By the way, I’ve lost faith in both parties - “A pox on both your houses”.

I'm not sure it has anything to do with the parties for me. MAGA folk have definitely lost their way. A central core of conspiracy theorists and white supremacists just plain isn't healthy, a lot of bigots who clearly think their bigotry is justified.

At some point I realized that you can look at the issues and the candidates, but you need to step back and look at the country and ask yourself - Do we need to go right or left. And somewhere in my late 30s or early 40s, I realized we needed to go left and always needed to go left because we are drifting right - even though I was partly conservative, we seemed to always need to go left.

So even though the Democratic Party may be malfunctioning, we need to go left, and voting for a third party is just throwing your vote away. Musk may be doing us a favor. :)