Well, if you’ll recall, some folks got the idea in their head that Hillary was just too awful to vote for because they couldn’t have their One True Bernie on the ballot in November. So they figured that if their states weren’t likely to be close, they’d just vote for Jill Stein.

Now, look at that very closely while you consider these data points from the 2016 election:

1. Most prognosticators did not expect Wisconsin, Michigan, or Pennsylvania to be close in Hillary’s favor.

2. Trump won all three.

3. The Jill Stein vote, alone, in all three was greater than Trump’s margin of victory. (And that’s not including Gary Johnson votes to boot.)

4. If Hillary had carried those three states, she’d have won the election.

So, just in case people aren’t getting my drift: yes, your vote matters. Protest votes can swing elections. Be very careful what you do with your ballot.

I kept trying to tell people then that, regardless of what you want, either Hillary Clinton or Donald Trump was going to be taking the oath of office in January 20th, 2017, and if you didn’t want it to be him, you HAD to vote for her. Not enough people listened to people like me and decided to FA&FO.

The movie metaphor I keep coming back to for “finding out” is the scene from Tora, Tora, Tora, where an officer who’d wanted tons of confirmation that radar contacts coming into Hawaii were actually Japanese planes, and the guy he’d said that to is standing in front of a window looking on Pearl Harbor in flames, and growls, “You wanted confirmation? Take a look! THERE’S your confirmation.”