Which is also why they wind up filled with “small business owners” who seem to all be about making money off land they own.

Based on the numbers I’m looking at, the people who didn’t vote were the ones that were likely Republican voters. The people that stayed home were likely Republicans who did not vote for Trump. I’m all for political engagement, but I’m not sure how invested I am in making sure Trump gets all the votes he told people not to cast.

I’m not sure how intense your off year elections are, but one of mine had only a single uncontested race, so I’m not sure I’d jump to considering missing some of the offyears “abysmal”.

Overall, 70% of U.S. adult citizens who were eligible to participate in all three elections between 2018 and 2022 voted in at least one of them, with about half that share (37%) voting in all three.

-Pew Research Poll on Voter Turnout

And it looks like a significant portion of the 30% who don’t vote are white adults without a college degree who lean Republican.

Actually, the recent record turnouts should really be getting you to pay attention to how the elections are structured. It turns out, the way districts and the electoral college are organized means that where you get out the vote matters. Telling people to vote harder doesn’t make those systemic obstacles go away.

Sounds like a reason for Biden to set a whole bunch of legal precedent while he’s still president.

If you vote with the hope that it will fixes problem by itself, you won’t get very far. Voting is sort of the end of a political process, the other end starting in people building political movements. For your vote to mean something, you have to be voting with a political project. So, focus on the political projects: start building the structures that protect people first, without relying on the government’s approval. Support your communities of care and build your mutual aid networks. Don’t wait for it to be delivered from on high, get with people who also care about the things you care about and start using what you have to build what you can.

Hoping that it is given to us, and doing nothing to build the political powerbase to make it happen doesn’t help. These changes we want to see need us to build and maintain coalitions, not just wait for other people to do the work for us or approach it like one person can fix the issue. If there are changes you want to see in the world, start working with you friends and family to get the word out about the issue and start doing things in your shared spaces to get that to happen.

Oh, good! Is it also owned by large corporations who have interests that cause them to favor certain stories because it impacts their bottom line and the editorial desk does not have strong independence from the business side of things because of a monoculture of publishers? Surely, this will bring us a wide variety of political candidates and not an endless parade of arch-capitalists and fascists who give kickbacks to corporations!

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Yeah, the focus on winning the presidency ignores the down ballot, small market and “off-cycle” races, and, to get to fillibuster-proof majorities, those races are the ones that need to be won. Berating progressives in urban areas to vote for moderate liberal candidates for president is not exactly harm reduction.

I swear I hear this regardless of how close we are to the next presidential election. Can we maybe focus on some of the other races on the ballot? I would love if we could get a Congress that was actually able to make good things happen, instead of trying very hard to do nothing so bad things don’t happen.

Counterpoint: I think you just described Twitter.

Somehow, I get the impression that you aren’t about to argue that what has happened to the Palestinians is sad and that they should be fighting against the people who did it to them.

The prices for fixed costs have gone up, too. People need a place to live, the health to keep living, and ways of ensuring access to both, and the costs of all of those have gone up as well. A not insignificant chuck of people don’t have discretionary spending to cut (not to mention how stressful living paycheck-to-paycheck on the bare essentials can be). Yes, it is certainly worth reevaluating budgets and determining where expenses can be lowered, but those margins have been getting thinner for a long while.

Vote in primaries, vote in off-year elections, vote in local races. We can’t hinge our entire political strategy on who wins the biggest race every four years while ignoring the rest of the political system if we want any chance of having options besides what the two large parties present us.

First-Past-the-Post voting makes this shit suck so hard. Not only does voting third party reduce the threshold for the rest of the field and in particular the party I definitely don’t want in power, that party is most incentivised to prop up my third party candidate. They get to count my vote as win, and with the stakes as high as they are even losing an election cycle means people I care about get seriously hurt.