Beyond "Lesser-of-Two-Evils": Why I Vote My Conscience

People like to imagine political campaigns as a pitch for a better future (a candidate standing on stage declaring, "Vote for me because here is what I will build, protect, and deliver"). Instead, voters face a relentless strategy built almost entirely on fear. Over the past fifty years, institutional reforms shifted power toward low-turnout primaries dominated by party activists and focused money. Consequently, positive visions quietly gave way to defensive positioning. Modern platforms are rarely "Vote for me because I am good"; they are overwhelmingly "Vote for me because the other candidate is worse." Voters experience unrelenting pressure to settle for the "lesser of two evils," a dynamic reinforcing declining platform quality over time.

The problem comes down to basic economic incentives. A system built on "Here is why I am good" encourages continuous improvement. Conversely, a system built on "I am less bad" discourages improvement. Candidates only need to maintain a marginal advantage over an opponent. Under these conditions, neither side has a reason to solve complex problems, innovate, or offer higher principles. They simply spend resources to appear "less bad."

When both major parties operate under this race-to-the-bottom mindset, falling back on defensive voting stops making sense. Rather than letting a primary system dictate my options, I use this shift to get clear on what I actually stand for.

The Constitutional Design: Built for Friction and Deliberation

To understand how we arrived at this point, we must look back at the original system. The American constitutional architecture was explicitly engineered with checks and balances to create friction and delay. The Founders knew human nature skews toward short-term self-interest and reactionary politics. The system of bicameralism, federalism, and separated powers was designed to slow down the process; this delay allowed short-term passions to cool so long-term thinking and organic consensus could emerge.

Today, short-term political incentives appear to hold the advantage. Politicians and administrators bypass deliberate friction through executive mandates, regulatory rules, and large last-minute spending bills. Focus has shifted from long-term stewardship toward immediate political gain.

This shift does not mean all outcomes are bad. However, it clearly means current outcomes leave room for improvement.

The Exploitation of Loss Aversion

Human nature has not fundamentally changed over the last fifty years. Evolutionary biology wires people to be loss-averse. Individuals naturally feel the threat of losing something far more acutely than the prospect of gaining an equivalent benefit. Negative campaigning continuously taps into this survival instinct.

First, institutional reforms changed the political landscape by shifting power toward low-turnout primaries. Dominating these high-friction environments required engaging passionate activists, making fear an efficient mobilization strategy. Political parties realized they no longer needed to inspire citizens with a compelling vision of the future; they only needed to convince voters the opposing candidate presented a severe downside risk.

Then, in recent years, social media platforms and digital communication channels emerged to colonize human attention. This technological layer supercharged the ability of political organizations to leverage loss psychology at scale. Micro-targeted algorithms transformed a primary system already built on fear into a real-time feedback loop.

When political machinery leverages loss aversion through targeted digital channels, defensive voting becomes the default consumer response. Breaking out of this incentive cycle requires intentionally stepping back from algorithmically amplified fear and re-anchoring in first principles.

Ten First Principles for a Free Society

Grounded in classical political economy and constitutional theory, the following principles offer a framework for evaluating candidates, policies, and our collective participation in a free society:

1. The Founding Framework Matters The Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the Federalist Papers, and the Bill of Rights form the bedrock of American governance when read as the Founders intended. These documents established a dynamic system designed to accommodate progress through careful deliberation, ensuring necessary change occurs without sacrificing core human liberties.

2. Liberty and "Triple P" Protection True justice means protecting person, property, and promise (the classical foundation of commutative justice). Because individuals define a "rich life" in vastly different ways, state attempts to redistribute wealth or enforce a single version of prosperity demonstrate intellectual hubris. A fair system allows organic richness to emerge; it protects property, enforces contracts, and secures individuals from force or fraud.

3. Aid Belongs at the Local Level Helping those facing hardship is a moral priority, best accomplished close to home. Local charities, community groups, neighbors, and non-profits understand the actual needs of neighbors far better than distant federal agencies.

4. Public Safety Nets as Temporary Shock Absorbers When broad systemic crises or sudden disasters occur, public support serves as essential infrastructure to absorb the shock. However, these programs function best as temporary trampolines rather than permanent hammocks. To prevent short-term aid from morphing into self-perpetuating bureaucracy, public safety nets require clear off-ramps restoring self-sufficiency and protecting community-led charity.

5. The Dignity and Purpose of Work Work is more than an economic necessity; it is a vital part of life providing focus, structure, dignity, and purpose. A healthy society respects labor and creates conditions where individuals build a life through personal effort.

6. Obey the 10th Amendment The federal government was designed to be limited, handling matters unsuitable for local management (such as national defense). Remaining responsibilities belong to the states, communities, and individual citizens.

7. Personal Autonomy and Choice Insights from behavioral economics rightly show that human decision-making is subject to cognitive biases and bounded rationality. However, transferring individual choices to centralized planners merely concentrates those same cognitive biases into rigid, systemic policy errors. Because no central authority can know what an individual needs better than the individual, people thrive when free to navigate their own choices, direct their lives, and accept personal responsibility for their outcomes.

8. Permissionless Innovation as a Growth Engine America’s historic dynamism stems from a permissionless economic architecture. Government may fund foundational science, but economic progress relies on the presumption of liberty. Citizens are free to innovate, create, and build without state permission. Protecting this open landscape keeps a nation dynamic and prosperous.

9. Equal Permission and Earned Opportunity Political thinkers like John Rawls rightly note that no one chooses their birth circumstances. Yet engineering equal starting lines requires heavy-handed state intervention. True fairness is not state-managed equality of opportunity. Instead, it requires equal permission, which grants everyone the unalienable right to work, innovate, and pursue happiness free from arbitrary legal barriers. Under this rule of law, all hard-working people, including legal immigrants, have the freedom to earn opportunity.

10. Spontaneous Order and Uncensored Market Signals Complex societies thrive through decentralized cooperation rather than top-down social engineering. Free markets operate like a natural ecosystem, generating vital price signals and real-time feedback. Economic distress seldom stems from market failure; rather, trouble arises when state interventions ignore, suppress, or distort those signals. Instead of declaring an undesirable outcome a market failure, thoughtful observers ask different questions: What signals did people miss? What feedback did policy suppress? Trusting spontaneous order, price discovery, and common-law associations allows society to learn, correct course, and flourish without expanding central power.

Why I Vote Third-Party

Both major parties have moved away from these priorities. Depending on who holds power, both routinely expand government reach, intervene in free markets, and regulate personal choices to satisfy activist bases. Neither party shows a strong commitment to decentralization, fiscal restraint, individual liberty, or restoring constitutional limits. Effectively, each party seeks to "less bad" the other.

For these reasons, I vote for the Libertarian Party.

I understand the electoral odds under our two-party system. Yet a vote is not a bet on who will win; it is an act of consent or non-consent. Voting for a candidate simply to keep another out signals approval for a broken system. Casting a ballot for the Libertarian Party keeps these principles visible, stands against bureaucratic expansion, and stays true to conscience.

I do not write this to convince anyone to vote Libertarian. This is simply where I landed after inspecting my own conscience and principles. Importantly, my perspective is not rigid. It will continue to evolve as society and my understanding progress. For now, this framework makes sense to me.

How will you inspect your conscience and vote accordingly?

Reclaiming Our Direction

The resilience of the American republic comes from its citizens rather than its political establishment. America has navigated periods of polarization before, and the path back to foundational ideals is forged by people who decline to settle for the status quo.

The trajectory of our country is not set in stone; it changes when we decide to change it.

We do not steer our nation toward long-term prosperity by surrendering principles to defensive voting. We do it by speaking openly, demanding accountability from our institutions, and holding fast to beliefs making a society thrive. Most importantly, we do it by casting votes of conscience (treating our ballot not as a wager on a political party, but as a clear declaration of what we stand for).

When we vote our conscience, we replace short-term political fear with long-term principles. We remind the political system that government serves the people, not the other way around. Real reform begins with individual clarity, and it starts at the ballot box.

Resources For The Curious

Constitutional Architecture & Institutional Design

Buchanan, James M., and Gordon Tullock. The Calculus of Consent: Logical Foundations of Constitutional Democracy. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1962.

Hamilton, Alexander, James Madison, and John Jay. The Federalist Papers. Edited by Clinton Rossiter. New York: Signet Classics, 2003.

Levin, Yuval. American Covenant: How the Constitution Unified Our Nation—and Could Again. New York: Basic Books, 2024.

North, Douglass C. Institutions, Institutional Change and Economic Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Behavioral Economics & Psychological Incentives

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Kahneman, Daniel, and Amos Tversky. "Prospect Theory: An Analysis of Decision under Risk." Econometrica 47, no. 2 (1979): 263–291. 

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008.

Spontaneous Order, Decentralization, & Innovation

Hayek, F. A. The Sensory Order: An Inquiry into the Foundations of Theoretical Psychology. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952.

Mazzucato, Mariana. The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths. London: Anthem Press, 2013.

Hayek, F. A. "The Use of Knowledge in Society." The American Economic Review 35, no. 4 (1945): 519–530.

McCloskey, Deirdre N. Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the World. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Smith, Adam. An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Edited by R. H. Campbell and A. S. Skinner. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981.

Thierer, Adam. Permissionless Innovation: The Continuing Case for Technological Freedom. Arlington: Mercatus Center at George Mason University, 2014.

Political Competition & Market Incentives

Friedman, Milton. Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962.

Gehl, Katherine M., and Michael E. Porter. The Politics Industry: How Political Innovation Can Break Partisan Gridlock and Save Our Democracy. Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2020.

Munger, Michael C. Choosing in Groups: Analytical Perspectives on Multilateral Decision Making. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.

Justice, Opportunity, & Equal Permission

Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971.

About the author: Jeff Hulett leads Personal Finance Reimagined, a decision-making and financial education organization. He teaches personal finance at James Madison University and provides entrepreneurial services. Check out his book -- Making Choices, Making Money: Your Guide to Making Confident Financial Decisions.

Jeff is a career banker, data scientist, behavioral economist, and choice architect. Jeff has held banking and consulting leadership roles at Wells Fargo, Citibank, KPMG, and IBM.