Social identity is a helluva drug

There's a saying in my country: don't get drunk on cold water. Meaning don't gaslight yourself into wishful thinking, because hope can be a hell of a drug.

A third party win won't happen overnight. The only way you can realistically get it is with ranked choice voting. Otherwise you're stuck replacing Democrats (and why not, Republicans — in smaller races you can absolutely run a Bernie style progressive who keeps the focus on economics!) one by one because the institutions are already in place, and they're really powerful! Also, remember they're just institutions: parties don't have ideologies, people do.

And before you think to vote for people like Jill Stein or whoever else while hoping that maybe this year the miracle will happen (i.e. getting drunk on cold water), remember that there's a lot of groundwork that needs to be done by that candidate for them to be viable, and it essentially boils down to this: the whole country needs to know about that person and recognize them on the street come election year — if that's not the case, then they're either delusional, underfunded, or most likely an opportunist (possibly even an intentional spoiler paid by the opposition, like RFK was in the Dem primary).

Source: me. I've been on the third party hope train back in 2020, emboldened by "leftists" such as Jimmy Dore, BJG, Richard Medhurst, etc.

The cons will swing libertarian and the libs will swing socialist, and then we'll get a president that only 1/12th of the country actually voted for