Again, it's not a choice to rely on that. It's the physics of the system. There is no other practical way to contest an election in the United States. It's a first-past-the-post electoral system.
There. Are. Two. Candidates.
Only two. You pick from those two. One of them will likely be closer to your ideals, the other will be farther away from your ideals. Pick one. Which one do you pick? The one closer to your ideals, or the one farther away?
Or will you decide not to vote at all and just let everyone else pick for you? How is that a better strategy? You still get one of those two candidates.
Support local grassroots pro-working class political movements and candidates instead of voting for the least worse ghoul every 4 years? Find the local chapter of whatever you think is better? Get involved for a cause that both parties are actively harming ? Demand, by any means available, elected officials to not be pieces of shit if they want your vote? Maybe just stop defending genocide support on the internet because it makes our guy look bad.
Putting your vote behind someone you believe to be detrimental to your own values should not be the default position and is, at best, the worst case scenario. Screw the two US parties and everything they stand for.
Did you watch that CPG Grey video I linked to earlier? Voting third party is the same as not voting under the American electoral system. It's basic game theory. So your alternative to voting Democrat boils down to "do nothing."
Yeah, he says it's worse than not voting because it's soaking up votes that in absence of the third party would have gone to the "least worse" of the two actually viable parties. I was being generous and assuming OP wasn't going to vote for that party anyway.
It is fact, actually. This is a result of basic game theory. First-past-the-post electoral systems inexorably develop into two-party systems because of the mechanism that he describes, in the same way that gas inexorably diffuses or water flows downhill.
Insisting that it won't happen because you feel like it shouldn't happen just causes you to fall into the traps CPG Grey described.