Please note I am a big fan of the general concept of third, fourth, fifth parties. There is no sensible way to carve up the huge range of political opinion into just two wobbly coalitions after all.
But our electoral systems make that inevitable. Given winner-take-all discrete elections and first-past-the-post national aggregation, there is also no sensible way that anybody can get ANY of what they want without making common cause with those who only want a very few of the same things. So we have the two party system and always will unless we change how we run elections.
So that third party support, be it anything from true believer advocacy to hipster posturing to "sending a message" to just casual protest, inevitably reaches a point where even the most vaguely informed realize that their choice will achieve not a single thing because they have zero chance of winning. Only the D and the R choice have that chance.
We're at the stage then where even folks who are, laughably, convinced that Johnson or Stein or whoever's running on the Constitution Party or CPUSA ticket are political messiahs who could make the country perfect are acknowledging they'll never have the chance to do so, and are instead picking the major party nom they dislike/fear the least and voting for them to at least achieve some small practical effect. Since even political fringes are more likely to be basically sane rather than not, most of them are deciding that Clinton is, in their strange view and hackneyed parlance "the lesser of two evils." And since when is lessening evil a bad idea?
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