I've written before about my daughter and I, and the undue influence she exerted over my decision to support and vote for Bernie Sanders. In all honesty, though, I probably would have come around to voting for him anyway, but she did speed up the process. And one thing for certain, I never would have contributed as much money to him (more than any other politician in my lifetime), had she not helped me see the light. When it comes to acting on one's values, she has me beaten six ways to Sunday.

I fully disclose all this to put into context what I am about to tell you.

Yesterday afternoon, while I was fooling around on my desktop computer (yeah, they still exist), my iPhone beeped at me. It could have been anyone, but it was my daughter. And she had a problem. Normally, I'm not exactly her go-to person when it comes to most matters that require parental guidance (that's my poor wife), but it seems this was something she felt best bringing up with me. Here's the initial message she texted:

I don't want to vote for Hillary if she wins

This was followed shortly thereafter by her second text:

I would rather vote for a third party candidate

Now you need to know something about my little girl (hey, she's shorter and weighs less than me, so I can still say that!): she hates REPUBLICANS with a passion. She got into a great deal of trouble once with my mother and sister because she compared Fox News to Nazi propagandists, a dispute that they took to mean she was calling them out as Nazis for listening to it. My daughter and my mother (and I also for defending my youngest child) amicably resolved the matter the next day (basically my mother agreed that she had overreacted to my daughter's opinions regarding Fox as a news source). Unfortunately, this incident created a rift with my extremely right wing sister (my daughter's favorite aunt up until then) such that my sister made it clear she never wants to have anything to do with either of us ever again. And for the past several years she has kept to her vow.

So, two points to take away here. One, my daughter views Republican politicians, their policies and and "values" as evil incarnate, and two, she is willing to suffer the consequences that come from for standing up for what she believes in.

Nonetheless, I was surprised to hear her say she did not want to vote for Clinton in the general election.

It's not like we spent a great deal of time over the last few months talking over what she should do if Hillary won the nomination. I am fairly certain, however, that I indicated voting for the lesser of two evils is something that we, as Americans, are sometimes forced to do. I may have even told her I would vote for the Democratic candidate no matter who won, considering my other options, or at least I probably said that last year before the primary season got underway. In any case, her text message to me was a clear sign that she felt greatly upset over the prospect that Clinton would be the party's nominee and not Sanders. Upset enough to tell me she would rather vote for a third party candidate, despite knowing that person would have no chance of winning.

In truth, I only recently registered as a Democrat last October, after having been an independent most of my life. The sole reason I did so was so I could vote for Bernie in the New York primary on Tuesday. My daughter, on the other hand, registered immediately when she came of age as a proud Democrat. She's always belonged to a myriad of volunteer groups and non-profit charitable organizations throughout her young life, and she has the knack of talking to people who hold political, social or religious beliefs that are the polar opposite of her own, and somehow making them her friends. Sometimes, she even manages to change their minds. It's a skill set I certainly lack.

I knew that my daughter's message to me meant she wanted, not advice, per se, but something to help her decide if voting for a third party candidate in her first Presidential election was okay, and not a betrayal of her own values and loyalties. She didn't want to be told what to do, she just wanted to hear that it wasn't wrong to feel the way she did.

So, after a moment, this is what I texted back to her:

You decide who you vote for. Jill Stein of the Green Party is one option.

That appeared to do the trick. No more messages were forthcoming. I'd let her know, in effect, that she was, after all, an adult, and that this was her decision to make of her own free will. She wasn't bound to vote for a candidate she didn't believe in, even if she belonged to that candidate's party. And I let her know of at least one third party candidate who will be on the ballot this Fall in New York.

Now, I get that this is a personal story, a small little anecdote, that may have little if any relevance to whether young people who now enthusiastically support Bernie Sanders will vote in November for Hillary Clinton if she is the Democratic Party's standard bearer. But, I do not think she is unusual among younger Bernie supporters. On the contrary, she likely represents, at the moment, the predominant mood of those among her generation who are passionately behind Bernie's campaign, not just because of the man he is, but because of the values he represents and has represented for years. Many of them see Hillary Clinton as untrustworthy, a corporate sell-out and a phony, and someone who could give a damn about them or their future.

They have been subjected to derision, scorn, insults, slanders and slurs by Clinton campaign surrogates, and by the candidate herself. They've been characterized as predominantly male (not true) or silly, stupid bimbos looking for where the boys are instead of standing up for their rightful champion. They been shamed, bullied and their issues belittled or ignored by the tone deaf Clinton campaign, which prefers to assume they will come around and vote for her in the end to stop Trump or Cruz or whomever the Republicans nominate, rather than promise any action to specifically address their generation's very real concerns.

So, is my daughter a harbinger of what might happen in November or just another extreme outlier whose opinion won't matter when push comes to shove this Fall? I can't say. My prophetic powers have always been weak when it comes to politics. But what I do know is that Bernie Sanders would be by far the better candidate to engage young people, who are the very people most likely to volunteer and work to elect, not only Bernie, but Democrats up and down the ticket, particularly if, as is usually the case, they got in line with their nominee's agenda.

So, I sincerely hope my daughter doesn't have to chose between a third party candidate or the Democratic nominee. If Bernie is the latter, and he should be, and I pray those of us in New York do our part to make it so, we all win.