[remram]

This is such a wrong take. Sure, you have to vote for a single party, but that doesn't mean you can't support specific ideas no matter where they come from.

And not even that, mostly voting does nothing either, because winner-takes-all: the way to be heard is packing up and moving to another state. Make a blue state bigger demographically because voting blue in a red state does nothing (and vice versa).

[appplication]

I’m not sure I see how my comment is at odds with yours. As you point out, voting and ideological support are orthogonal concepts, if intertwined. I agree with you there.

As far as voting not mattering, it both does and it doesn’t. Your individual vote may not matter, but convincing large groups of people their vote does not matter does matter and has also been historically exploited as a voter suppression technique.

There’s a lot of game theory one could reason about optimizing your ability to participate in the US democracy, but unfortunately the outcomes of that exercise are generally quite depressing.