I know several people like this. It’s so hard to explain to them that a vote for the status quo is better than letting things get even worse. If we don’t halt the degeneration we can’t ever turn things around. You can’t push something up without first stopping its fall.
I think the hardest part is that the feedback loop for voting is too slow for people to see its effects. It took decades of consistent voting by conservative Christians to get Roe v. Wade repealed. The urgency of the messaging around voting during election season makes it seem - to a politically-uninterested observer - like each election is an end unto itself.
What really matters with voting is doing it consistently. It should feel like doing your taxes, not like an epic struggle for the future of the country. The idea that a single election will produce the kind of systemic change I think most people want to see is just wrong.
Well, decades of semi-consistent voting (wasn’t so consistent in 2006 or 08, just to grab two elections off the top of my head), and a couple billion dollars in dark money thrown at judges and law schools and think tanks to launder all their extremist garbage, which is something the left doesn’t really have
conservatives are more far-sighted than the democracts, yes. that is why they have been so much more successful.
they are also far more willing to lie, cheat, and steal. The democrats won’t.
Elected conservatives consistently work towards what they run on. Elected Democrats have this nasty habit of showing extremely public contempt for progressives, and then if they try to do anything at all toward fixing what they just showed contempt for, doing so quietly, all the while demanding fawning praise from progressives.
Progressives see what voting gets them. Republicans didn’t keep the public option from coming to the floor for a vote. Republicans didn’t give a cutesy thumbs down to increasing minimum wage. Republicans didn’t systematically rip BBB apart over the course of months. Progressives see Democrats have the means to improve things and find enough no votes to prevent that improvement, in some cases being gleeful about it. Every time they have a medical expense that their garbage insurance denies, they remember giving Democrats a supermajority and watching them find the votes to kill the public option. Every time they can’t make ends meet, they remember giving Democrats a majority and then watching Sinema’s thumbs down. Every time they spend too much for daycare, or can’t afford to put their child in pre-k, or can’t take medical leave, or afford community college, they remember giving Democrats a majority and watching Democrats dismantle BBB without any help at all from Republicans, extremely publicly over the course of months. And those scars reopen.
Democrats wonder why they don’t get immediate enthusiastic lockstep voting from the electorate. They never expect it from the elected.
