What do Harambe, Kanye West, Deez Nuts and Andrew Yang have in common?
Writing their names on your ballot might as well be a vote for Donald Trump.
In 2016, many voters wrote in candidates who had already dropped out, which took votes away from legitimate candidates.
Now, history may repeat itself since a social media movement has revealed that people are #StillVotingforYang despite the fact that he dropped out of the 2020 presidential race on
Feb. 11.
Among other things, Yang’s campaign was most notable for proposing a “Freedom Dividend” that would give every American household $1,000 a month, as detailed in his campaign website.
For a candidate who ran on a platform of mathematics, the remaining “Yang Gang” fail to understand is that the numbers don’t support him.
Or maybe it’s reading comprehension they lack, since Yang himself said he had no chance of winning when he dropped out of the race.
“I am the math guy and it is clear tonight from the numbers that we are not going to win this race,” he said at a campaign event during the New Hampshire primaries.
Yet on Twitter, the “Yang Gang” posted things such as “I voted for Yang. Fight me.” and “3 of us just marked
the ballot for Andrew Yang in Ca. Let’s Shock
the world!” and expect to be taken seriously.
Of course, the real reason that anyone would vote for Yang, or Batman or Jesus, is likely as a form of protest.
According to The Wichita Eagle, a Kansas newspaper, out of the one million people that cast votes in Kansas, more than 42,000 people voted for a write-in candidate in the 2016 presidential election, roughly 4% of the total votes in the state.
Kansas voters’ answers ranged from “a decent candidate,” to God to runners-up who didn’t make it on the ballot.
If there’s a message here, it’s hard to pick out.
It’s not a very good protest if no one knows what you’re protesting in the first place.
At best, these write-ins are a statistical anomaly that amount to throwing away your vote.
At worst, writing in your vote amounts to a vote for the person who you don’t want to win.
Thousands of Twitter users have pledged their votes to Yang, who is no longer even running for president.
If this attitude keeps up in the general election, we may very well have a repeat of the 2016 election, with write-in voters playing unintentional kingmakers for Trump.
After all, while the progressive side of this story is fractured among different candidates, conservatives seem to be congregating into a united front.
The fact of the matter is, anyone who’s voting conservative is voting Trump.
There are simply no other options, so he’s essentially running unopposed.
So, come time to vote this year, if you choose to stand behind a Democratic candidate with even the slightest shot at beating Trump, you cannot afford to waste your vote on a candidate who basically has no chance of winning.
At the end of the day, Yang is not a bad person or a bad candidate.
He had some good ideas that the country was not ready for, as shown by how few votes he got in the Iowa caucuses.
Thankfully, he was humble enough to quit while he was losing.
But if you vote for him anyway, long after he lost his ghost of a chance of winning, then you’ll only have yourself to blame if the worst possible outcome happens.
