Two Divergent Paths of Progress

With Bernie Sanders having torched the Democrat Primaries, progressives have two divergent paths forward, from what I can see, which is the Protest Vote versus the Populist Shepard. I think the way to go is the Populist Shepard strategy, but first let's look at the more familiar Protest Vote.

A protest vote would be any of the following strategies:

1. Voting 3rd Party: this is the most effective of these strategies for moving policy forward.
2. Writing in a name of someone: a waste of your vote.
3. Not voting: the only thing you could do worse writing in a name.
4. Voting for Trump: a dangerous gamble because though you get a chance to vote for a progressive again in 4 years, Trump is no Nixon or Reagan - Trump lacks the basic core competencies of state craft, and POTUS is arguably the first job he's ever had not handed to him by his father. Ideologues like me easily forget that there is a job to do here, and that though George W. Bush wasn't very good at the job, Trump for all intensive purposes can't seem to do the job at all.

I suggest instead progressives Shepard the Populist movement that won Trump the 2016 election and almost got Sanders the Democratic nomination twice. I realize that many Progressives are too thin skinned for this strategy, but here's how it would work:

1. Up to the election in 2020, put as much pressure on Biden as possible to be as progressive as possible, leaving no doubt in the DNC's mind your vote is anything but guaranteed. When it comes time to vote, choose Trump or Biden, whichever is most progressive (Trump is far more progressive and Biden far less progressive than what their critics give them credit for.)
2. After every election, switch parties to whichever is going to have the next primary. In other words if Trump wins reelection, your are GOP starting in December of 2020.
3. Explore the ideology of the GOP, and figure out what is their language for policies you would consider progressive. Pro tip: start looking at policies like "Fair Tax" and "EITC," with candidates like Marco Rubio and Mitt Romney. From within the GOP, push for the most progressive candidates and the most progressive polices.
4. When it comes time to vote, again choose the most progressive candidate.

What Progressives are doing right now is by and large failing. Our marriage to the DNC is highly dysfunctional, and the DNC does not deserve our devotion. The way it works now is as long as the DNC has a candidate that isn't as bad as the GOP candidate, we have to choose between 8 years of bad vs 4 years of worse.

Instead Progressives should be open minded enough to embrace the GOP and push for a more progressive GOP, so that the GOP becomes REAL competition for the DNC when it comes to having progressive options to vote for. Consider:

1. On the issue of Basic Income, the single most important progressive policy since the days of MLK Jr., on average more GOP candidates are concerned about this issue than DNC candidates. Fair Tax is one example of this that even Trump talked about in 2016, but Marco Rubio in 2016 was more progressive on this issue by way of his EITC ideas than every single DNC candidate in 2020 besides Yang and Harris! It is no coincidence that Rubio is more ethnically diverse than Biden or Trump.
2. The GOP has the more progressive long-term deep history than the DNC. The GOP is culturally more serious about personal freedoms, and has stronger anti-slavery impulses than the DNC. (The Federal Jobs Program Sanders promoted would not fly in GOP circles.) The influence of the New Testament on the GOP means that they ultimately have a compassionate streak hard coded into their ideology, unlike with bureaucratic establishment in the DNC. 
3. When Gay Marriage was legalized from sea to shining sea, the Supreme Court was controlled by judges loyal to the GOP: after all the noise made by the DNC, it was GOP judges that legalized gay marriage!

Considering how knee-jerk stupid the DNC has been with trying to remain "conservative enough" for "swing voters," there is actually a LOT to work with in the GOP. Perhaps progress that can be made within the GOP that is unreachable within the entrenched bureaucratic establishment of the DNC!