Why voting should always be tactical: because if it isn’t, you get a worse result than the one you wanted

Electors aged 18 to 25 in the United States voted for Hillary Clinton. But around 10% of that demographic, instead of voting to keep Trump out of power (or, for that matter, to vote Trump in), voted Libertarian or Green.

Were they ever going to get a Libertarian or Green President of the United States? No. Instead they got Donald Trump, who must be the worst kind of anathema to a Libertarian or Green voter.

Fine, vote Libertarian or Green when neither of the two – realistically speaking – sole contenders represent a threat to the country. But when one of them does, as with Trump in this election and Muscat in the upcoming election in Malta (and the last one, but enough about that – people couldn’t see it at the time), you vote to keep them out.

Because what happens to the country is important, and political parties are not football teams.

People understand this instinctively at some level, which is why Alternattiva Demokratika has worked for years to implant the idea that the Labour Party and the Nationalist Party are equal and the same, so it’s OK to vote AD because it doesn’t matter which one of the two is elected to power. One of the biggest victims of this idiotic way of looking at things has been Astrid Vella, leader of the built-environment lobby group FAA.

The only thing her assiduous support of AD and her refusal to vote for the Nationalist Party has given her is this government which is now causing her and so many others such great distress. But not being particularly bright – and I say that as a statement of fact and not as a gratuitous insult – she has still not understood this and is planning on voting AD again in a year’s time “because I’m an environmentalist”.

In other words, she’s going to rely on the rest of us to vote to keep Labour out while she faffs around with her ‘green’ vote. The reality is that the only green votes in the upcoming general election are going to be votes which keep Muscat and his band of robber barons and corrupt builders out of power.

Anything else is just a self-regarding affectation. Even Michael Briguglio knows this, because unlike Astrid Vella he’s actually intelligent.