Disney's Jiminy Cricket (123RF)

It feels way too early to be talking presidential politics, but after a long weekend with friends I’ve been thinking about not so much about candidates but voting in general, particularly in the 2020 election.

I wonder: Do I throw away my vote if, rather than picking either the Democratic or Republican nominee, I choose to vote for a third-party candidate?

Some people say yes, that when a vote is cast for someone who clearly cannot win, that vote is wasted. But there are a variety of good, solid arguments for why even a vote for Donald Duck might not be wasted in a presidential — or any other, for that matter — election. And no matter who’s on the ballot in 2020, I have no intention of voting for Donald Duck.

Mathematically, every vote cast beyond a simple majority is wasted. A big margin of victory doesn’t make the winner more victorious or give him or her added powers or much of anything else but bragging rights. Using that theory, every vote cast for a losing candidate is also wasted.

But that’s math, and it only applies after the votes are counted. Until then, in theory at least, no one knows precisely which vote will give one candidate that majority, and until then, every vote is worth what every other one is. That’s particularly important in very close elections like the one between Republicans Ben Schimmoller of Bend and Jack Zika of Redmond for their party’s 53rd Oregon House District nomination in 2018. After a recount, Zika won the contest by just two votes.

Still, those third-party and write-in candidates might make a difference. In the Zika-Schimmoller race, there were 52 write-ins, more than enough to change the outcome had enough of them been cast for either of the two candidates on the ballot. In the Bush-Gore race, which came down, finally, to the vote in Florida, Bush won the state’s popular vote by fewer than 600 votes, and third-party candidate Ralph Nader picked up about 100,000. If only a relatively small number of Nader supporters had switched to Al Gore, George W. Bush would have lost the election.

This year Oregon’s Legislature got into the vote-counting act when it passed a bill that would send the state’s Electoral College votes to the winner of the national popular vote, no matter who that candidate might be or how well he or she did in Oregon. I can’t help but believe the measure would not have done so well had anyone but Donald Trump won the last presidential election without a majority of the popular vote. I also can’t help but wonder what the Legislature’s Democrats would have thought of the idea if Trump, not Clinton, had won the popular vote and she had won the Electoral College vote.

Third parties, meanwhile, have a long and proud history in American politics. Today’s Democratic Party started life as Thomas Jefferson’s Democratic-Republican Party, and became the Democratic Party by the 1830s. Meanwhile, Alexander Hamilton’s Federalist Party dissolved after the War of 1812, according to the History Channel website. The Federalists ran their last presidential candidate in 1816.

As for the Republican Party, it first appeared as a third party in 1856. That same year another third party, the American or No-Nothing Party, walked away with nearly a quarter of the presidential vote. Just four years later, Republican Abraham Lincoln was elected president, and the Whig Party, which had taken no strong position on slavery, largely disappeared.

It may be more difficult for a third party to replace one of the big two these days, to be sure. Money is one reason. No third party can come close to the $6.8 billion price tag for all federal elections in 2016, or even to the $2.56 billion spent on the presidential election alone that year. Americans spent roughly $6 billion on cereal and a measly $5.4 billion on marijuana during that period.

All of which, it seems to me, provides plenty of reason to vote for the candidate you think will do the best job, no matter what the political affiliation. That isn’t throwing away your vote, I don’t believe, but— in the words of another cartoon character, Jiminy Cricket — letting your conscience be your guide.

— Janet Stevens is deputy editor of The Bulletin. Contact: 541-617-7821, jstevens@bendbulletin.com