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I came to similar conclusions as you a long time ago without much disillusionment about politics because of the simple math of voting: the only way that my vote matters in terms of who gets elected is if one of the elections in which I voted was decided by exactly 1 vote, after all the recounts and such, and the odds of that happening are so astronomically small that the very real guaranteed cost of taking the time and effort to go to a place to vote or to fill out a form and mail it in aren't worth it. However, I voted in the 2016 and 2020 US elections for 2 different reasons, which you might find compelling.
First of all, I don't think I'm a very good liar, so I wanted to place myself in a situation that I wouldn't have to lie convincingly. Given that, I wanted to honestly be able to say that I voted for the first woman president of the United States merely for the historic reasons (whether or not I think the whole "first person of [x] in position [y]" should be historic, it is historic) which is why I voted in 2016. Didn't quite work out that way, but the chance of positive upside seemed worth the cost. In 2020, I voted for Biden, because I wanted to be able to honestly say that I helped to vote out Donald Trump from the White House, lest I face severe negative consequences from people who consider not voting against Trump to be a mortal sin. Of course, the exact mirror situation could happen with people considering not voting for Trump to be a mortal sin, but my own assessment of my risk was that Biden supporters were far more likely to enact such negative consequences on me than Trump supporters. I'm not sure I'll vote for Biden again this year rather than abstaining like I did in 2012, since the fervor to keep Biden in the White House while preventing Trump from getting back in, for some reason, doesn't feel as strong now as the fervor to knock Trump out of the White House in 2020 (I'm guessing that Covid & the riots of that year probably had a lot to do with it).
While I am aware that such people exist, have you actually encountered them in any meaningful context in real life? My friends are pretty much all normie blue tribe liberals, some even work for the federal government, and no one seems all that surprised or bothered that my views do not match their own.
Are you?
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No, at least not people to the extent that the negative consequences I face from them would be considered "severe." It can be a bit difficult to guess at due to the fact that I've literally never met a single open Trump supporter among my IRL social circles, though I have a friend who's fairly right-wing and occasionally, hesitantly, shyly open about it, and the extent of negative consequences tends to be just ostracization rather than anything severe. In retrospect, I was being paranoid in a similar way as the people in 2016 who were saying death camps for gays would be around the corner if Trump got elected.
Yeah, I get the reticence, particularly within a monoculture of people that aren't necessarily close friends. I'm just asking because my own experience with being hard-right on a number of issues, including things like advocating the elimination of multiple federal departments, just doesn't seem to get actually get me any real blowback. Maybe it's because I tend towards either being kind of jokingly sardonic or dryly policy focused rather than coming off as a cultural enemy, but it's just really not consistent with what I hear people expecting.
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I think this is underselling it a bit: my mental model as a self-identified swing voter is that my vote or the votes of others like me could be the deciding factor in an otherwise-close race. My vote is worthwhile, because if everyone who felt that way voted together, it would actually merit attention from The Powers That Be.
But I will also support casting a blank ballot as a better, valid protest vote over not casting a ballot at all.
I used to think somewhat like this, but I realized that whether or not I decided to vote, I wouldn't affect the behavior or votes of others like me. Others like me will make their decisions on whether/who to vote based on their own beliefs and values. Those beliefs and values will likely be similar to mine, and so their decisions will likely be similar to mine, but it's not as if me changing my mind now to vote would influence them to make similar decisions.
It's not that it would influence them, it's that the hundreds/tens of thousands of other "you"s are also considering the exact same choice. If all ~75,000 of the statistically equivalent "me"s out there in the country all decide 'who cares about my 1 vote', then we may all tip to the side of not voting. But maybe if I decide that I must be part of a statistical block of similar people rather than a super unique individual, then maybe all the "me"s also decide that, and we end up voting anyway.
At least that's how I like to think of it (even if I'm overestimating the number of "me"s out there, on any given simple issue it grows much larger).
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