Under ranked choice voting this would be safe, under FPTP it's suicide

There are no serious third parties who are on the left. Thats why DSA runs as Democrats. The two party system is the problem.

Sure, but they’re still not electable.

That's exactly the point of the meme: leftist voters are both "making no difference" and "making all the difference" according to the mainstream Democrats.

It's almost as if that oft repeated piece of political propaganda is to avoid discussion of how in Representative Democracy it's up to politicians to appeal to voters, not up to voters to vote for the least unappealing politician, since the former discussion invariably ends up assigning blame to mainstream Democrat politicians for not at all doing their job and then afterwards just blaming everybody else for their own failure.

Also, it's a typical "having the cake and eating it" - they claim not to need to appeal to leftist voters "because they make no difference" and subsequently they claim that the fault for their loss lies with those very same leftist voters which "make no difference" for not voting for them.

So, which is it: "are those voters unimportant hence their vote made no difference" in which case politicians not caring about them was the right choice but they can't blame their loss on those voters or "those voters are important and their vote did make a difference" in which case politicians not caring about them was at best profound incompetence.

no, no they lost because the votes for that candidate were faked. keep up.