The NSA whistleblower tweeted this morning that, “There may never be a safer election in which to vote for a third option.” Attached to the tweet was a New York Times forecast showing that Hillary Clinton has a 93 percent chance of winning the election. The underlying assumption here, also made by others who favor a third-party vote even if they acknowledge Trump is unfit to be president, is that the only real danger is Trump winning. If there is almost no chance of Trump winning or if you live in state where the vote is so lopsided that it won’t influence the election, the logic goes, there’s no dire reason to vote for Clinton.
The problem with this argument is that a Trump victory isn’t the only danger. Trump has been doing his best to gin up a legitimacy crisis, saying that the system is rigged and that he might not accept the results of the election. Further, the better Trump does, the more likely it is that his political movement will have an after-life and be imitated by future Republican candidates. Trump is leading a dangerous racist movement that is mainstreaming all sorts of hate. For that reason, he needs not just to lose, but to lose by a wide margin, to be buried so deeply that Trumpism can never rise again. A vote for a third party is not at all safe, but one way of giving Trumpism a longer lease on life.