If anyone votes for a progressive third party candidate

[Jim Lane]

74. On very rare occasions, the Republican is the better candidate.

There was a thread a while back about "Have you ever voted for a Republican." Some responses were in your "never" camp, but some of us had, with varying degrees of difficulty, crossed that line. For example, I voted for a halfway decent Republican against a corrupt Democrat who won the election but subsequently went to prison.

I would somewhat revise your maxim in the OP. In many American elections, there will be precisely two candidates who have any realistic chance of winning. In such an election, progressives should (1) do what they can to see to it that a progressive is one of those two, but (2) when confronted with the final choice, pick the better candidate from between the two who might win.

In some other elections, however, there is only one candidate who has any realistic chance of winning. In those circumstances, the practical argument for voting for a conservative Democrat is much weaker. If a shoo-in RWNJ Republican incumbent is being challenged by a conservative Democrat and by a progressive third-party candidate, the most practical choice might well be to vote for the third-party candidate -- not because he or she will be elected (because by hypothesis nothing you do will affect who's elected) but because it might usefully affect the choices available in future elections. Of course, a high tally for the Green Party or whatever might also encourage progressives to follow the disastrous course of third-party politics, so even in that hypothetical it's not clear-cut to vote for the candidate whose principles are closest to your own.