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Here's a puzzle for you. A group of three men go to a hotel, and they each pay $10 for a room, for a total of $30. Afterwards, the manager remembers that there's a deal where you can get 3 rooms for $25, so he gives $5 to the bellboy and tells the bellboy to return it to the men. But the bellboy returns just $1 to each of the men, and pockets the remaining $2.
So the men each paid $9, for a total of $27. The bellboy pocketed $2. Where did the other dollar go?
It’s an informal fallacy.
And the answer is that "Where did the other dollar go?" is a nonsensical question when you understand the situation correctly. But a lot of people who first hear it don't understand the situation correctly.
Likewise, "You're helping Trump by voting third-party" is a nonsensical when you understand the situation correctly, but many people don't at first understand the situation correctly.
Are you sure we don't understand it correctly? Trump won in 2016 in part due to the righteous indignation of people that refused to vote for Clinton. Third party spoiler candidates are not a new phenomenon.
Trump won in 2016 in part due to the righteous indignation of people that refused to vote for Clinton.
And would those people have suddenly switched to Clinton if no third-party candidate was available?
Most probably wouldn't have voted at all but that doesn't change the math. In a US presidential election, voting third party and not voting at all are equivalent in every practical sense.
Right. So, part of the problem with “Voting third-party means supporting Trump” is that it presumes I would have otherwise voted for Biden.
And I wouldn’t have. Because he’s committing genocide.
Also, when third-party candidates start to get traction, they can pull votes away from Trump as well as Biden.
And if enough people vote third-party, we can start to defeat both Trump and Biden. Even small amounts of support for third-party candidates can lead to a third-party winning seats in congress if that support is concentrated in particular districts, like college towns. And in an evenly divided congress, a few seats can control the balance of power and have a big impact.