# The Many Problems with Lesser Evil Voting Date: 2026-03-21 --- --- ### The Many Problems with Lesser Evil Voting If Gavin Newsom runs against J. D. Vance, we must vote Newsom is what we are being told repeatedly long before Newsom has even won a primary. Let’s dig into that logic though. The first problem with that logic is that it puts the next presidential election in a vacuum where the entire Democratic Party history is clean slate. More realistically let’s look at this sequence of voting decisions where we have infinite Newsom and Vance clones for the foreseeable future: Newsom vs Vance 2028 Newsom vs Vance 2032 Newsom1 vs Vance1 2036 Newsom1 vs Vance1 2040 Newsom2 vs Vance2 2044 Newsom2 vs Vance2 2048 Newsom3 vs Vance3 2052 End of America This sequence models that what we are really doing with our votes for the Democratic Party is to participate in a coalition. Ultimately it’s our responsibility to participate in a coalition that will make progress for America or at least not end it. ![Image](https://disrael.github.io/blogs/assets/the-many-problems-with-lesser-evil-voting-7ce76c95aa.png) Put another way if you face Scylla and Charybdis once then of course you go with Scylla, lose a few our your crew, and sail on. However if you are going to have repeated encounters with Scylla and Charybdis, then Scylla might end up eating all of your crew anyway and the choice is unclear. The second problem with this logic is that our willingness to support Newsom, no matter what, has an effect on the Democratic Party’s primary. Agreeing that Newsom’s only responsibility is to be better than Vance sets a bar so low for his presidency that very little good can come of it. The third problem with this logic is that it blames the victim. If you are someone that can’t stomach voting for a candidate that supports policies that lead to genocide, it’s your fault and not the candidate that is supporting those policies. With this logic, if you are offered a choice between rape and murder and you fight the rapist, it’s your fault if you get murdered. The fourth problem with this logic is that it removes all moral responsibility from voters in a Democratic Party primary. Following lesser evil logic your only moral responsibility is to pick the candidate in the primary that is most likely to win against a Vance. Taking any risk with your primary vote is unacceptable since Vance’s defeat is our only concern. The fifth problem with lesser evil voting is that it strangles third parties. Since you can never “waste” your vote on a third party, no third party will ever exist. The sixth problem with lesser evil voting is that it corrupts the moral compass of the voter. [Hannah Arendt](https://www.themontrealreview.com/Articles/Personal_Responsibility_Under_Dictatorship.php) argued that “Those who choose the lesser evil forget very quickly that they chose evil”. > Acceptance of lesser evils is consciously used in conditioning the government officials as well as the population at large to the acceptance of evil as such. To give but one among many examples: the extermination of Jews was preceded by a very gradual sequence of anti-Jewish measures, each of which was accepted with the argument that refusal to cooperate would make things worse — until a stage was reached where nothing worse could possibly have happened. The seventh problem with lesser evil voting is that, even though this pattern has failed over the last 50+ years, no one believes they have to justify the continued application of this logic. Again from Arendt: > Unfortunately, it seems to be much easier to condition human behavior and to make people conduct themselves in the most unexpected and outrageous manner, than it is to persuade anybody to learn from experience, as the saying goes; that is, to start thinking and judging instead of applying categories and formulas which are deeply ingrained in our mind, but whose basis of experience has long been forgotten and whose plausibility resides in their intellectual consistency rather than in their adequacy to actual events. The outrage with which, even hypothetically, refusing to vote for Newsom is being met directly contradicts America’s experience that led to Trump’s second term. It’s as if voting for Biden was successful in preventing the current fascist regime. Despite these seven problems there is, of course, a case that can be made for lesser evil voting in certain situations. However citing lesser evil voting logic as axiomatic is, at this point, madness.