I've heard this idea before, from college students 20+ years ago, talking about US politics, and intentionally "throwing away" votes on independent leftist candidates.<p>The goals I recall were to try to force Democrat leaders not to take leftist votes for granted <i>and</i> (more to this Extremist's Gambit theory) to rile up Democrat-inclined voters, by letting what they'd think of as an awful Republican candidate win.<p>This was before US political party polarization had seemed to hit the sports team extremist fandom levels that elected Trump.<p>In this particular case, I'm not aware that post-Trump things have yet worked out for the college student revolutionaries. Voters are polarized, in a very dumbed-down way, distracted with extreme sports team rivalry petty behavior, rather than getting much progress on the supposedly driving values.