How did Reagan get in the mix here? I thought we were talking about Fiorina, not a conservative.
That was my example in the post you responded to and it makes a good analogy for this election example. You suggest a write-in person over the best-chance conservative-leaning person in the general election. Almost no write-in candidate ever has a chance of winning in a general election, so that write-in vote doesn’t help get a better person elected. Instead, it serves as a protest to all the other viable candidates that actually have a checkbox on the ballot.
My principles could let me do that on every single ballot I’ve ever cast, and I wouldn’t have ever voted for anyone that ever made it to office. Heck, just a few people doing that would have allowed Gore to win in Florida that year—but at least we’d have Gore as our president while maintaining “principle purity,” right?