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A flippant response to your flippant critiques: Have you ever actually engaged in real political coalition building or donated five figures to a candidate? Unless you have a viewership in the tens of thousands at minimum, all the ink you'll ever spill on politics is utterly worthless compared to a single vote. Voting, and being polled about their voting intent, is the only degree to which the average citizen ever actually influences politics. Disgust about wokeness matters little if it's not enough to make you vote against the democrats. A protest non-vote only matters insofar as polling suggests to candidates a way in which they can win your vote. The hardcore pro-life share of America is well under 40%, but they got an overturn of nationwide law that was broadly popular and largely considered settled because in large part of the fact that so many of them are single issue voters means they cannot be ignored.
Sure, you can complain without voting. But guess what, it's not just your dad who won't take you seriously. It's also anyone who matters. Because people who don't vote are not a constituency anyone serious about winning cares about.
The election budget is 14G$. There are ~161M voters. This means that 86$ are spent per voter.
Of course, the effectiveness of campaign spending is debatable. It could well be that the money required to mobilize the marginal voter is 1000$, but donors keep spending because they have trillions riding on the outcome of the election. But your claim that you need 100,000$ to flip a single vote seems unlikely.
As a donor, it's not just about flipping votes. That's the candidate's concern. If you actually want the candidate or his staff to speak with you about the issues and maybe even remember your opinions, 10k is probably about the minimum you'll need to be spending. Sure, donating 100 bucks is probably worth more than your vote, but your vote is free and a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks. Plus that's only any good if the candidate already lines up very well with your beliefs.
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In my weak defense, I do actually try to correct myths and encourage more comfortable bellyfeel about nuclear power policy, when the opportunity presents naturally. Actually mobilizing someone to vote, or trying to convert someone to my candidate, no, though.
That makes it sound a bit like you’re not simply not voting, you’re not really “participating” at all.
I’m also grappling with whether or not to vote at all, so I’m asking myself as I’m asking you—are you actually doing anything other than complaining? And complaining in the most ineffective way to the least degree possible?
To the second question you asked, an attempt at a steelman would be to imagine you’re in a room with a bunch of people and dinner plans come up and you say nothing. The choice is narrowed to two restaurants and you say nothing. A vote is taken and you think it’s pointless so you leave during the vote and come back.
It seems to me even if you’re the only one who wants Mediterranean and there’s no hope of swaying enough to your side, you still come off badly if you can’t even be bothered to say that.
Like I said though….grappling with it myself. Not sure what I’ll do.
Interesting, that doesn't match my intuition at all. If my party mostly wants pizza or tacos and I know they are not interested in sushi like I am, bringing up sushi at all only impedes collective decision making and may come across as whining. If I am truly indifferent between pizza and tacos, my input is useless at best.
Surely you agree though that bringing it up only after the decision is made is worse than before or both though right?
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Two factors that I find repel me from voting are
Between perfectionism, procrastination with a fun and infinite problem, and a multi-month process requiring advance planning and grit on the day of to wait in an hour-long line to poke a cranky ATM, it's very easy to round 1/3E8 of the cost/benefit from a given federal outcome to 0 and not bother. This is effectively charity to a process that's worked more-or-less well enough so far, all outcomes are within bounds, going with the flow is entirely tolerable.
For the first problem, various interest and political groups usually put out voting guides. You could delegate the decision to a group whose priorities you generally agree with (assuming there is one) and use their voting guide.
If forming any of those opinions seems so odious that you’re willing to claim you don’t care, why put up a fight? Concede you couldn’t be bothered to form an opinion in advance so complaining afterwards is unearned.
Is aimlessly complaining about whatever while making no effort to help or improve things or even understand what’s happening so important to you?
These problems and sub problems were invented by you, they aren’t requirements by any stretch of the imagination.
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