Relitigating the 2016 Election: An Open Letter To All The Progressives Who Voted For Trump

Note: This story originally appeared on my blog on November 10, 2016.

2016 third party candidates engaged in debate

Before I write anything else, I would like to say this: if you were a Jill Stein/Gary Johnson supporter but ultimately cast your vote for Clinton for the good of the country, God bless you. You had the foresight to recognize how dangerous a Trump presidency was for the country and you temporarily put your ideology aside in order to do the right thing. If you were a Jill Stein/Gary Johnson supporter who swapped votes with a Clinton supporter in a blue state, God bless you, too. While you may have despised Clinton, you too also foresaw the dangers of a Trump presidency and used some creativity in order to get what you wanted without doing something monumentally stupid.

No, this post is directed at all the Stein/Johnson supporters who did do something monumentally stupid, the ones who went third-party in swing states knowing full well what would happen if they did.

I have to call it like I see it. If you were one of the 270,026 people who voted for the Green Party or the Libertarians in Florida, you delivered the state to Trump. If you were one of the 191,765 people who went Green or Libertarian in Pennsylvania, you cost Clinton a victory there. Clinton could have turned…