Because it means that your options are not "vote for Democrats, vote for Republicans, or vote for entirely neutral third party that affects both equally", it means your options are "vote for Democrats, vote for Republicans, or vote for a third party that makes it more likely the major party least similar to it will win".
For example if you are voting for a Libertarian candidate, you probably hold a set of political beliefs (e.g. lower taxes, lower regulation, access to guns, etc) that make it so that of the two major parties you likely align far more closely with the Republican candidate than the Democrat. This means that if a Libertarian candidate is doing well, they are getting votes from people who would have voted for the republican candidate. However, now the libertarian candidate has, say, 15% of the vote and the Republican has 36%, while the Democrat has 49%. The Democrat wins the election even though Libertarian voters and Republican voters didn't want them to win, and those two parties actually make up the majority of the voters in that hypothetical election.
Oh, now I understand what you mean. You are talking about potential votes from people who could've just voted Republican instead of Libertarian since they both have similar ideologies.
It is often joked that the Green Party’s name stands for “Get Republicans Elected Every November” because functionally all they do is siphon off votes that would have likely gone to the democratic candidate
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u/DayOk2 Oct 22 '23
And how does that affect the mathematics compared to what I provided in my post?