Yes I viscerally reject everyone's BS. I can't speak for anyone else, I can only speak for myself. But anyone who's voting Democrat every time, or Republican every time, is almost certainly a participant of bullshit identity politics.
I reject this characterization.
My own personal ideology is well to the right of the mainstream of the Republican Party so I've literally never had an ideological reason to vote for a Democrat for anything. I've voted for Democrats for personal reasons (didn't like/trust the R, or liked/trusted the D).
Ideologically I don't always like the Republican but I pretty much always like the Democrat less.
That isn't participating in BS identity politics, it is determining upon reflection that the R is ideologically closer to me than the D in almost any possible election.
As far as third party voting . . .
As a practical matter it only really matters if you live in one of the handful of states that are competitive enough that your vote might actually matter. As an Ohioan I am very familiar with this. Ohio voted for the winning candidate in all but two Presidential elections from 1896-2016*. My point is that for most of my life Ohio was a very Purple state so my vote could plausibly matter. When your vote matters, voting for a third-party candidate is basically just helping whichever side is further from your own. If you don't believe me, ask the leftwing liberals from Florida who voted for Nader in 2000 or the relatively conservative voters from Ohio who voted for Perot in 1992.
Now that Ohio is a decidedly red state I'm a lot more open to voting for a third-party candidate as a protest. Red State Texans such as yourself and Blue State Californians, can vote for the Libertarian or the Green or the man on the moon because you already know which way your state is going to vote so it doesn't matter. I'm adjusting to living that reality in Ohio.
*The exceptions where 1944 where Ohio voted for Republican Thomas Dewey largely because his running-mate was Ohio Governor John Bricker and 1960 where Ohio voted for Nixon over Kennedy in a race that was VERY close both nationally and in Ohio.
