’s block. And it alienated a bunch of more progressive voters. Particularly voters of color. Double-plus particularly Muslim voters and their friends in key swing states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

These indie voters never formed a visible coalition. They never aligned around an alternative candidate that Harris would (or even could) explicitly align with. They never showed up in popular polling as a “gettable” block of issue-oriented voters. So Harris ignored them. They dropped out of the general election pool as non-voters, contributing to Harris’s catastrophic plunge in support after Biden’s 81M vote high watermark from 2020. And they remained faceless, until…

The DSA began mobilizing these voters in the 2026 primary campaigns. Suddenly, they were a viable, vocal block of support. They showed up at rallies as a community. They donated as a block. They block walked as a block. They backed candidates as a block. They won primaries as a block - first (notably) in the NYC Mayor’s race. And then again in primaries from Maine to Minnesota.

This partisan block was now gettable. They were visible to pollsters. They were visible to fundraisers. They were visible to candidates who wanted to win them over. As unaligned individuals, they didn’t matter. But now they fucking mattered.

Within any given party, you’ve got a wide spectrum of opinions. Unfortunately, very few of these opinions are any good.